The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (2 page)

But the crowd was tuning out now, Natalie could tell.
What had any of this to do with Clamor.us
? They’d turned out on a Friday afternoon, yes, for some sci-fi magic, but mostly for the promise of untold monetary wealth – that alchemic transformation peculiar to this part of Northern California. Certainly not for plain old new ageism.

Vogel soldiered on into his Craiglist story anyway. It
was
in some sense a mirror to Clamor.us, possibly wider humanity too. The explosive growth. The social good of a free classified advertising service balanced by the menace of its un-policed backwaters and its notorious adult listings. The company was in legal dispute with minority investor eBay. This modern day fairy tale was not sitting well with the others on stage, Natalie could tell from their body language. Thankfully, Jon was nearing his finale: “
The social web
,” he exclaimed, looking around, almost
blinded
by the light: “Ask not what your web can do for you!
Ask what you can do for your web
!” and he punched the air!

Then he sat down, almost missing his chair.

“Well thanks Jon, for that. Um … does anybody have any questions?” Silverman turned to the crowd. A hand went up. “Yess!” he said with evident relief.

“Hi, Josh Hartman here from American Millennium,” a clean-cut young man said. “I’d like to ask about the financials if I may. I understand you’re looking to raise two point five billion at a post-money valuation of fifteen. That’s twenty five times current year revenues. I just wondered if you had any comments on revenue or profitability growth or both.” He handed the hand-held mike back.

“Hiiii,” a treacly voice came from behind. “I have a follow-on question,” the raven-haired lady said with her hand held high, a black T-shirt putting a mike into it. “Thank you. Brie DuBois of the
Trumpington Bugle
blog. Say, I heard that more than half the current five hundred million revenue line comes from a single search advertising deal that is set to expire. Perhaps you could say something about the risk of revenue
erosion
.”

“Good questions, good questions,” said Silverman, looking around rather helplessly. “Dwayne, would you like to talk about the product vision and how revenue opportunities fit into it?”

Apparently Dwayne Wisnold’s parents hadn’t even met when Arpanet was written about. ‘Wiz’ himself barely had living memory of a world without the web. He’d just entered grade school when the Netscape web browser rolled out in ’95. Prior to starting Clamor, his only entrepreneurial experience had been a joke, albeit a popular one.

If the online news reports were to be believed, in 1999 – at the crazed height of the Web 1.0 boom – he’d scored $1 million in funding from a Nebraskan VC called Luna Ventures, for a high school science project. He’d worked out a way to print digital photos onto bed sheets, then sell them back online at a site called virtual-bedding.com. The most popular image was of a bikini-clad Princess Leia from the opening scenes of
Return of the Jedi
. It allowed fellow students to claim they were sleeping with actress Carrie Fisher. Virtual-bedding was rumored to be in acquisition talks with a lifestyle products e-store, before both died in the 2000 bust. Thereafter, Wisnold went back to his science homework. His next venture would be a dorm room social experiment in his Stanford freshman year, which he jokingly called Clamor – owing to his housemates’ interest in the beta site, and specifically a feature called ‘
HotorWhat
?’ ranking female freshmen year book photos out of 10.

A black T-shirt struggled with Wisnold’s fleece, trying to find a place to clip on the miniature mike. Wiz kept his palms against his jeans. He stared down at his feet like he was looking at them for the first time.

“So, er – wow. Hi!”

There was a sympathetic stir in the crowd. He seemed so slight, so
young
!

“So, revenues. Yeah, we’ve been thinking about that. But before we talk numbers, let’s talk concepts. Like, consider Google.” The crowd and Silverman appeared to breath easier.

“Think about: expressed interest meets relevant products and services.” Wiz brought the index fingers of both hands together at face height. “Weird,” he said. “It’s like I’m doing some sorta mono stage show thing of ET...

“Anyways, that’s just what happens, when you enter a search keyword on Google, and the computer serves you up a Sponsored Link. It’s win, win, win. A win for the user, a win for the advertiser, and a win for … erm …

“Google,” said Silverman.

“Right!” Wiz laughed, the rustle of his fleece rumbling through the mike. “Don’t be evil!” It was Google’s founding slogan. Wiz laughed again and the crowd laughed too.

“So like Tom was telling you, users have signed up to these groups. A lot of groups. And we have the affinity characteristics mapped out pretty well now, so it’s like a lot of Clamor users have given us all these super-specific keywords about their interests and tastes and stuff. Does any of this make sense?”

Uh-huh, the crowd intoned.

“Well, let’s just look at a real group. Who’s got a group.”

“Triumph,” a British accent said.

“Triumph?” Wiz said, looking behind him, back to the stage. “Oh, hey Mike.”

Michael Marantz was Clamor’s Chief Financial Officer. He said: “Triumph, the motorcycle.”

“Cool,” said Wiz. “Let’s look at Triumphs.”

He moved over to the laptop, his sandals scuff-
scuffing the stage. The big screen glowed to life again as the power-saver came off. Up came the web, then Clamor.us. Into the center-middle search box crept the first letters: T-r-i … Natalie shook her head upon realizing how trained she was to scrutinize such inane matters as keystrokes –

Then something happened.

The word auto-completed and resolved to Clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHoteland GiftShop.

Huh
?

Filling the screen was a girl, the headshot of an Asian girl of indeterminate age. The photo could not have been more real. It was the girl’s eyes. Hurt, confused, pained and humiliated. Below the photo read:

Today feature: Jasmine, 13 yrs. Origin: Fujian. $8,250.US

It was like the north side of the Keaton had been struck by a thunderbolt. A shocked murmur went through the crowd. Natalie saw Brie DuBois cover her mouth, Tom rush over to the keyboard: “I think you’ve – er, here,” and he found the Escape key. The Clamor.us home page filled the screen again. “Yuri, maybe you could look into this,” Tom said loudly to Yuri Malovich, Clamor’s Head of Security and Privacy, also up on stage and thankfully on his feet.

But Dwayne Wisnold and one hundred and twenty others simply stared at the impression left behind from the screen. The haunted eyes of a haunting, trafficked girl. Finally Dwayne Wisnold turned and spoke one word. “Bummer.”

He sat down.

“Well, that went well,” Natalie heard Ben Silverman say.

CHAPTER 2

Ben Silverman returned to Carmichael Associates’ offices on California Street, his day far from over. He muted his cell phone, sent office calls to voicemail and slumped into the chair behind his desk. Exhausted, he could barely focus. He needed time to think, to consider how he’d give this latest update to his boss.

Through the window of his office, he could see the northern fringes of the city, the fingers of Fisherman’s Wharf. The bay shimmered lazily around Alcatraz Island in the late dusk. He tried to imagine what the view would have looked like to those more earth-bound, original ‘49ers. Those fearless men and women who led that first San Francisco gold rush, sixteen decades before.

His sparse bachelor office featured four tombstones, as the trophy plinths are called in the trade, celebrating successful capital raisings over the years. Front and center in his dark wooden bookcase sat the spherical-shaped one for PingPong, an online payments service that had gone up against PayPal – and lost. Next to it were others, for increasingly less memorable web-based businesses that had chewed their way through ever greater amounts of investors’ cash: an online grocery business, an optical broadband adventure, a new-age ‘wellness portal’.

Well, a fee is a fee, Silverman reminded himself, and they’d all paid Carmichael handsomely – while they still could. But there the tombstones sat, taunting him with the central conundrum of his career: just what was it that singled out the lottery-like winners on the web from the thousands – the
tens
of thousands – going nowhere at warp speed? If Silverman could only answer that question, he felt he had a real shot at being a truly competent technology investment banker, as opposed to being a merely well paid one.

He flexed back in his Aeron chair and stared up at the ceiling tiles, willing the guy above to get this Clamor debrief over with. What a day, he closed his eyes. But the question kept taunting him in its hydra-headed way. How many pre-historic e-commerce companies had foundered before Amazon.com succeeded? How many weird and wacky ‘price discovery’ models had to implode before eBay became the global brand it now was? He remembered all the Johnny-come-lately investors who’d thrown their money in at the peak, including Silverman’s own dad – a retired cop for Chrissake.

Silverman javelined his pencil into a far-corner waste bin and swiveled the chair round to his keyboard. But his hands refused to type. For then there was Google, Web
2.0
’s founding father. To this day it bothered Silverman, intensely, that he understood Google’s success so imprecisely. Just how had Big G become such a spectacular winner, when so many apparently similar search engines had come and gone before? Sure, Google had a clean, ‘well-lit’ user interface – hadn’t Alta Vista too, back in ‘95? Yes its search algorithms were fast and accurate – was that to say Inktomi’s
weren’t
? The name itself, the socially infectious verb
to google
: it baffled him. Whatever its algebraic origins in geek-land, phonetically Google sounded like something his nine month-old nephew could’ve come up with. The only way Silverman could explain it was by a certain
bigness
that Google had somehow attained, allowing Google to
match
things. That Joe Six-pack, entering the keyword ‘asbestosis’ in Wichita, Kansas, could be brought together with a local class action law firm – and that Google could relieve said law firm of several hundred bucks for the introduction.

The desk clock clicked over to 18:30. “Come on, come one,” he willed his phone to light up, with Steven Schweitzer’s assistant’s name. “It’s a freakin’ Friday night.”

He turned back to his still warm turkey-and-fresh-cranberry sandwich. It had arrived on rosemary ciabatta with a side tub of turkey
jus
. He dunked the sandwich in the side tub and took a big bite of the juicy meat, dabbing his lips with the first of an accompanying mound of napkins.

He munched thoughtfully. For, of all the success-stories, Clamor was by far the most mysterious. Clamor had hit the big time providing its users with essentially two utilities: the ability to create a profile page, i.e. fill out a basic web template with photos and other random stuff, and the ability to link this profile page to other peoples’. Six Degrees was doing the exact same thing a decade before. And since then, hundreds of ‘community’ companies had sprouted and withered. Geocities, the ‘trailer park of the web’, bought by Yahoo. PlanetAll, bought and shut down almost as quickly by Amazon. All those ethno-sites, MiGente and the like. What
was
so special about Clamor? And yet unquestionably there
was
something special, almost
magical
about it. Five percent of the planet’s population and ninety-five per cent of the most evolved part it could only be so wrong.

‘Francesca H’ flashed up on the phone.

Ben picked up the handset, fighting to swallow: “Hi.”

“Ten minutes,” Francesca said.

“Fine,” Ben said.

“I’ll let you know,” and she hung up.

Google, Google – it sounded like some Silicon Valley heartbeat. Ben didn’t even want to think about the pain and humiliation heaped on bankers across the land when ‘Don’t be evil’ Google went out, avoiding the usual feather-bedding IPO process for a public auction designed to give little-guy investors access to that first-day ‘pop’. Shares were always slightly under-priced for the first day of trading, to ensure a ‘healthy after-market’ – a fair reward for the risk of backing bankers being saddled with large chunks of un-saleable stock, should circumstances change. In reality, Ben knew, IPOs simply got pulled when circumstances changed. It was indeed one of the few occasions he could recall investment bankers acting in unison, persuading institutional buyers to boycott Google’s 2004 IPO altogether.

And yet the auction had worked, well.

At least Clamor hadn’t followed Big G down
that
path.

The phone bleeted, causing Silverman to spill hot
jus
down his Hugo Boss suit – Fuck!

He wrestled with the handset again. “OK, I’ll be right up.”
 

The 39
th
floor was all dark wood. Francesca sat at a slim desk outside the corner office of Steven Schweitzer. Schweitz was officially Head of the Technology Practice – the title being a political compromise arrived at someplace along the way, for Carmichael Associates
only
did technology business. Walking out of Schweitz’s office was Leonard Carmichael, looking a little like Richard Nixon on a bad day. Silverman said: “Hello sir.” He never quite knew whether Carmichael recognized him. The Chairman nodded and went on by.

Francesca looked dark and lovely as ever, her curved lashes lifting fleetingly: “Ben.”

“Fran.”

“You can go right on in.”

Schweitzer sat swiveled to one side, his feet up on a row of low filing cabinets. He was throwing a plastic baseball against the wall. Occupying the opposite corner was a furled Stars-and-Stripes flag. Half way down the adjoining wall nestled a fireplace with ornately carved surround that Schweitz had bought from Butterfield & Butterfield, the august San Francisco auction house acquired by eBay back in 1999. He’d been trying to persuade Butterfield to drop its age-old advisors in favor of Carmichael. The play was to turn that role into a broader mandate, once the 134 year-old auction house was absorbed into the 4 year-old flea market with exploding technicolor logo, worth 200 times as much. But Butterfield was too disorientated to entertain Schweitz’s advances, and even Leonard Carmichael raised a thick eyebrow when an expense claim crossed his desk for a rare 1780s marble fireplace surround. The compromise was to install it someplace in the building, capitalizing it onto the balance sheet as a Long Term Investment.

Such were the benefits of the intimate partnership structure.

“Benjamin,” Schweitzer greeted Silverman in fatherly fashion. He looked like a slightly younger version of talk show host Jerry Springer, complete with specs. He wore a white shirt with silver striped tie, loosened. “What’s new in Dwayne’s World?”

“Hi. Good, Steven. Yeah, good. Wisnold seems to be doing great,” Ben said sunily, sitting down and handing his boss a deal update pack. “It was an interesting meeting.”

“Oh yeah? Like how.”

“Well let’s see: Jon Vogel treated the room to Jon’s New Laws of the Universe.”

“Only the fruits and nuts here in California Benjamin, only the fruits and nuts. You know that guy has some kinda steam clock in the grounds of his place down in Monterey, that’s supposed to cuckoo every ten thousand years? Jesus Christ in the morning.” He gave exactly the same shake of the head as Jerry did on the show.

“No doubt. Erm, maybe we should consider getting someone else on stage for the New York presentations.”

“Oh yeah? Like who.” Schweitz was already absorbed in the update pack, specs far down his nose.

“I guess Paul Towse. He’s a big holder, shows well. He’s got the chops to sell the boys out East.”

Schweitz nodded: “That’s where the real money is lying and waiting, Benjamin.”
Two hundred billion.
“That’s the away game we need to win.”

Schweitzer stopped at a certain point in the update pack. Ben knew which. “Oh my,” he said.

   Clamor.us, Inc. ‘Pre-Money’ Capitalization Table

               EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL

He said it as though in awe of a great painting, or some other priceless piece of art. “Oh my. Will you just look at the kinda money these pricks are gonna pull down.”

Schweitz fell silent for a moment. Then in a faraway voice: “You know, Bill Gates once remarked that a man changes when his net worth passes a hundred million...”

He snapped out of his reverie. “But I’m still here, Benjamin. What else?”

“Just verification work mostly, for the S1 filing. Trying to find out about that Multiworld investor. And, there
is
something else I need to speak with you about.” Silverman hesitated. “You didn’t see my emails?”

Schweitz eyed him. “Just got out of the meeting. Len makes us go topless. It’s a new edict.” He savored Silverman’s confused look for a second. “Lap-topless. No handhelds allowed in the Board Room either.”

It was something Silverman had consistently seen in alpha males: the exaggerated leisure of guys like Schweitz as the stakes rose. He knew better than to delay the crux of his update any longer:

“We had an incident at the end of the preso. The Kid got up to do his site demo turn, and managed to pull up the page of what looked like a human trafficking site, complete with thirteen year-old girl. Let’s just say there was a sharp intake of breath in the room.”

Steven Schweitzer was silent.

Ben: “Should I talk to the lawyers?”

“About what?” snapped Schweitz. “Does eBay talk to its lawyers when some lunatic posts hate crime material on their site? Yeah, maybe they do – to make sure their site use policies are absolutely clear, that they have
nothing
to do with it.

“Work with the Clamor team on this. Which of these guys can provide a little adult supervision in that department,” and he looked down the cap table again.

“We’re supposed to be working with Marantz. He’s the CFO. Old school: blue shirt, flies around trying to do web one-dot-o deals with old media companies –”

“Assuming there will still
be
any old media companies to do deals with. Who else?”

“Nguyen seems solid. He spoke well today.”

“Then work with him. Suggest they get a private security consultant on board to understand it better. Someone arms length and low key who could fly under the ‘Other Professional Service Fees’ note at the back of the S1. We could probably give them some recommendations.”

“Sure. But what about –”

“It’s good this happened here, where we have the home field advantage. Let me tell you something, Benjamin,” and Schweitz put the update pack down, picked up his baseball again and wandered off into some discourse about former Republican presidents. About how President Nixon “got a little over-competitive and was found with chicken-shit on him.” How Ronald Reagan “sold weapons to the Iranians, and used the proceeds to run interference throughout Central America… and that’s elephant shit, Benjamin. Yet we know which president had to go. So what does that little historical comparison tell us?”