Fishbowl (17 page)

More desks were bought and people arrived in the office to populate them. One Monday, three new faces appeared and set up camp in a corner of the increasingly crowded space on Ramona Street. Suddenly, Fishbowll had a customer service team, removing another of Ben's responsibilities. More software engineers arrived. A human resources and finance person joined, sharing a desk in one of the last available spots. Ed Standish from
4Site always seemed to be in Palo Alto for meetings with James and the commercial team that James had set up. With barely half the 4Site contract period gone, Ed jumped ship after eighteen years in Dallas and joined as the Senior Vice President for Advertising. James was already looking for larger premises.

Andrei, meanwhile, was learning what it was to be the leader of what was now perceived as one of the most exciting internet start-ups in years. He spent less time coding, more time allocating the company's programming resources among the almost infinite array of projects they could launch and providing guidance to the software engineers. Calls from investors came in regularly. Valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars were being bandied about without any verified public knowledge of Fishbowll's user base or revenue figures.

Andrei began to be invited to conferences and meetings, but avoided them. Both Chris and James told him that he couldn't avoid public appearances for ever. He would have to learn to deal with the press as well. If he wanted to be the CEO, that was a part of the role that he would have to accept.

His relationships with the other founders of Fishbowll began to change. He saw less of Ben, who was coming towards the end of his senior year and was focusing strongly on his studies. In any case, Ben had less and less to do in the business as James built up the team, and rarely had reason to be in the office. Inevitably, there were few opportunities for the long, rambling conversations Andrei and he had shared so often in the first year of Fishbowll's existence. Kevin remained anarchic, libertarian, enthusiastic and Stakhanovite – all of which Andrei valued about him – but didn't have the same outlook on the business that Andrei did. Andrei couldn't afford to be anarchic any more. He now had thirty-four employees. They needed some measure of reliability.

Another change that happened was in the name of the website. Chris had always been bugged by the second
l
in Fishbowll and felt that, potentially, it even limited the growth of the company
by giving it an alternative and somewhat juvenile feel. If they wanted to go public, the name wouldn't help. James Langan agreed. Two months after James arrived, he and Chris persuaded Andrei to buy the rights to
Fishbowl.com
from the organization that owned it. The price immediately shot up and Andrei ended up signing a cheque for $400,000. Fishbowll was formally renamed Fishbowl.

Andrei Koss, at the age of twenty-two, was CEO and majority shareholder of a company that he would have had no difficulty selling right then for a price anywhere up to $500 million, and which likely would go public within the next couple of years at a valuation an order of magnitude greater. He was surrounded by a growing group of incredibly smart and talented programmers working on the thing that still was – in keeping with the question that Chris had asked him the first time they had met – the most important thing he could imagine doing. His leave of absence from Stanford would lapse in the summer but any idea that he might go back – if he had ever had such a thought – was entirely gone now. Advertising revenues continued to grow at a rocketing rate. As the second winter of Fishbowll's young life turned to spring, there was no reason to suspect that anything might happen to prick the bubble.

20

IN RETROSPECT, THEY
should have seen it coming. Competition to Fishbowl was already beginning. A couple of start-ups in the US and Europe were trying to reproduce the Fishbowl experience, and inevitably China had its own home-grown, heavily censored version spreading behind the Great Firewall. It was only a matter of time until a genuine heavyweight entered the ring.

Early in the spring, Homeplace, the world's largest social media site, issued an announcement that within a fortnight it was going to launch a meta-network of its own, making it clear that they must have been working on a rival service for months.

‘Now Homeplace users will be able to find anyone, anywhere, who shares their interests,' Mike Sweetman was quoted as saying. ‘Leveraging Homeplace's unparalleled reach and breadth, we are confident that we will bring more connections to more people in more places than any other meta-network could possibly ever aspire to do. Homeplace will always be the place where the whole world is at home.' In an interview on
Business Daily
that night, in case there was any doubt who he had in his sights, he added: ‘It's time for the big fish to get into the pond.'

Chris came up the following day. He, Andrei, Kevin, Ben and James met at the house in La Calle Court. James hated coming out to La Calle Court, which still had the look and feel of a frat house, but it was the only place they could get any privacy now that the office on Ramona Street was bursting at the seams.

They sat around on a pair of busted-up sofas with beers and pizza. Chris had spent most of the previous day on the phone but
hadn't been able to find out much more about the service that Sweetman was planning than had been announced in the press. The one positive, James said, was that Sweetman obviously regarded meta-networking as a serious business. That was validation – with a capital V, as he put it – to anyone out there who still doubted it, and that included potential investors if and when Fishbowl chose to go public. The downside, which nobody needed to point out, was that if Homeplace was successful, there might not be any Fishbowl left to invest in.

Fishbowl's user base was approaching 200 million – but Homeplace had over a billion and, more importantly, over half of Fishbowl's 200 million were Homeplace members as well. Even if they stayed loyal, even if they didn't switch back to the new service that Homeplace was going to offer, growth from that quarter would probably stop dead.

Chris felt they needed to come out quickly and forcefully to differentiate themselves, focusing on the fact that Fishbowl was unaligned and independent, a true meta-network that didn't discriminate amongst social networks or other sources from which it drew its members. James was less impulsive. He agreed that Fishbowl's independence was its differentiator, but was less keen to make a noise until Sweetman launched and they could see the nature of the competitor they were dealing with. He couldn't imagine that Sweetman would create a truly free and unbiased meta-network to rival Fishbowl. Somehow, James was sure, he would be seeking to put Homeplace at an advantage against competitor networks. James wanted to wait and see how much damage Sweetman was going to do to himself. That would be more powerful than anything Fishbowl could say or do. Chris worried that if Sweetman didn't do himself any damage, and if Fishbowl didn't got its shots in first, its voice might be drowned out in the thunder of Sweetman's success.

Ben inclined to James's view. Kevin was with Chris. He looked at Andrei. ‘What would your father say?'

‘How to deal with a competitor?' said Andrei.

Kevin nodded.

‘I think the custom in Moscow in those days was to blow up their offices.'

Fishbowl restricted itself to a bland acknowledgement of the imminent launch of a competitor and said that meta-networking was such an important development in global connectedness that there was certainly space for companies that offered different approaches – a compromise between Chris's plea to start differentiating themselves and James's suggestion that they keep their powder dry.

Within that part of the press and blogosphere that was interested in such things, speculation was feverish about Homeplace's plans. Sweetman was keeping the details of the new service under wraps, which only heightened anticipation of its launch. Fishbowl's response didn't satisfy many commentators. There was soon a chorus of doomsdayers saying that Fishbowl had seen its peak and no one would be willing to pay a dime for it now. As the pressure built, Chris came back up to Palo Alto to plead for a more aggressive line. James urged Andrei to hold firm, saying that all they had seen so far was hot air being blown out by journalists and bloggers.

According to the blogosphere, Homeplace, with billions in its war chest and a staff of programmers that could develop in a month what had taken Fishbowl a year and a half to produce, would outmuscle, outmanoeuvre and generally outdo the young upstart on Ramona Street. Mike Sweetman, who had built the most extensive social network on the planet, had never put a foot wrong. Andrei Koss, they were saying, should have sold out when he had had the chance.

For two weeks, Fishbowl waited.

Launch day was a blitz. Homeplace flew in just about every tech journalist on the globe to a monster party in San Francisco's coolest venue, the Grey Warehouse. A thirty-foot planet suspended above the stage lit up with the hitherto secret name of
the new meta-network – Worldspace – at the moment that Mike Sweetman announced that it had gone live. Underneath it, to make the point, someone had placed a twelve-inch fishbowl with a single goldfish swimming around in bemusement.

Sweetman announced that he expected 20 million registrations by the end of the first day, and had put in place unprecedented server capacity to manage the demand. The next day, Homeplace claimed that almost double that number had joined up – in less than twenty-four hours, in an awesome display of its reach and brand power, Homeplace had garnered over 20 per cent of the number of users Fishbowl had achieved in the entire eighteen months of its existence. If Homeplace was to be believed, that number doubled again the next day.

Then the complaints started.

Every time anyone opened their Homeplace page, they were asked whether they wanted so sign up to Worldspace, and had to click Yes or No in order to get to their page. After the first couple of times, they started to get tired of it. Some people claimed they had been signed up despite having clicked No. And on the other side, if someone signed up who wasn't a Homeplace user, they discovered that registration with Worldspace automatically signed them up to Homeplace as well. The next time they tried to sign in to Worldspace, they were told that they had to sign in to their Homeplace page first.

Then people began to notice that the only ‘snares' they received seemed to come from Homeplace users.

People thought the use of the term ‘snares' was pretty lame. Unable to use the terms ‘bait' or ‘hook', which were Fishbowl signatures, this was the best that the thousands of supposedly brilliant people at Homeplace had been able to come up with. It contributed to a growing sense that the site was derivative and unoriginal, replicating Fishbowl without offering anything new.

The tech press was lukewarm at best, damning at worst. Analysts lambasted Homeplace for having done nothing more than copy Fishbowl. The blogosphere heaved with a sense of
disappointment and anticlimax. After all the hype, Worldspace had no innovative new features. Fishbowl actually set a record for registrations in the month of the launch. While the publicity of the launch generated interest in meta-networks, it seemed that plenty of people were opting for Fishbowl, perhaps as a way of punishing Sweetman for Homeplace's dominance of the social networking world, or for the laziness and arrogance of Worldspace's shortcomings.

By the end of the first week, Sweetman announced that the automatic question asking whether Homeplace users wanted to sign up to Worldspace had been removed. He claimed that it had only been intended to be there for the first few days to raise awareness. He said that Homeplace was investigating claims of sign-up despite clicking on the No button. And he denied categorically that the only snares came from Homeplace users. Technically, that was true, but two days later he was forced to admit that snares from Homeplace users were given higher priority than those coming from other sources, which everyone knew amounted to the same thing. He pledged to create truly random lists, again doing no more than replicating what Fishbowl already offered.

James had been right. The spectacle of Sweetman making concession after concession had more impact than anything Fishbowl could have done. Now Fishbowl launched its publicity drive. If Andrei wouldn't do interviews, at least he needed to speak. A video release was issued showing Andrei talking about Fishbowl's record of independence and comprehensiveness and asking why Sweetman hadn't addressed the outstanding issue of automatic sign-ups to Homeplace by non-users of the network.

In a video blog the next day, Sweetman announced that the automatic sign-ups from non-Homeplace users had been a mistake, and that they had already been stopped.

In response, Andrei was quoted in a press release as saying that he was glad Homeplace had seen the error of its ways, but he wondered that if they did what Mike Sweetman had pledged,
what exactly were they offering that Fishbowl hadn't been offering for almost two years to some 200 million users?

Sweetman used an interview with Bloomberg to reply that Worldspace users also had access to all the features of Homeplace, with a streamlined registration process that took no more than a minute.

‘That proves what we've been saying all along,' Andrei was quoted as saying. ‘Worldspace isn't a meta-network – it's a micro-network. It seeks to close people into a walled garden – we seek to break down the walls around the gardens so everyone can see each other. If you want the walls, go to Homeplace. If you want the view, come to Fishbowl. And, by the way, how many users does Worldspace have now? And how often do they visit the site?'

Rumours were spreading that Worldspace growth had stalled, and that many of its registered users were barely using the service. James Langan issued a press release offering to provide Fishbowl's figures on key metrics if Sweetman did the same.

Six weeks after its launch, Mike Sweetman announced a total relaunch of Worldspace, to be renamed Openreach. He pledged to make Openreach a genuine meta-network with the widest possible reach, and to introduce a host of new features that would leave Fishbowl trailing in its wake.

This time there was to be no monster party, no giant globe looming over a tiny fishbowl. Details of the revamped service and its new functionalities would be revealed at a press conference to be held on the Homeplace campus.

The press conference was scheduled for 3 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon – a Wednesday afternoon that, it turned out, would be etched indelibly etched into America's memory. But not because of anything Mike Sweetman did.