Fishbowl (23 page)

‘I don't play much.'

‘What do you play?'

‘Nothing really.' The image of him sitting in front of a video game was definitely something Andrei didn't want people to have. Besides, he really didn't play much any more.

‘Nothing?'

‘I like movies.'

‘What sort of movies?'

‘Big movies. Epics.'

‘Like …?'

‘Troy. 300. Kingdom of Heaven.'

‘Historical epics,' said Mendes.

‘Right. Why? What is it about them that interests you?'

‘I don't know,' said Andrei. ‘I just like them.'

Handel smiled. ‘You're a thoughtful guy, Andrei. You must be able to say more than that.'

‘Something about them appeals to me.'

She watched him for a moment, then couldn't help laughing.

Andrei wondered what was funny.

‘Do you have a girlfriend?'

He nodded.

‘What's her name?'

‘I don't want to drag her into this.'

‘“Drag her into this”?'

‘She's a private person. Fishbowl's got nothing to with her.'

‘But I'm interested in
you
, Andrei, not only Fishbowl.'

Andrei frowned. ‘I don't think I should talk about her.'

‘There were pictures of her with you at the Defence of Freedom march.'

Andrei nodded.

‘Doesn't that make her kind of a public figure?'

‘I don't think so. She had the right to march.'

‘So you're not going to tell me her name?'

Andrei shook his head.

‘Not even on background?'

Andrei looked at her uncomprehendingly.

‘We can talk about that later,' said Mendes.

‘OK. Well … what does she think about the fact that you're a very wealthy man?'

‘I'm not a very wealthy man,' said Andrei. ‘If I told you what I had in my bank account, you wouldn't be impressed.'

‘How much do you have in your bank account?'

‘Ah, I don't think we're going to answer that,' said Mendes.

Handel smiled guiltily. She hadn't really expected to get away with that one. ‘Let's go back. Maybe you don't have a lot in your bank account right now, but you will. You'll be a wealthy man. People say Fishbowl's worth many millions and you own the majority of it, right? That makes you a wealthy man.'

‘Maybe. I don't really think about that.'

‘Does your girlfriend?'

‘I don't know. You'd have to ask her.'

‘But you won't even tell me her name.'

Andrei nodded.

‘Look, I guess one of the things I'm asking is, you're a young man with a very big future in front of you, one that involves a lot of wealth, so I'm interested if you find that that influences the kind of women you meet and the relationships you have.'

‘I've been with my girlfriend from before I started Fishbowl.'

‘So then … let's say she wanted to break it off, do you think your potential wealth would stop her?'

‘That would be kind of sad, wouldn't it?'

‘It does happen.'

‘I hope it wouldn't happen with her.'

‘Do you think it would?'

‘If I thought it would, I probably wouldn't be with her.'

‘Have you got plans with your girlfriend?'

‘Plans?' said Andrei, deadpan.

‘I think she might mean … marriage,' said Mendes.

‘Oh.' Andrei shrugged.

Handel sighed. ‘OK. What about going out? Umm … where do you go to eat?'

‘I go to Yao's a lot. You know Yao's, on University Avenue?'

She shook her head.

‘It's this noodle place I found when I was at Stanford. It's kind of where we have our meetings.'

‘You mean Fishbowl meetings?'

‘Yeah.'

‘At the noodle place?' Handel clutched at the straw of colour that had suddenly floated into view on what was otherwise turning out to be a drab, grey stream of an interview.

‘It's kind of, like, we never had anywhere to really meet, and we didn't have an office – even now the office is completely open – so we'd go to Yao's.'

‘For dinner?'

‘Lunch, often.'

‘What do you eat?'

‘I usually have the fried prawn and chicken noodles.'

‘Is it good?'

‘I'm no expert, but I have eaten at a number of noodle establishments, and I think, yeah, it is pretty good.'

‘What else do you eat there?'

‘Actually, I only ever have the fried prawn and chicken.'

‘You've never tried anything else?'

‘I don't know.' Andrei frowned. ‘I think that's the first thing I tried there and it was pretty good. You know, I usually have fried prawn and chicken when I have noodles. Not just at Yao's.'

‘I like beef noodles,' said Handel.

‘Really? You should try the fried prawn and chicken if you go there.'

‘I will. What kind of meetings have you had there?'

‘Meetings … you know …'

‘Can you give me some examples?'

‘Well, the meeting where I suggested to Kevin and Ben that we should set up the company, that was at Yao's.'

‘That's Kevin Embley and Ben Marks,' said Alan Mendes. ‘Andrei's co-founders. I'll get you the spelling.'

Handel glanced at him and nodded, then turned back to Andrei. ‘Was that when you were still at Stanford?'

Andrei nodded.

‘What did you say to them?'

‘I told them I couldn't do it without them.'

‘Is that true?'

‘What? That I said it to them or that I couldn't do it without them?'

‘Both.'

‘Yes. They're both true.'

‘What did they bring to the company that you didn't have?'

‘Ben's good with people. He understands the way people think.'

‘And surely you don't think that you don't?' asked Handel, her tongue firmly in her cheek.

‘Not like Ben,' replied Andrei seriously. ‘And Kevin, Kevin's a great programmer. And he's a Stakhanovite.'

‘Meaning?'

Andrei explained.

‘Do you guys work hard?'

‘Pretty hard.'

‘Tell me what it was like in the early days. You started the company in your dorm, right?'

Andrei nodded. He talked easily again, back on more comfortable ground. Handel talked him through the first months of Fishbowl, using Yao's as a point of reference, always asking what had happened there, who had been present, what had been decided. She could see the noodle restaurant running as a theme through the piece.

Later, she asked Andrei about the impact Fishbowl's suspected involvement in the Denver bombing had had on him and the company. As she expected by now, she got very little on the first and much on the second. But then Andrei opened up a little, talking about the experience of meeting people at the Defence of Freedom March on Boston Common and the sense of responsibility he felt. He went on to talk about how that sense of responsibility reinforced his commitment to building Deep Connectedness, and then he was back on to that, and by the time Handel tried to steer him back to the personal aspect of the experience, the door that had opened for a moment, unguarded, had closed again, and it was too late

Handel finished with the concluding question that she had planned, asking Andrei how he saw Fishbowl's future, what he hoped to achieve, what he considered would be his greatest challenges, and was treated to another long investigation of the idea of Deep Connectedness and its capacity to change the world.

At the end, Deborah Handel couldn't decide if Andrei's obfuscation on the personal front came out of some kind of sense of
superiority, or whether he was just a shy, vulnerable guy who didn't have the personal confidence to let anyone get inside his head. She thought it was probably the latter. When he had talked about the experience on Boston Common, she had felt she had got a glimpse through a chink in the armour, and what she thought she had seen was someone who was bewildered, almost naive, about the public position into which he had been thrust. It would have been easy to paint him in the nerd stereotype, easy to mock the belief he had in Deep Connectedness. But she wasn't sure that did him justice. On more familiar ground, when speaking about Fishbowl, she had found him thoughtful, insightful, even visionary. The idea of what he could do with an interest in orangutans had impressed her. She could see all kinds of ways she could use Fishbowl as a journalist, and wondered how she hadn't realized this before.

But what she had heard was relevant to more than journalism. Deborah Handel was no tech expert, but she wasn't sure that Andrei's idea of Deep Connectedness really didn't have the capacity to change the world, at least a little.

For some reason, as she sat down later that day to look over her notes and record her impressions of the interview while they were still fresh, Handel found herself liking him. Perhaps because he had seemed, in a way, to be honest.

She went onto Fishbowl again and spent some time navigating through the world that it opened up to her. She registered an interest in orangutans, took some Baits, and followed the trail that immediately opened up into the world of pongophiles. The next day, she went to Yao's and talked to the owner, Tony Yao, and a couple of the waiters. She had the photographer take some pictures. She even had a dish of fried prawn and chicken noodles to see what Andrei was talking about.

When her piece came out a month later, there was less in it than Handel had planned about Andrei, and more about Fishbowl's vision and evolution. And about orangutans. And Yao's, which was the quirkiest thing she could find to add interest to the story.
Any reader would have been forgiven for imagining that every important decision about Fishbowl had been taken at the restaurant and that if you wanted to find Andrei Koss, all you had to do was go down there at lunchtime any day of the week.

27

FOR FISHBOWL, THE
effects of Denver were far-reaching. Andrei received approaches from the FBI and even more shadowy agencies in the intelligence community on the mistaken assumption that his cooperation after the bombing meant that he would be keen to cooperate in other, less overt ways. There was talk of ‘back doors' and ‘mass data transfers'. Andrei rebuffed them all and eventually they stopped contacting him, presumably reverting to their usual ways of snooping. Although security on the site had been a priority ever since John Dimmer had turned up with Fishbowl's first National Security Letter, Andrei had a team get to work on developing even more sophisticated levels of encryption.

A more important effect was that user registration skyrocketed, at first out of solidarity from the inhabitants of cyberspace as Fishbowl came under McKenrick's attack, then due to the internet multiplier phenomenon as awareness of Fishbowl entered truly popular consciousness. ‘Fishing' and ‘Baiting' became words in general use, even amongst people who had never opened Fishbowl – and they weren't talking about rod and reel.

As user numbers rose, advertising revenues continued to surge, and investment interest in Fishbowl intensified. Valuations of the business were now heading north of a billion dollars. At its core, the advertising model was that which had been developed by Andrei in the early days of the 4Site contract, continuously improved and refined by a team overseen by Kevin. Andrei himself took little interest in it now. As far as he was concerned, the advertising operation merely provided the funds for server
space and salaries to drive the development of all the other functionalities that his programmers were working on. None of the other meta-networks that had been set up to try to capitalize on Fishbowl's success came close in their capabilities.

Eventually, Andrei got a call from Mike Sweetman

For the second time in Fishbowl's short history, Sweetman asked if Andrei wanted to sell. This time the offer was for $1.5 billion, raised immediately to $2 billion when Andrei's response was negative.

Andrei had no interest in selling. Fishbowl was in the almost unprecedented situation of being a start-up that had reached mega proportions without recourse to venture capital. Chris Hamer's investment of $1 million aside, and excepting the few tens of thousands that each of the founders had put in, Fishbowl had financed its own growth.

When Andrei said he wasn't going to sell, Sweetman asked if Andrei wanted to explore a partnership, offering to discontinue Openreach as part of any deal. It wasn't as big a concession as it sounded – it was an open secret that Openreach had failed, and its continued existence was something of an embarrassment for Homeplace. A series of meetings ensued. Andrei, Chris and James sat on one side of the table, Sweetman and his chief financial officer on the other side. But although there were many potential synergies, no matter how Sweetman pitched it, at the core of the partnership there always seemed to be some kind of preferential ranking or treatment for Homeplace users. Andrei couldn't see how that was going to enhance Deep Connectedness in general, or the experience of Fishbowl's users specifically, and he couldn't see how a partnership that didn't privilege Homeplace in some way could be in Sweetman's interest. The negotiations came to an end without agreement.

After the final meeting, Chris sat down with Andrei and told him that the time had come to deal with Homeplace. Mike Sweetman had thrown everything he could at them – now it was time for Fishbowl to turn the tables.

Andrei thought about it. Fishbowl was already capable of offering most of the functionality that Homeplace offered for people who wanted to network with their friends and acquaintances, and with a dedicated development programme it could relatively swiftly fill in the gaps and offer everything Homeplace had. Beyond that, it already provided the Deep Connectedness that Sweetman had tried and failed to replicate. It was thus a relatively small step to merge the meta-networking capabilities that were the core of Fishbowl with the services of a home network for those who chose to use it in this way with friends and family. The difficulty would be getting people to switch – at present, if you left Homeplace, you would lose everything – text, photo, video, audio – you had ever posted or received there. If Fishbowl could develop a seamless protocol for importing data from Homeplace – and
if
that protocol could get access to Homeplace's user data – they could make it as simple as a single click for a user to cut links with Homeplace and transfer everything to Fishbowl. But the second ‘if' was a big one. Sweetman would fight tooth and nail to prevent any such protocol having access to his users, yet that didn't mean there wasn't a way to force him, if one was prepared to work at it. Scrutiny of Homeplace's behaviour by the Department of Justice hadn't gone away, and the locking-in of user data was often cited as an example of its anti-competitive approach. Sweetman had already been forced to make a number of minor concessions. With smart lobbying and a concerted, persistent campaign – over years, if necessary – it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that Homeplace could be forced to open up entirely to data transfers.

James agreed with Chris. As he had shown over Denver, James's Christianity was of a muscular, if not bruising type and didn't mean limitless compassion – certainly not in business. And as long as Homeplace continued to be a force, he said, it would always be scheming against Fishbowl.

Discussion continued over a period of weeks. Andrei wasn't persuaded. He hadn't started Fishbowl in order to put other
people out of business. And what they were talking about was simply reproducing what Homeplace already offered.

‘We won't be offering anything new,' he said. ‘Why would I want to do it? Out of some kind of grudge?'

‘You're not sure what he might try next to hurt us,' said James.

‘I'm not worried. I think Sweetman's the one who's worried about us.' Andrei didn't fear Mike Sweetman any more. He felt that Fishbowl had seen Homeplace off, and saw Sweetman's desire to partner with him when he couldn't buy him out as a sign of weakness. ‘Guys, honestly. Let's forget about it. Why would we bother?'

‘Efficiency,' said Chris. He paused to let the word sink in. ‘Sweetman's never cared about his users, Andrei. Everything they've developed over there, they've developed so they can gather data and sell advertising. Every single thing they do, we can do more efficiently. We can give users more efficiency
and
more connectedness. We won't be offering the same service – we'll be offering something better.'

Andrei watched him thoughtfully, then glanced at his watch.

‘Take a look at Homeplace,' said Chris. ‘A good look. And don't tell me we can't do things better.'

Chris had no particular aspect of Homeplace in mind when he said that, but he thought, if Andrei Koss couldn't take a look at a website – any website – and find ways to do things more efficiently, then that website probably didn't exist.

Andrei looked. A few days later he sat down with Chris and James again.

‘OK,' he said. ‘Let's do it.'

Additional programmers were employed and a cohort of publicity consultants and lobbyists contracted. Fishbowl began a long fight to force Homeplace to open up to a transfer protocol that would spirit its users away with a single tap on a screen.

As it approached its second anniversary, Fishbowl had entered a new phase of its existence It was no longer one of a myriad startups jostling and bumping in the primordial soup at the foot of the
internet ladder where companies surfaced and sank with remarkable rapidity. It had definitively exited that morass and risen to the rungs of companies that were seen as fixtures of the space.

Andrei had started to live less like a student unexpectedly let loose from the dorm, if not quite in the style of a tech baron. He had left the house in La Calle Court, having to pay a hefty five-figure sum to undo the damage that had been inflicted during almost a year and a half of frat-house occupation, and moved into a condo off University Avenue. He had gone online and ordered a bed, a sofa, a table, chairs and a desk for his computer, which he thought pretty much filled his needs. Anything else in the place had been put there by Sandy, who was in her senior year at Stanford and spent about half of her time in the condo and half in the dorm. She got him cutlery, plates, mugs and other kitchen basics. She bought towels and bed linen, and most of his clothes as well.

Andrei was now increasingly visible as the face of Fishbowl and more accessible to the media, albeit in small and controlled doses. He had been dissatisfied with his performance in the interview with Deborah Handel and, as a result, he undertook a serious programme of coaching in order to improve. He tried to define what aspects of himself he was prepared to expose and to find ways of being comfortable in talking about them.

As the months passed, he began selectively to accept invitations to speak at conferences and his utterances were listened to and reported. His confidence grew. He was mixing with heavyweight internet entrepreneurs in whose company he was increasingly seen to be a natural member. As a result of the McKenrick campaign, he had been invited into their upper circle and found that he was not only able to hold his own but that he was taken seriously. He had worked closely with a number of fellow CEOs in the Defence of Freedom campaign and had, in particular, struck up a friendship with Jerry Glick during that intense, hectic fortnight. Now he and Sandy went to Jerry's for the barbecues that Glick liked to hold on the weekends at his big
house in Palo Alto Hills, where Andrei met more of the aristocracy of Silicon Valley.

Fishbowl now employed almost four hundred people and had moved to a new space on Embarcadero Road, this time taking three floors of a regular glass-and-concrete office block. There were no individual offices but, for the first time, there were meeting rooms where people could have private conversations. As always, an aquarium stood opposite the entrance, this one larger and stocked with more fish than the one in the Ramona Street office. In Ramona Street, anyone who felt like it had cleaned the tank and fed its occupants, resulting in an informal roster, murky water and a high turnover of fish. Now a man from a professional agency came in three times a week to see to the aquarium and the water was always sparklingly clear. The fish also had a noticeably longer life span.

The original advertising deal with 4Site had come to an end and was not renewed. Ed Standish, who had come across to join as Senior Vice President for Advertising, was constantly expanding the team. Eighteen of them occupied a section of the second floor on Embarcadero, with another twenty-plus based in an office in New York.

As always, the original tight core of programmers who had been with Fishbowl since the early days resented the arrival of what seemed to be ever-increasing cohorts of business types, as did the other programmers, who were joining in growing numbers. One of the benefits of Fishbowl's rising profile was that it could attract software engineers of the highest calibre, often luring them away from jobs in the iconic companies of Silicon Valley. The cult of us-the-programmers-who-are-the-only-ones-who-know-what-this-website-can-really-do versus them-the-business-guys-who-dumb-everything-down-and-don't-get-the-point-of-anything was strong. Kevin was mischievously guilty of propagating it and this caused considerable friction with James, who was trying to hold everyone together.

Andrei, whose natural inclination was to side with the cult, knew that he had to rise above it, yet everyone knew where his sympathies lay. Theoretically, he wasn't supposed to be programming any more, but at least a couple of times a month he couldn't stop himself heading over to Geek's Grotto, as the programmers had proudly named the fifth floor, and taking in a wheelspin that often turned into an all-nighter. It would end with high fives and yells of ‘Stakhanovite!' and then a bunch of them would go out and invade Yao's.

Andrei's forays into programming were only one thing that made his relationship with James tricky. By themselves, James probably would have overlooked them, but trust between the two men had been badly eroded by the Mea Culpa statement, as Andrei's message to the Grotto after the Denver bombing had come to be known. James believed that Andrei had reneged on an agreement they had reached the night they had met at La Calle Court, according to which he would not say or do anything until they met again with the lawyer the following morning. Andrei accepted that he had ignored James's request not to do anything before speaking to a lawyer, but didn't believe he had ever explicitly agreed to it. The issue had lain dormant during the turbulence and extraordinary intensity of the weeks that preceded the Defence of Freedom marches, when they had forced themselves to work together for the sake of the company. But it was only dormant – not resolved. Eventually, during a stormy meeting, James demanded that Kevin, Ben and Chris say in front of Andrei whether Andrei had actually agreed to say nothing that night in La Calle Court. James claimed that he had asked and Andrei had said yes. The actual word: yes. No one else was sure if he had said it, or at least wasn't prepared to say that they were, but they agreed that the general understanding, when they had broken up that night, had been that Andrei would accede to James's request.

Andrei accepted that he might have given that impression, even while being undecided at the time about what he would do. He apologized for that.

For his part, Andrei was aggrieved at the things James had said to him the following morning and the anger he had shown. James had called him stupid. He knew for a fact that people in the office had heard James blow up at him on the phone. James accepted that he shouldn't have said certain things, and even without those things, that he shouldn't have let people hear the conversation and promised not to allow it to happen again. Andrei didn't think it sounded like a very genuine apology.