Fishbowl (24 page)

Andrei was beginning to wonder whether James was the right man for the job. He was supposed to be the adult in the room, and Andrei knew it couldn't be easy for him to play that role, part of which meant controlling Andrei himself. Andrei was still his boss and by a large margin the majority shareholder. Yet some of the things that had come out of his mouth the morning of the Mea Culpa statement had suggested that he wasn't really comfortable in the chaos of Fishbowl, and Andrei didn't know if that was going to change. James had managed to put some order into the place, but Andrei wondered if he would be satisfied only when he had put in more order than Andrei wanted, stifling the unpredictability and somewhat uncontrolled creativity that Andrei felt was at the heart of Fishbowl. On the other hand, Andrei valued James's judgement. Maybe yet more order was needed, and Andrei was just going to have to learn to live with it.

He talked to Chris, who had been closely involved in recruiting the COO. Chris thought that James had turned out a little more corporate than they had hoped, but he also thought that neither he nor Andrei could have brought the kind of order and organization to Fishbowl that James had done. Andrei didn't dispute it.

‘You ask me,' said Chris, ‘this isn't the time to get rid of him.'

While Andrei was considering whether James should stay, the COO was focusing himself on readying Fishbowl for an initial public offering, or IPO, in which a percentage of the shares of a company are released on a stock exchange such as the NASDAQ, raising cash to fund growth and at the same time realizing
fortunes for those lucky enough to own stock. Unless Andrei chose to sell the entire company, or chunks of it to venture capital investors, this was always going to be the route to realizing the value he had created.

Everyone more or less assumed that an IPO was on Andrei's mind. But even if he retained majority control, it had downsides. Once the company was listed, a duty was owed to the public shareholders who held stock. Fishbowl would need to publish extensive, open accounts and be accountable to financial regulatory authorities and to the demands of the markets. This would not only take considerable time and resource but would also also constitute a significant restriction of freedom. Important decisions would need to be justified to the markets, and their results would be followed. There would be less leeway to try new things, experiment, fail. Andrei didn't know if he was ready for that, or ever would be. Fishbowl was still funding its growth from its burgeoning advertising revenues and the company had no need for cash from a public offering. Andrei had enough trouble dealing with James and the business approach he applied to Fishbowl without having to worry about another thousand people constantly analysing the business from the outside.

But Andrei didn't say anything to stop James. He buried himself in the stuff that he enjoyed – ideas, projects – and the stuff that he didn't enjoy but as CEO had to do – external representation of the company – while leaving the COO to manage the business.

James was making sure that the cost base of the company was under control even as it expanded, that the record of advertising and revenue growth was healthy, that regulatory compliance was in order – all things that investors would scrutinize closely. For an IPO to succeed, for the shares to be taken up and the price to be high, he knew that the company had to look mature and stable enough to be taken seriously as a long-term business with sustainable sources of revenue and exciting potential for growth. He also knew that timing in an IPO was everything. The business
had to look right, but the market also had to be receptive, with plenty of investment cash looking for a home. Fishbowl definitely looked a strong, sustainable business – much more so than many others that had gone public. And the market seemed to be eager for it.

Andrei couldn't continue to ignore the question of the IPO for ever. He turned to Chris for advice about it. In general, Chris was becoming more of a sounding board for him. Although Ben was now back at the company full time, having finished his degree at Stanford, the year in which he had been away had marked a shift in Andrei's relationship with him. Even if Ben had sometimes been in the office, he had been much less involved than before and his grasp of what was going had been limited. His mind had been on his studies and he had seemed somehow detached from the business. Sometimes, Andrei had got the feeling that he begrudged Fishbowl the time he spent there. The long conversations that they used to have had petered out – the last one Andrei could remember had been after Denver, when he had agonized over cooperating with the investigation, and they had been a rare event for some time before that. Many of the things on Andrei's mind now related to the business side of Fishbowl, about which Ben had no expertise, but to which Chris could bring a fund of experience.

Chris thought the timing for an IPO was probably pretty good, but he also didn't think there was a rush. He believed Fishbowl was going to keep rising in value and there was no sign of the market heading into one of its periodic bouts of aversion to internet stocks. He thought they should do the IPO some time in the next couple of years but it didn't have to be right then. James was more eager, arguing that the market was hot for Fishbowl after the publicity it had attracted, and the price of the stocks would command an added premium. After the complaints he had heard from James on the morning after the Mea Culpa statement, it occurred to Andrei that James might have been so enthusiastic because he wanted to cash out and leave the company. He had
1.75 per cent of the stock. At $2 billion – the price Sweetman had offered – that would value his stock at $35 million, and by now Sweetman's offer was probably low.

Over a beer in Andrei's condo one night, when he was up in Palo Alto, Chris suggested that they talk to a couple of investment banks to get their view.

‘They're going to say do it, aren't they?' said Andrei. ‘They're investment banks. That's what they do.'

‘We could talk to a couple of VCs. They have a good grasp of when to go to the market.'

‘Why would they tell us?'

‘They might think they're going to get a piece of it. We could always let them think that. Why don't we talk to Robert Leib over at LRB? I could set up a meeting.' Chris paused. ‘Do you want me to?'

Andrei didn't reply, musing on the beer in front of him. There was a dream he had had intermittently since he had been a child. In it, he was somehow bouncing like a rubber ball, bouncing higher and higher, even though he knew that a person couldn't bounce like a ball and at some point he would have to crash back down. In the dream, he was always anxious and scared, wondering how the bouncing was going to end as he flew higher and higher – and then he would wake up. Sometimes he had the dream recurrently, sometimes not for months.

In the past few weeks he had had it at least half a dozen times.

Suddenly he looked up. ‘Chris, do you think this is really going to work?'

‘What? The IPO?'

‘No, Fishbowl. The business.'

Chris laughed.

‘I'm serious.'

Something inside Andrei made him wonder if it could be this easy, if it really was possible to go from nothing to a company worth in excess of a billion dollars, starting out of a college dorm, with no knowledge of business at all, in two years. Somewhere,
surely, there had to be a flaw. And if there was a flaw, then the IPO process would uncover it.

Not that he didn't believe in Fishbowl. He did, passionately. He believed in everything he had written in the black notebooks when he had first begun to think deeply about what it represented. He had stopped writing in the notebooks, but had kept them. Andrei had come to believe in Deep Connectedness as a natural human desire and a fundamental need, and he believed that Fishbowl's success was proof of that. He also believed in it as a powerful force for good – monsters like Andrew Buckett and Walter Hodgkin apart – and that it would help make the world a better place. But that didn't necessarily mean that, long term, Fishbowl would be the financial success it appeared to be. In fact, it seemed to him almost paradoxical. Something that was a force for good surely didn't make money.

What if it was all founded on air in a way that he didn't understand? After all, what did he really know about business? What if he was surfing the skin of a bubble and at some point the bubble was going to burst and he was going to find himself hitting the ground with a thud?

‘Sometimes I can't believe it,' he said. ‘This life … is it mine? Sometimes I feel like I'm back in the dorm at Stanford and this must be some kind of a dream.'

‘Andrei, this isn't a dream.'

‘I think to myself, it can't really work.'

‘It's working,' said Chris. ‘What else do you need to see?'

‘What if it doesn't last?'

‘Doesn't last?
Andrei, I think you've got something here that in another year or two is going to be established as one of the truly iconic things on the internet.'

‘I bet you thought that about FriendTracker.'

‘No, I never thought that about FriendTracker. FriendTracker was ridiculous. It came out of a bet between me and this guy I worked with on one of my other ventures, Josh Henkler, about who could come up with the most repulsive, slimy, disgusting
internet idea and make it work – “work” being defined as the first to reach a hundred thousand users. And I thought what could be more disgusting than a program that rates your friends?'

Andrei looked at him sceptically. ‘You never told me that before.'

‘It's true. I'm not proud of it. I ask you, is that what friendship's about? Rating people? But you know what? People loved it. People wanted this hideous thing. And what for? Not to show someone how good a friend they were. No, it was, like, I'm going to use this to get rid of the friends I don't really like. I'm going to show them how much I despise them and hurt them as much as I can in the process. I'm going to alienate them from all their other friends and leave them bereft. That's when it really took off – when people started using it to piss their friends. We had suicides, Andrei! And you know what? With every suicide, we got more users! What kind of a world, huh? I had to promise to keep doing stuff to tone it down, but I never did. We'd do something cosmetic and say we'd made sure it would never happen again. No one really wanted me to do anything except the moms and dads of the kids who'd killed themselves, and they didn't use the site, right? Everyone else who made a noise forgot about it after ten minutes. But it was a fad. It wasn't a sustainable business. The Ukrainian idiots who bought it had no idea. Getting a return out of that business,
that
was about timing. All timing. That was all there was to it.'

‘Aren't you scared the Ukrainians are going to come break your legs some day?'

Chris laughed.

‘Seriously. You should talk to my father. He could tell you some stories about Ukrainian gangsters.'

‘Look, Andrei, Fishbowl isn't FriendTracker. Believe in this thing that you've made. It's real. It's awesome. It's not going away.'

Andrei didn't reply. What if the issue wasn't Fishbowl, but him? What if he didn't have what it took to lead it? Maybe it
should be someone who had some experience. Maybe it should be Chris.

‘I think James is right,' said Chris. ‘The market's hot for us right now, but that doesn't mean you've got to do the IPO. You have time. Fishbowl's not going away. You have the most targeted offering for advertisers in the world. They'll pay in blood for your data. Andrei, what we've got is a whole new model. That's what you've built here. That's as solid as a rock.'

Andrei watched him doubtfully.

‘The IPO … you can take your time.' Chris paused. ‘Let me set up that meeting with Bob Leib. He's a good guy. They're all vampires, but Bob's the best of them. I mean he's not always out to suck your blood. Occasionally, he looks up from the carcase for a second. Let's hear what he's got to say. He's a very good judge of the market.'

But a week later, when Chris called from LA, he hadn't set up the meeting. And he hadn't set it up a fortnight later, or a month later. He hadn't even called Leib to try. As it turned out, that meeting wouldn't take place for another year.

Instead, Chris set up another meeting – with Andrei, James, Kevin and Ben. He had had an idea, one that had nothing to do with a possible IPO. An idea that at some level had been percolating in his mind ever since a certain evening watching ping pong with Ben during the first, wild summer of Fishbowl in La Calle Court.

28

‘
EDGAR ALLEN VANDER
,' said Chris. He looked around the meeting room at Andrei, Ben, Kevin and James. ‘Ever heard of him?'

They stared back at him blankly.

‘I've heard of Edgar Allen Poe,' said Ben.

‘That was his great-uncle.'

‘Really?'

‘Not sure. Would you like him to be? With Edgar Allen Vander,' said Chris theatrically, ‘anything is possible.' He paused, enjoying the showmanship. Everyone could see he was on a high. He opened his computer and hooked it up to a projector. A Fishbowl page came up on the wall. ‘This is the Vandernarianism School page. Ignore the posts – yada, yada, yada … See that box on the right? That's the sign-up box for the Edgar Allen Vander conference in San Diego next March. See that number. We've got … Wow! It's up to two hundred and sixty-four registrations.'

‘Dude, what the fuck is this?' said Kevin.

‘Oh, of course. You don't know about him. Edgar Allen Vander, who, I've just been informed, was Edgar Allen Poe's great-nephew, founded a new age religion called Vandernarianism twenty-three years ago in Redwood, right here in California.'

‘That makes him way too young to be Edgar Allen Poe's great-nephew,' said Ben.

‘Great-great-nephew, I think. Anyway, the point is, Edgar Allen Vander did, so far as is known, create Vandernarianism, the
four tenets of which are, as we all know …' He clicked on a button on the School page. ‘One, own only what you can. Two, display only what you must. Three, leave only what you have. Four, discern only what you see.'

The others stared at the list of commandments.

‘What is less well known is that Edgar Allen Vander, who authored these famous tenets, was himself created by a short Armenian man called Nicholas Kervakian.'

‘You mean that was his real name,' said Ben.

‘No. What I mean is, Nicholas Kervakian created him.'

‘You mean like God,' said Kevin, with a falsely innocent tone, knowing that would rile James.

‘After a manner of speaking. Because what no one knows – apart from me, that is, until this moment – is that Nicholas Kervakian himself …' Chris paused and brought up a Fishbowl home page ‘… is me.'

The home page on the screen showed a set of Photoxed images of Chris with moustache, dark hair and about thirty more pounds in weight.

Kevin grinned. ‘You sly beast.'

‘Thank you, sir. In six months, gentlemen, using nothing more than four tenets, eight invented biographical facts, and a keyboard – and the mighty Fishbowl, of course – I created a cult. A bona fide, all-ends-up cult that is meaningful enough for two hundred sixty-four people to register for a conference about a man that didn't exist.'

‘Sounds like Christianity,' murmured Kevin.

James glared at him.

‘Oh, no,' said Chris. ‘That took years. Although to be fair, Jesus didn't have Fishbowl. I simply wanted to see what was possible. Starting from nothing, nothing but an idea and a keyboard and the awesome power of the mighty Fishbowl. And the gullibility of human beings, of course. Their awful need to believe. Wouldn't want to forget that.'

‘The point being …?' said James, in a tone of intense irritation.

‘Two hundred sixty-four people. That's at five hundred dollars a head
before
accommodation and travel expenses. That's one hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars.'

‘You took their money?'
James's face was red with rage. ‘You took these people's money? What is this supposed to show? That you can commit fraud on Fishbowl? You think after McKenrick this is what we need, to show that you can hoodwink—?'

‘I didn't take anyone's money. They registered. No money has been sent. Tomorrow they'll be informed the conference is cancelled.'

‘But they'll still believe in this Vander person.'

‘Maybe I'll tell them it was a joke. Maybe not. I mean, the tenets aren't so bad. They're essentially meaningless. I made them up pretty much randomly, but they're not exactly telling anyone to go out and kill somebody. And who am I to stop it? Who am I to say Vandernarianism doesn't exist?' Chris raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe it does.' He clicked on an online encyclopaedia and brought up an entry for Edgar Allen Vander.

Kevin laughed uproariously. ‘Dude! Stakhanovite!'

‘I did not write that page,' said Chris. ‘I promise you.'

James shook his head in exasperation. ‘What is the
point
of this—?'

‘Dude, what's the point of the Mona Lisa?' retorted Kevin. ‘What's the point of the Taj Mahal? It's genius.'

‘It's puerile!'

‘Genius is puerile,' said Chris. ‘Let's look at something else that's not so puerile. Bali.'

‘Oh, for heaven's—'

‘Bali,' said Chris again. ‘Yoga.' He clicked at his computer and brought up the website of a luxury yoga retreat called The Imperial. ‘Take a look at that. Pretty cool, huh? Not cheap. It'll cost you twelve thousand dollars a week to do their programme. But it's a great place. Haven't been there myself, but I know someone who has. Raved about it. Totally awesome. And that, gentlemen, is all I said.' He clicked again and brought up the
home page of another Photoxed image of himself, this one slim, taut and toned. ‘OK? That's
all
I said.'

‘To who?' asked Ben.

‘To the eight people who decided to go there over the past three months as a result of me telling them that. One from France, two from Germany, one from Australia and four from right here in the States.'

Kevin grinned. ‘You did a Cooley.'

Chris cocked a finger at him. ‘Now you get it. A Cooley. Only not with a pair of sneakers or a wet suit, Tonya, my pretty little friend. With a twelve thousand dollar yoga retreat.'

‘What's a Cooley?' demanded James.

‘When you get someone to buy something,' said Kevin, ‘preferably against their previous preferences.'

‘And it took you three months to get eight people to sign up,' said James dismissively.

‘Spending half an hour a day, max.'

‘Eight
people.'

‘There are more on the way. It takes a little time to build up a head of steam. The next three months, I'd say it will be twenty.'

‘Twenty,' snorted James.

‘Twelve thousand each, James. What if it was cars, yachts, skiing holidays, designer clothes, designer goods? Anything high end, anything expensive? Let me ask you a question. What's the best form of advertising? Let me answer it for you. Word of mouth. Fishbowl is the mouth, gentlemen. A mouth wired directly into the ears of hundreds of millions of people, and only Fishbowl knows exactly what they want to hear and when they want to hear it.'

Ben glanced at Andrei for a second, then turned back to Chris. ‘You're saying we do this? We go to businesses and say we can target your potential customers with a virtual personality that persuades them to buy their product?'

‘Correct,' said Chris. ‘Although
persuades
is a strong word. Think of it as raising awareness. You raise awareness at the right moment, and you don't even need persuasion.'

‘And what? We have people sitting here doing it?'

‘Correct again. This will only work for high-end goods. My rough calculations say that anything that sells for over five to seven thousand dollars – very roughly – will be a financially viable object for this kind of marketing. Think about those eight people who are going to Bali. Do you remember where they came from? The States, France, Germany, Australia. Think about it. Three continents, four countries. How much advertising would you have had to throw out across the
world
to find those exact people, at the exact right time when they're ready to consider going on some kind of retreat, with the exact right idea? But me, hey, I'm sitting there talking to them! I don't have to go finding them – they tell me when they're ready! And all I have to say is, I've heard of this great place. That's it! And, yes, in case you're wondering, every one of those eight, when they come back, when they've had that experience, become advertisers themselves. Word of mouth. Word of mouth building on word of mouth. We prime it and we keep it going. You sell this idea to an advertiser, and you do it so you get not only the commission on the sale but the commission on the expected value of the sales the word of mouth will generate. That's a significant multiple.'

‘Have you done that?' demanded James. ‘Has this resort in Bali been paying you?'

‘Not yet. It was an experiment. At the moment, they have no idea why they're experiencing such a surge of interest.'

There was silence.

‘Cool,' said Kevin.

Andrei was staring at the picture of the yoga retreat, frowning.

Chris sat down and let him think.

Since the summer in La Calle Court when Chris had begun collaborating with Kevin on personas, he had become increasingly fascinated with the thoroughness and commitment of Kevin's approach to something that, like a butterfly, might last only a number of weeks and then disappear. Kevin constructed lives and, like a freewheeling cyber magpie, stole whatever he
needed – a face there, a body here, a background, a friend, a family – to give them substance. There was performance and creativity in it as well as deep subversion, all qualities of high importance to Chris's conception of spirituality. He had seen how a personality grew and took on a life of its own, a life that had a logic beyond the intentions with which it had been launched into the world. He had experienced how it was to inhabit that life, snippets of time in which he was excised from his real-world existence and translated into another.

In some ways it was similar to having an avatar in a virtual world, but there was a difference in knowing that he was talking to real people, not other avatars, and being seen as a real person, that made the experience all the more compelling. Sometimes he spent the whole day in front of his screen, inside the skins of his personas. He could talk to people in ways he had never talked, hear them in ways he had never heard. The mixture of the real and the virtual was heady, so heady that sometimes the line blurred. To Chris, it echoed his experiences of the disembodied yet obviously all too real experiences of Peruvian
chamans
, or of the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime. In exploring the cyber world through these constructed personalities, he felt he was crafting a new and intensely meaningful form of these experiences. He came to see the creation and inhabiting of these personalities as something fundamental and important, perhaps a defining act for the still-emerging cyber world, a world in which physical appearance, life experience and identity itself, were fungible.

But the cynic and the entrepreneur in Chris, so intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable, were never far from the mystic. The germ of the idea he was putting in front of Andrei and the others had been in his head since the moment Ben told him about the Cooley experiment – it had simply taken time to find shape as he explored and inhabited his world of constructed personalities. How far would people's gullibility and willingness to believe allow him to take them? Could he reliably reproduce the Cooley effect? To find out, he had created a 42-year-old, expatriate
American yoga enthusiast who lived in Singapore and had heard about a luxury yoga retreat in Bali from a friend, and set himself a task. How many people could he stimulate to go on the retreat? Then he had got the idea of doing something even more subversive. What if he could create not just a personality who spoke about something that existed but both a personality and something outside him that didn't exist, and get people to believe in that as well?

From there it had been a relatively short step to the persona of an enthusiast of a prophet – randomly named Edgar Allen Vander – and his religion of four random tenets. He had worked the Fishbowl Schools, seeding them with tantalizations to visit the Edgar Allen Vander School page and its links to the tenets of the faith and the biography of the prophet. It turned out that the simplicity – if not total vacuity – of the four commandments that he had invented was a stroke of genius. People could read anything they liked into them, and they did. Before long, the School page was alive with what Chris perceived as sad, damaged, needy, searching people, seriously discussing his empty aphorisms and mining them for meaning. Articles on Vander appeared in online encyclopaedias. He had planted the seed, then sat back and watched as the tree grew. Yet the success of Vandernarianism had taken him by surprise. It was far in excess of anything he had anticipated. To Chris, it was awe-inspiring.

But he wished now that he hadn't started the meeting by talking about Vandernarianism. That was one for Kevin. The yoga foray, on the other hand, was a straightforward Cooley experiment – Chris hadn't known just how important an experiment until the conversation a month earlier, when Andrei had told him about his doubts over whether Fishbowl would last. Chris had said to Andrei that Fishbowl had established a new model of advertising, but afterwards it had struck him – that wasn't true. Fishbowl merely offered a better version of the existing model that tried to identify people's interests from their online activity and aim advertisements at them that seemed to
match those interests. What Fishbowl was doing was more powerful not because it was different but because in Fishbowl people identified themselves by the one or two things that were top of their list of interests, and an advertiser could be reasonably certain that they would be interested in what they had to sell them. In other words, it was only the old model more powerfully applied.

During the month that had followed since then, the number of people signing up for the Bali resort had shot up from two to eight. Chris had thought he would be doing well if he could get three. He had also had the idea of seeing what would happen if he announced a Vandernarianism conference – and found 200-plus people eagerly signing up. He realized then that a new model of advertising really was possible – not merely the old one better applied. A new model that, because of the quality of Fishbowl's targeting and the ability of a constructed personality to enter the discussion flow, gave them a unique advantage.