TUNA LIFE (6 page)

“Let’s celebrate,” he said.

Andrew glanced at his watch, thinking it was a wee bit early for a drink.

Ken was already holding a glass in his hand.

12

MONTH 3

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 3

NUMBER OF USERS: 0

VALUATION: $500K - $750K

The meeting with Y-Bator, four days earlier, had exceeded all of Andrew’s expectations. Richard Smith had pulled Andrew to the side after his presentation, and confessed that not in his wildest dreams had he ever expected to see Andrew again. And now, only two months after their first meeting, Andrew had returned with a pitch and a slide deck that had blown Richard away. Andrew had put together a great team with a potentially disruptive technology, and most importantly; the product had a potential gigantic market. Andrew had spent a whole week polishing his PowerPoint presentation. Part of his old job in Avensis Accounting had been just that; to prepare fancy business plans and impressive cash flow forecasts so that his clients could secure funding, and the bankers could have their back clear. Andrew hadn’t bothered too much with details in his presentation though. He had focused on the market, the ridiculously large market.

In the end, that was the important thing. If the market was big enough, they could always figure out how to make money later on.

Halfway through the presentation it had dawned on Andrew how correct Frank had been in his summary of the internet. People still didn’t have a clue what to use it for. It was still in its very infancy. The average person only visited a handful of websites every day, and their habits seldom changed. The mobile market was the same. After downloading sixty-three different mobile apps the first few days after buying his first smartphone, Andrew now only used six or seven of them on a daily basis. The rest were clutter. Free stuff he had downloaded because he enjoyed downloading free stuff, he enjoyed getting something for free. This service Andrew and his team were in the process of developing had the potential to get on that precious list, that handful of webpages and mobile apps that the masses would be addicted to. It all hinged on them being able to execute properly, though. ‘Execution, Quality and Growth’. Andrew had stolen a slogan he had read on the internet somewhere. He couldn’t remember where, but he thought one of the co-founders of Twitter had originally come up with it. It didn’t matter, though. It was well suited for how they were going to succeed with their service, and he had plastered it on his wall.

Andrew stared at the bank statement.

One hundred thousand dollars.

They had done it. They were already a success. They had raised a hundred thousand dollars, and Y-Bator hadn’t even bothered to haggle on the valuation Andrew had set. To be honest, Andrew had arrived at the valuation by sticking his finger up in the air, and waving it around a little bit.

They were an eight-week-old company. Established with three shares worth one dollar each. All they had was a good idea and a largely untested technology. And four days earlier Y-Bator had agreed to acquire twenty percent of the company for one hundred thousand bucks. They had valued Frank’s idea at five hundred thousand, if you included the cash injection.

Andrew had to laugh. It had almost been too easy, and he regretted not having set the valuation at a million. They still had no idea how the company was going to make money, but Andrew knew that they could be sitting on a potential gold mine. There was something about Frank’s product. If they managed to get it working properly then this could get seriously popular. And if it tanked, they still had sufficient money to come up with another idea – they could just pivot.

They had secured funding, and that was the important thing. The absolutely most important thing, because Andrew had started to get increasingly stressed over the last few weeks. In the absence of any savings he’d had to resort to increasing the spending limits on both his VISA and MasterCard. He simply had nothing left. A week ago he had asked the bank for yet another increase of his spending limit. They had asked for updated pay slips; alternatively they could increase his housing loans if he provided them with updated valuations. Andrew was screwed. He had no fortnightly salary after quitting Avensis Accounting, and his housing loan was probably exceeding the value of his apartment – the one he had bought when the market had peaked.

But who cared? He was employed again, with a regular wage. The company had one hundred thousand in its business account.

Andrew was working for himself. He was an entrepreneur.

This was his chance to change his life.

His only chance.

13

Scott Davis nodded to Mark Moss as he entered the canteen. The new editor, Vesna Connor, had called the staff in for an all-hands meeting. It was obvious for most of the employees that the meeting was going to be about new staff cuts. Vesna Connor was now well into her third month as editor, probably an eternity in her definition of time. Plenty of time to have learnt the intricate ins and outs of the organisation, to have assessed who was productive and who was superfluous dead weight. Scott smiled. He had already spoken to his lawyer. He wasn’t about to leave the ship quietly. If they wanted him out, they would have to pay up.

Vesna Connor tried to force a smile. But no one was fooled; they could all see it was a fake one. A smile to defuse the gravity of the situation, a smile to make it easier to tell people they were about to lose their jobs.

“As everyone knows, we are living in exciting times….”

Yeah, sure. Try to turn something negative into something positive. It’ll be fun and exciting to lose your job when you have turned fifty years, and have never done anything else than news. What are you supposed to do then? Pack groceries at the local supermarket? Nahh. Not so rosy career prospects there either, Scott thought. The last time he went shopping at Coles he hadn’t been able to find a single person working there, and he’d had to scan his own groceries before paying at some sort of automated checkout machine. What the fuck was happening with society? Every job was either outsourced to India, automated or replaced by the internet. These ridiculous companies he wrote about; the companies of
the new economy
, they were supposedly the future.

“….we will all need to chip in.”

Scott Davis turned slightly to the left and observed some of the faces around him. Many of them had been there almost as long as him. They all looked tired. It wasn’t the first time the Gold Coast Times had called for an all-hands meeting in the canteen. New boss, same old shit. To be a journalist had been a fight against windmills for years, and it wasn’t about to get better anytime soon. Vesna Connor had just advised the room that the free coffee would be ended from Monday first. A sigh had travelled through the canteen. Like that was going to save the paper – to cut out the free coffee.

Scott felt a poke in his elbow. “Have you looked at the case?” It was Mark Moss, who had managed to manoeuvre himself next to Scott. Scott hadn’t deliberately tried to avoid Mark since he had popped his hairy head in and asked for help more than eight weeks ago. He just hadn’t bothered to seek him out. He had thought he had sent an obvious signal: of course he hadn’t looked at the case. Missing girls on the Gold Coast. Possible serial killer on the loose. Mark Moss was an inexperienced kid with a vivid imagination. Scott didn’t have time to teach him how to do his job. The paper had made the decision to replace Scott with Mark on the crime desk, not Scott. They could bloody well train him themselves.

“Shh. I’m trying to listen to Vesna,” Scott said.

“It’s a simple question. Have you looked into the case or not?” Mark pressed. He was a persistent little fucker.

“I want to know if I’ve still got a job,” Scott replied, and nodded toward the stage, where the editor Vesna Connor had started to rattle off the departments that were going to be cut.

She hadn’t mentioned the business desk of the paper yet.

14

Y-Bator’s investment soon got legs to walk on when Frank heard about the account balance. Andrew had initially wanted to preserve as much cash as possible, in case the idea didn’t turn out to be viable, and they had to pivot. He was after all dependent on withdrawing a salary to survive from day to day. But Frank had convinced him: They could manage without any staff hires for a while, but they had to invest in hardware, expensive hardware. Otherwise the software wouldn’t be able to scale Frank’s advanced algorithms.

Upon returning from a shopping trip, Andrew received the message he had been awaiting for the last few days; their mobile app had been granted a green light from Apple – they were allowed to release the app on iTunes.

Andrew was fired up where he sat in his rusty Mazda 3, boxes of servers and computer screens stacked to the ceiling. Ken had done a magnificent job designing the user interface, and the development of the app had almost gone without a single glitch. Andrew had to admit he didn’t understand most of the technical jargon Frank used when he explained which problems he worked on, but who cared? In a matter of record time Frank had been successful in amending the original software so that they now had a functioning mobile app users could use to take a picture of clothing they liked, and instantly see what they would look like in that very same outfit.

There was only one minor flaw in the otherwise perfect software Frank had developed; to enable the software to calculate correct sizes and shape the piece of clothing around the user, the user had to film themselves with their mobile phone camera. As they did this they had to hold up something that the software could use as a stable reference, so that all future measurements were correct. Frank was an impatient man, so he had used whatever he had available at the time. And by accident this had been a can of tuna from John West. He had forgotten to update the software before sending the app off to iTunes for approval. So now the can of tuna had become the standard. Ken had thought the whole thing was funny, and had renamed the app
Tuna Life
. He had even created a logo that symbolised the new name, a tuna fish eating a smaller tuna fish. He reasoned they could always change the name later, when they had received confirmation that the app worked and appealed to consumers.

Three days after the launch, an agitated Richard Smith called Andrew: “Andrew, have you checked the servers?”

“No. Not in the last hour,” Andrew replied. “I’ve been to gym.”

“Check them. I think they’re about to break down.”

“What are you saying?” Andrew asked, quickly grabbing his gym bag and car keys, before heading for the gym’s exit door.

“We’ve had more than twenty-five thousand downloads in the last hour, and it’s impossible to access our website. Get hold of Frank. He needs to fix this immediately.”

Andrew didn’t know whether he should laugh or cry. He had understood that they were sitting on a possible winner when he had tested the app a few days earlier. The technology was incredible. After the install you could take a picture of any piece of clothing and instantly see how you looked in the same outfit. The software reconfigured everything you took a picture of and produced an incredibly real end-result; it actually looked like you were trying out the same outfit.

But how had they managed to get twenty-five thousand downloads in just under an hour? The app had only been available on iTunes for three days, and even though they had experimented with various social media platforms, they hadn’t experienced any great interest yet. Last time Andrew had checked the figures, and that was only three hours ago, the app had only been downloaded a paltry nine hundred times.

Andrew called Ken from the car on his way over to Frank. He was in the middle of a lecture at Bond University. They were about to start dissecting a corpse, and learn about acute amputation of fingers. He almost sounded enthusiastic when he said he couldn’t come. Andrew had to sort it out himself. This was one of those lectures where you got graded on your attendance, and he had already missed a fair few lectures designing the Tuna Life app.

Andrew said it wasn’t a problem. It was Frank he needed anyway.

At seven pm Andrew finally arrived at Frank’s house. The gate was open so he walked straight up to the front door. He was about to knock on the door when he noticed the massive Mahogany door move. Gently he pushed it open, and called out Frank’s name. Nobody answered. Cautiously he entered the house. He walked straight to the kitchen before proceeding out into the garden. Nobody was there either. He stopped and listened. It sounded like there was music playing from the basement. Fuck you Frank, he thought. Frank was probably stoned out of his head, sitting down in the basement smoking a joint. Andrew turned around and ran down the staircase to the basement. All the lights were on, and loud techno music was playing from the expensive Bose system. But there was no sign of Frank.

Andrew hooked up to one of the computers and organised some extra capacity on the servers. It would buy them some time, but he needed to get hold of Frank.

Two hours later, Andrew was still sitting in Frank’s basement. He had been forced to drive to three different electronics stores and buy all the fans they had. Frank’s air-condition system wasn’t sufficient, and the overworked servers needed cooling. At least he had avoided the Tuna Life homepage being down for too long, and the downloads kept creeping up throughout the evening and night. Andrew pulled a blanket over his freezing cold body, and lay down to get some rest. It looked like it would be an all-nighter.

The morning after, Andrew was still stuck in the basement. They had planned a low-profile launch of the app, to test how people responded to their product. Now they found themselves in the strange position that the app had been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times, and it didn’t seem to slow down. They had to pull the plug. They had to pull the plug before it was too late.

Andrew called Richard. “We need to kill it, Richard. If we don’t remove Tuna Life from iTunes we could risk having several hundred thousand users with a trial version of our product.”