Fishbowl (26 page)

Andrei watched him. To do this without James knowing went against everything the headhunter had told him when he had hired the COO. She had urged him to make sure James was included in all the important decisions, even the technical ones. There was no way to undermine a business operator more quickly in a tech company, she said, than to cut him out of those.

And Chris had been there when she had said it.

‘You're not even making a decision,' said Chris. ‘It's just an experiment. Even if it works, you can still say you don't want to do it.'

‘And if it goes wrong?' said Ben.

‘Blame it on me. We'll say it was a rogue act and the company is severing its ties with me. Andrei, come on.'

Andrei didn't reply.

‘You know what?' said Chris impulsively. ‘How much is my five per cent of this company worth? Fifty million? A hundred million? If I'm wrong, I'll not only take the blame, I'll sell every last share back to you for the million bucks I paid.'

29

CHRIS'S OFFER TO
sell back his shares for a million dollars if his experiment went wrong didn't sway Andrei. If anything, it made him wary. A good idea shouldn't have to be accompanied by a bribe.

Ben found Andrei the next day and asked if they could talk. When they had closed the door of a meeting room behind them, he told Andrei that he felt strongly that they shouldn't proceed with the kind of activity Chris was suggesting.

Andrei already knew Ben felt like that from what he had said during the meeting. But in Andrei's opinion, Ben had never had a particularly broad conceptualization of Deep Connectedness. Andrei heard him out but said little in reply, and Ben came away from the conversation frustrated and depressed. He went back to his desk and sat down, not sure what to do next. In general, he had too little to do. He was still Chief Mind Officer, but since James had joined as COO his role had become as nebulous as his title. When he had still been studying at Stanford that hadn't been a bad thing, but now that he was back at Fishbowl full time, it left him underemployed and embarrassed at the thought that people must be wondering what he did all day. He had mentioned it to Andrei a couple of times but nothing had happened to change the situation.

From Andrei's perspective, it wasn't that he necessarily disagreed with Ben about Chris's proposition. In fact, he wasn't naturally in sympathy with the proposal, either, but he was determined to look past his own prejudices and view it through the
lens of a broad conceptualization, one that was willing to constantly examine, challenge and, if necessary, change his assumptions about what Deep Connectedness meant. This conceptualization had moved a long way since the days in Fishbowl's first year when he had baulked at putting conventional advertising on the site, and would have been unrecognizable to the Andrei of that time. Had he stopped to consider it, Andrei would have regarded that evolution in his thinking as a positive. He was also determined to view Chris's idea from a starting point of inclusiveness, the principle of trying things as long as they didn't make the world worse rather than having to be sure from the start that they would make it better and that people would want them. Andrei believed that this approach had been one of Fishbowl's most important strengths from its earliest days in Robinson House. He was determined to remain open to challenge and willing to try new approaches, conscious that it was all too easy to start believing that the way you currently thought of things was the only way they could be understood.

Andrei felt that Chris had challenged him in two important ways. First, why should Deep Connectedness be restricted to connections between individuals or their online personifications? Throughout their lives, people had important relationships with organizations. And organizations were, after all, collections of people. Why, therefore, should Deep Connectedness not involve organizations as well? And if it should involve organizations, why should it exclude organizations that were trying to sell things?

Second, why should corporate entities be identified as such? If people could have palotls, as Chris had named them, why couldn't companies? And if people could have undisclosed motives, some of which related to personal gain, again, why not companies?

In fact, who was to say that companies weren't doing this for themselves already, undisclosed? If people were capable of doing it – as Kevin had demonstrated – surely corporations were?

James had found that all of this had needed hardly a moment's thought. He had closed his mind immediately to the apparent
deceit of representing companies by palotls. But to Andrei it wasn't necessarily a deceit – it could also be seen as a natural, perhaps inevitable manifestation of the opacity that was an intrinsic part of online connectedness, and which had been present from the moment the very first person on the internet had decided to use a pseudonym. It had never been Andrei's mission to eradicate that. Focused on constantly exploring and expanding his conceptualization of Deep Connectedness, and determined to prevent instinct ruling his thinking, he saw these challenges as serious questions, not to be answered glibly.

It was these challenges, rather than the potential for a new model of revenue-generating advertising, that interested Andrei in what Chris had said. Fishbowl's revenues were already sufficient for the needs of running and developing the company, even with the added costs from the effort they were making to rival Homeplace's services with a suite of more efficient functionalities and to force Homeplace to allow unfettered data transfer, which was an ongoing project. There was a growing pile of cash in the company's account.

As far as advertising was concerned, Andrei still told himself that it was a means to an end, a necessity in order to be able to respond to user needs and continuously improve the efficiency of the Deep Connectedness that Fishbowl provided. Even if you saw it as a form of Deep Connectedness in its own right, as Chris had suggested – and Andrei had to admit that there was a case for that – you didn't need every last cent of revenue that you could get, as other major internet companies seemed to want. So many founders had started out with altruistic intent – or so they claimed – to facilitate access to knowledge or information sharing or social interactivity, and had ended up gathering all the personal information on their users that they could acquire and packaging it for advertisers in order to build multi-billion-dollar companies. Andrei didn't see himself in that light and found them sickeningly hypocritical. They still spoke as if they were actually trying to do something for the world.

In any event, Andrei didn't think Chris's suggestion would generate much in the way of revenue. Even if it succeeded, the returns from any model requiring people to manually work the Fishbowl network, no matter how lucrative on a per-person basis, would surely pale in comparison with the automated click-auctions from which Fishbowl currently earned its money, not unless they could employ hundreds or even thousands of sales people.

To Andrei, this wasn't about money. It was genuinely about Deep Connectedness. It was a test of his willingness to stick to his principle of having a broad conceptualization, of his preparedness to embrace challenges to his thinking. Despite his own bias, which told him that this was something he didn't want to do, he was determined to force himself to face the challenges Chris had made. And perhaps it was partly because of this bias – his awareness that he had instinctively veered toward rejection coupled with his determination always to test his instincts – that he eventually made the decision that would prove to be so momentous in shaping the creature that Fishbowl was finally to become: to go ahead with the experiment and let the chips fall where they would.

Andrei had once said to Chris that the surest way for Fishbowl to become irrelevant was for three guys sitting in Yao's to try to tell the world what it could do. He still believed that.

Chris came back up to Palo Alto the following week. This time he and Andrei had dinner alone at Yao's.

‘I was hasty last week,' said Chris.

Andrei looked at him quizzically. ‘You don't believe what you said about this new model?'

‘No, I do.'

‘You don't want to do the experiment? You want to tell James?'

‘Shit, no! Tell James? Are you out of your mind?'

‘Then what is it?'

Chris hesitated. ‘I've supported you for two years, Andrei. I
saved your butt that first summer when you were going to burn yourselves alive.'

‘I know.'

‘I've put in … I don't know how many months of work over that time and never drawn a salary.'

‘Do you want one? I always thought you wanted to be an investor.'

‘I don't want a salary.' Chris hesitated again. ‘Look, what I'm saying is, I got carried away last week. I made an offer to you that I didn't really mean … I mean, I hadn't planned it. It was the heat of the moment.'

‘You mean about your shares?'

Chris nodded.

‘That was a big bet.'

‘Yeah,' said Chris. ‘Something just … I don't know, I didn't mean to say it.'

‘What do you want to do about it?'

Chris shrugged, gazing at him for a moment, then looked away.

Andrei watched him. For the first time in the two years he had known him, it didn't feel as if Chris was the one who knew everything and he, Andrei, was the novice. Suddenly, Chris seemed a lot smaller and more limited.

Andrei could have told him to forget about it. He didn't need the extra 5 per cent of shares back. With 65 per cent of the company still in his ownership, they were irrelevant. But something stopped him doing that. Chris, he felt, had to honour in some way what he had said. He knew that was harsh, but he found himself wanting Chris to pay some kind of a price over this.

‘If we go ahead,' said Andrei, ‘let's make it half. If you do it, and you're wrong, you sell back half your shares for half a million. You get to keep two and a half per cent.'

Chris stared at him. There wasn't exactly a smile on his face.

‘Or we can call it off,' said Andrei.

‘No. I'm right. You'll see.'

‘I'm not sure if the risk you're running is worth the payoff.'

Chris shrugged. Part of him just wanted to see if he was right. There was nothing more fascinating to Chris than seeing how low people would go. Would they bother to resist this? He doubted it. But he didn't say that to Andrei. ‘If I'm wrong, I lose two and a half per cent of the company. That's not an insubstantial amount, I grant you, but the other two and a half per cent still gives me plenty of a return on my investment. But if I'm right – and I'm pretty sure I am – I have five per cent of a company that will be worth an order of magnitude more. So if this is the only way to get you to do this, then that's how we'll do it.'

‘An order of magnitude?' said Andrei. ‘I don't think there's going to be that much revenue out of it, even if it works.'

Chris smiled knowingly. ‘One step at a time, my friend. Let's see if it works. Let's prove the concept. Then let's see where it goes.'

After a moment Andrei shrugged. ‘OK. It's your risk.'

‘But the IPO's off while we do this. There's no way we can do an IPO while this is going on.'

Andrei nodded. He was relieved. Now he had a reason not to do the IPO, which he hadn't really wanted to do anyway. ‘I guess I'll have to talk to James.

‘What will you say?'

‘I don't know … I'll say I don't think the market's right.'

‘He won't like it,' said Chris.

‘Have you changed your mind about him? Last time, you said now's not the time for him to go.'

‘He's not a start-up guy, Andrei, but he knows how to run a business.' Chris shrugged. ‘It's okay to have James around as long as he doesn't get it in the way.' He looked at Andrei meaningfully for a moment. ‘OK, back to the topic – there's something we need to get clear beforehand. What's the measure of success? We're going to get a lot of people – or what will seem like a lot of people – saying they don't want this. It won't really be a lot, it will be an infinitesimal fraction, but they'll make a lot of noise.
It's not the noise I'm interested in, it's what people actually
do
. Do they leave Fishbowl? Do they stop using it? Those should be our metrics.'

Andrei nodded again. Chris was right: it wasn't the noise that mattered. Andrei had seen so many storms of apparent resistance blow up, only to finally reveal nothing of lasting substance beneath the sound and the fury. And Chris was right about another thing. This was what Fishbowl was for, to ask the big questions, to put them to the world, and then to objectively and impartially view the answer.

‘If I'm putting fifty per cent of my share on this, we need to be clear.' Chris grinned. ‘We'd have to be clear anyway, but now we have to be really, really clear.'

‘Which means what, in practice?'

‘Which means, when we do it, when we announce it, we don't listen to the noise. We look at the numbers. Registrations and deregistrations, visit frequency, the usual parameters. And we look at it for a couple of months. Whatever happens, Andrei, we give time for the initial effect to wear off and see what people are really doing before we make a decision.'

‘That's fine.'

‘That means you're going to take the heat as the CEO. When people are crying out for someone to take action, when the 300 are going postal in the Grotto, they're going to be aiming at you. I'll be OK. No one knows who I am. You're going to be the one who needs to hold out.'

Andrei gazed at him. ‘That's fine,' he said again.

‘Don't kid yourself. It'll be tough. Two months. We look at the numbers. Do we have a deal?'

‘Not if we have litigation. If we have litigation or a serious threat of it, then that's another story.'

‘OK. A serious threat. Not verbiage. Not just vague talk about the possibility of some kind of action.'

‘And if the numbers are bad,' said Andrei. ‘If the numbers are bad, that's it.'

‘That's fine. If the numbers are bad. Let me give some thought to what that means. I'll suggest the metrics.'

‘OK.'

‘But otherwise,' said Chris, ‘if we don't have litigation, and the numbers don't tank below levels we agree – then you hold out for two months, no matter how much noise there is. And then we decide.'

‘And you tell no lies.'

‘Absolutely. That's the principle. Tell no lies. Put a search and store on everything I do so a third party can audit it.' Chris leaned closer. ‘Now, deal or no deal?'

Over the next weeks, working out of LA, Chris drafted in a freelance advertising consultant, prepared a pitch, took some flights, and did deals with a luxury yacht builder in the Netherlands, a top-brand Swiss-watch maker and a high-end safari operator in South Africa. Chris – or his palotls, to be accurate – would give people links to dedicated web addresses to claim a discount so the clients could track the sales due to his activities. Fee levels were agreed at various sales thresholds. To capture the word-of-mouth effect, mentions of the brands in an agreed range of media would also be tracked and there were structured payments if the rate of mentions rose. Chris flew to Palo Alto and met Andrei and Kevin in Andrei's apartment. He showed them the briefs from the advertisers and the profiles of the palotls he proposed to construct. Together, they agreed what he could and couldn't say to adhere to the principle of telling no lies.