Fishbowl (6 page)

If he
had
given the number, Stanford would have discovered that after six short weeks Fishbowll had grown from the tame little creature Andrei Koss had launched on the world into a beast with a staggering 600,000 registered users, of whom an eye-watering 92 per cent visited the site on a daily basis.

The suite broke up for Winter Break. Charles Gok, for whom Fishbowll was merely a distraction as he made his way through the increasingly crowded common room to and from the physics lab each day, only had to travel as far as Los Angeles. Kevin went home to Chicago. Ben went back to New Jersey. Andrei got on a plane to Boston.

As the plane took off, Andrei felt something inside him take off as well. Maybe it was watching things grow smaller on the ground, but suddenly he felt himself looking at what he had done over the past couple of months as if from a height. Things had been happening so fast and with such intensity that he had had no time to try to understand it all. He had sat the exams for the Fall Quarter on the back of a couple of nights of intense cramming, and he knew his grades weren't going to be what they should have been. He really needed to think.

He decided that for the next two weeks he wasn't going to do any work on Fishbowll. He was going to step back and try to understand this thing he had created and which, in a few short weeks, seemed to have taken over his life.

And it wasn't only time that Fishbowll was taking, it was money. The site was chronically short of server space and there was only so much he could do by streamlining the architecture. He had already put in most of the savings he had in the bank from selling his app. If Fishbowll's growth continued at anything like the rate it was showing, a significant additional investment in server capacity would be required merely to keep it standing.

Back home, he told his parents about Fishbowll for the first time. His brother and sister were visiting for the holidays as well. He showed them the website. When he opened it, his sister, Dina, who was doing a PhD in chemical engineering at Princeton, started laughing. ‘That's yours?' she said.

Andrei bristled a little, wondering what was so funny.

‘I joined up last week.' Dina grinned. ‘Leo,' he said to their brother, ‘have you joined yet?'

Leo shook his head.

‘What do you guys at Wharton do all day? Come on, this is the most awesome thing I've ever seen.' She turned back to Andrei. ‘It's yours? You really wrote this thing?'

Andrei nodded, still not sure if Dina was pulling his leg.

‘Mom, Dad, this thing's unbelievable. You've got to take a look at it. How many users have you got, Andrei?'

Andrei shrugged. ‘Around half a million. A little more.'

‘Half a million?' said Leo. ‘In how long?'

Andrei shrugged again. ‘A couple of months.'

‘That's unbelievable!' said Leo.

Dina hit him on the arm. ‘See? Join up already!'

Andrei's parents glanced at each other, wondering what their children were so excited about ‘You're taking care of your school work, right?' said Andrei's father, waggling a finger at him.

‘Sure,' said Andrei.

Naturally, Andrei couldn't quite keep his hands off his keyboard over the holiday, and he used the opportunity to fix a few aspects of the site's functionality that had been bugging him for a while. But he did force himself to step away and think about it as well.
Dina and Leo wanted to know more about the site, how he had got the idea, how he had developed it, what plans he had for it. Andrei wished he could have answered the last question. He took long walks along the icy streets around his parents' house in Brookline and tried to figure out what he had got himself into. Was Fishbowll a figment, a fancy, a programming whim, or, as he was beginning to feel, a revolutionary means of providing a radically deeper level of connection in a way that might change the world? Or was he just turning into a completely deluded fantasist?

As the old year ticked into the new, Fishbowll had 793,000 registered users. Three days later, Andrei was on a plane back to Stanford.

Even if he wanted to walk away from Fishbowll, or set it on the back burner while he concentrated on school, he wasn't sure that he had the right to. He had offered it to people and they had taken it up. Almost a million of them. They depended on it now.

He could sell it and let someone else – someone with the time and the money that was needed for it – take it to the next level. Even now, with the growth curve it had generated, he might well get something for it, perhaps even a seven-figure sum. Not bad for half a semester's work. He had school work to do and his future to think of, as his parents had reminded him, and just as a site's user base could rapidly grow, so it could rapidly fall. He was lucky enough to be at one of the world's great universities. He had a course to finish and he was barely more than halfway through it. He had neglected his studies badly since Fishbowll launched. If he kept going with it, he knew that Fishbowll was going to demand more of his time, not less.

And even if he wanted to keep going, was he the best person to do it? If Fishbowll had even a tenth of the importance that he believed it did, was he capable of building it as it needed to be built? And could he do it by himself?

As he flew went back to Stanford for the Winter Quarter, Andrei knew he had to make a decision. In fact, a number of decisions.

7

IT WAS KEVIN
who organized the party to celebrate Fishbowll's millionth user – if hauling a heap of alcohol into a dorm and letting it be known that there was going to be a party could be called organization. The user count ticked over to the magic seven digits about two hours after the party started. Kevin jumped on a desk and announced that it was a 63-year-old lady from Saskatchewan who was interested in Scottish terriers. There was silence. No one knew what to make of that. ‘I'm joking!' yelled Kevin. ‘It's an eighteen-year-old girl in Rio who wants to know about fellatio.'

By the time they woke up the next day, the user count had ticked up another couple of thousand, and the million milestone already felt as if it was in the past.

‘Let's go to Yao's,' said Andrei.

‘For breakfast?'

‘Kevin,' said Ben, ‘it's twelve o'clock.'

They went to the noodle place. Andrei knew just about all the waiters by name. Lopez, a short Mexican waiter who had his arms piled with plates, nodded in the direction of a free table at the back.

‘I wanted to tell you guys something,' said Andrei, after Lopez had taken their order and they were waiting for the food to arrive. ‘I've been to see a lawyer.'

Kevin glanced knowingly at Ben for a second, then looked back at Andrei. ‘You're selling Fishbowll, aren't you?'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘I knew you would,' said Kevin.

‘Really? You think someone would buy it?'

‘Dude, are you serious?'

‘You think it's that good?'

‘I don't need to tell you,' said Kevin. ‘You know it better than me.'

Andrei shrugged. ‘You get a buzz, the numbers go up. Then they go down.'

‘Not this one. This is the real deal, Andrei.'

Andrei looked at Ben. ‘What do you think?'

‘I don't know,' said Ben. ‘I don't know what makes a website work. But I can tell you, if you go to the Grotto, you've got a shitload of people who believe in this site. I mean,
believe
. Evangelical. It's scary.'

‘Guys,' said Andrei, ‘this site just sits on top of a whole bunch of social networking sites. It's like a network that connect other networks. A meta-network, if you will. It just connects home pages.'

‘Not so,' said Kevin. ‘People have their own Fishbowll home page now.'

‘Some people. And if they stick to those, it just creates another silo. The point is to trawl the different networks – that's what gives the step change in connection.'

‘And your point?' said Kevin.

‘How long until one of the networks starts doing this themselves?'

‘Why are they going to do that?' demanded Kevin. With all of two years of an economics major, he regarded himself as the business guru of the group. ‘Dude, think about it. The whole point of their model is to keep people in their network. The walled garden.
Your
point is to put connectivity across those networks. Like you said, Fishbowll is a meta-network. It's like the brain. The social networks, they're like regions in the brain. Each one of them can only do so much. But connect them, and look what you can do.'

‘And someone else will recognize that,' said Andrei. ‘Maybe I should sell now before that happens.'

Kevin sat forward. ‘What's going on? Has someone made you an offer? Has someone—?'

He stopped. The food had arrived.

‘Thanks, Lopez,' said Andrei, as the waiter put down their plates.

Lopez smiled. ‘Sure.'

‘Well?' said Ben, when Lopez had gone. ‘What's the offer?'

‘There's no offer,' said Andrei. ‘I'm just thinking. How defensible is this business? If I can do it, someone else can do it.'

‘But they haven't,' said Kevin.

‘But they will.'

‘You're the first mover. That's why you've got the numbers you've got.'

‘I've got a million. We need a billion.'

Kevin grinned. ‘Give us a couple more weeks.'

Andrei took a forkful of his fried chicken and prawn noodles. ‘Why shouldn't I sell the site?'

‘What have you been offered?'

‘Nothing, believe me. But let's say I was. It might be at its peak value right now, before someone tries to take us out.'

‘You'd be giving it away.'

‘Depends how much I was offered.'

‘Whatever you're offered! Hell, sell it to me!'

‘Kevin, you have nothing.'

‘I'll give you an IOU.'

Andrei turned questioningly to Ben.

Ben frowned. ‘I'm not a businessman. I don't know what it's worth. As to whether the big guys are going to eat you alive … I don't know. You'd think they would. But Kevin's got a point. There's a conflict. They don't want people going outside their network – and that's the core of what we do. They want to keep people in. All I can say is, psychologically, people have a hard time doing the opposite of what they've been committed to doing, even if that's what they say they want to do. But I don't know if that's the same for business.'

‘It is,' said Kevin, with all the assurance of the junior economics major.

‘I don't think it's a flash in the pan,' said Ben, ‘but if you think now's the time to sell, Andrei, then I guess you should.'

‘Dude, shut the fuck up!'

‘It's his, Kevin. It's his choice.'

‘He'll sell it to some corporate who'll just ruin it. Is that what you're going to do, Andrei? Sell it to some fucking big corporate like Homeplace? Then make them pay you a billion. At least make them pay for ripping the heart out of what we've created.'

‘You're being melodramatic,' said Andrei.

‘Am I?' Kevin looked as if he was about to leap up and tear his shirt off. ‘Am I really? Then why are you selling to them?'

Andrei didn't reply. He ate a forkful of noodles. Then another. ‘Fishbowll's about connection,' he said eventually. ‘That's all. It's about inspiring people to connect in ways that are unexpected and exciting and important and can change the way things happen, the way they think.'

‘Dude, I totally get it. So why are you selling—?'

‘I'm not selling!' said Andrei impatiently.

‘So why did you go to a lawyer? Why are you telling us—?'

‘I want to know how committed you are,' said Andrei, cutting across him.

‘And a lawyer's going to tell you that?'

‘No. You are.' Andrei looked at each of them in turn. He said the words again. ‘I want to know how committed you are.'

Kevin slapped his fist, knuckles down, on the table beside his bowl of noodles. The tendons stood out in his wrist. ‘You want my blood?'

‘Ben?'

‘Andrei, this is the coolest thing I've ever been near. It's the biggest psychological experiment you can imagine, seeing how people use this network, seeing how they respond to what it offers, seeing what they say, what they feel, what they think, and I've got a seat behind the one-way window. I'm not going to ask you to hold on to it just for that, but—'

‘Dude, he's committed,' said Kevin. ‘All right? We're both
committed. And you know what, I was thinking over the break … since you're asking about commitment, and if you're telling us the truth and you're not going to sell, then I guess this is a good a time as any to say it …' Kevin coughed. ‘Maybe you should recognize that. Our commitment, I mean.'

Andrei didn't reply.

‘We both put in, Andrei. I'm not saying we contributed what you did. I'm not saying we had the idea or brought it to life. But I think, if it hadn't been for us, I'm not sure if Fishbowll would still be in operation. There were times over the last couple of months when I think you would have gone down without us.'

‘So you want me to pay you?'

‘No. I'm just wondering whether we shouldn't have some kind of … you know, some kind of a share.'

Andrei glanced at Ben.

Ben put up his hands. ‘First I've heard of it. We haven't discussed it.'

‘Dude, I'm just being honest,' said Kevin. ‘I've been thinking about it. That's what I think.'

Andrei was silent for a moment. ‘What are you going to do about school?' he asked.

‘What are
you
going to do?' replied Kevin.

‘I'm going to try to get through this quarter. I'm going to try to juggle things that far. Then I'll see.'

‘What comes first?'

Andrei picked up a napkin and took a pen out of his pocket. He listed a set of dates: 1 February, 1 March, 1 April, 1 May, 1 June. Alongside each date he listed a user number, rising to hit 10 million by the last date. ‘If we can track that growth curve, this comes first.'

Ben smiled. ‘If you don't hit those numbers, you'll do more, not less.'

Andrei pushed the napkin across the table. ‘I want to know if you guys are prepared to be in.'

‘Dude, we told you we're in,' said Kevin. ‘What part of “in” don't you understand?'

‘Then going back to what you said before, I want you to have part of the company.'

‘What company?' said Ben.

‘The company I went to the lawyer to set up. This is getting big. I agree with you, Kevin – I couldn't have got this far without you, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that. It's going to get more crazy, not less. We haven't even seen the start of it.'

‘So you're saying … you want to give us a share?'

Andrei nodded. He had no idea how he was going to manage his school work for the rest of the year, but he had no intention of selling Fishbowll, even if he could get some money for it. That wasn't why he had built the site. He had seriously asked himself if he was the best person to build the site and he had come up with the answer that he didn't think anyone else would understand his vision of connection the way he did. And that meant that if he wanted that vision to come to life, in all of its power and its purity, he had to keep building it. If he sold it, it would never be the Fishbowll it could be, and his vision would never be realized. Whoever bought it would prostitute it to advertising, like every other site on the net, to make as much money as they could.

But he couldn't do it by himself. That was something else he had decided very clearly. He had started something, and he had no idea where it was taking him. Already, after two months, Fishbowll was bigger, more diverse, more demanding – different, in almost every way – than anything he could have imagined when he began. It way too lonely to be doing this alone. He had felt that in the plane home, out of San Francisco, and he had felt it even more strongly coming back. He needed help. He needed brothers in arms, and those brothers were Ben and Kevin. He needed the way Ben listened, the way he thought. It was Ben who had come up with the idea for the Grotto, Ben who had said the things on the way to Ricker that had finally set off the explosion in his head that had made Fishbowll work. And he needed Kevin, who was as much of a wheelspinner as he was. He wanted them to be in, in a way that was strong and permanent. And if there was
ever going to be any money in Fishbowll, he wanted them to have part of it too.

He had no problem with Kevin having asked before he had had the chance to make the offer. After the work he had put in, Kevin had every right.

‘Ben,' he said, ‘we wouldn't be here without the things you said to me. Kevin, you're a Stakhanovite.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's the old Soviet term for a hero worker, the guys who did more than anyone thought possible. We would have crashed and burned in week two without you. I want you to have fifteen per cent of the company each. But I'm going to need you to put in some money. We need more server space. I'm putting in everything I've got, every last cent I've saved. Can you find something? I don't know, talk to your families. Say, fifty thousand each.'

‘How long will that take us through to?' asked Kevin.

Andrei glanced at the napkin with the numbers he had written. ‘September? I figure we're also going to have to pay someone to help with the coding, and that should cover that as well.'

Kevin considered it. Obviously, Andrei wasn't going to divide the company equally, with each of them getting 33 per cent. Andrei had had the idea, he had made it happen, he had put in the initial funds for server space. He deserved to have more. Kevin hadn't settled on a share for himself that he thought would be fair. Twenty would have been nice. Ten would have been low.

Fifteen per cent of the company for $50,000 valued the business at somewhat over $300,000. Kevin believed in Fishbowll and its potential – $300,000 was nothing. If they did things right, he calculated that it would be worth a whole lot more than that.

‘I'm in,' he said.

‘Can you get fifty thousand?'

‘I'll tell my parents any lie I have to. I'll tell them I got a girl pregnant.'

‘Tell them something they'll believe,' said Ben.

‘Funny. Very funny.'

‘Ben?' said Andrei.

‘I'm not sure. My folks don't have that much spare cash. Stanford's stretching them to the limit.'

‘Call them. I want you in. You guys should get your own attorneys. I don't want you to feel there's any problem in the future. I've got my guy to draft an agreement, but we should make sure everyone is happy that this is absolutely fair.'

‘I'm OK,' said Kevin. ‘I'll talk to your guy.'

‘I'm OK with that,' said Ben.

Andrei nodded. That was what he wanted to hear. He had felt he had to recommend that the others get their own lawyers, but if they had taken him up on the suggestion, he didn't know if he would have gone ahead with the deal. If they didn't have trust amongst the three of them at this stage, he didn't think it would work.

Andrei put out his hand. ‘Welcome to Fishbowll, gentlemen!'