When Stooky Bill made his first appearance on TV, and Gutenberg printed his first Bible, and Marconi invented radio – they were all creating the same thing: a new one-way medium. TV, books, radio, recorded music, film – these were all new and interesting ways of broadcasting information in one direction; from the brains of publishers and broadcasters to the ears and eyes of many. The method of distribution was controllable and was controlled.

The Internet changed all that. It allowed someone like me – an arrogant punk who wanted to become famous – to create a website that could be accessed by anyone in the world. And on the back of that website, it allowed him to get book deals, and a job on a newspaper, and to write jokes about terrorist attacks and make a ton of money in the process. He could create his own legend, and no one could stop him.

But the Internet also made him more accountable than ever before for what he did – just like the author reviews on Amazon.com penned by real customers held authors to account, or the feedback ratings on eBay held sellers to account, or millions of blogs held politicians and business leaders and – gasp – even journalists to account.

When Jennifer Ringley started posting every detail of her life online, she had to accept the reality that there would be plenty of people – teenage boys mainly – who would attack her appearance, call her names, even threaten her from behind a veil of anonymity. For every company or politician with an official website there’sa disgruntled former employee, or a political opponent with their own site, or their own attack campaign. For every Nicholas Hellen there’s a Zoe Margolis with a Google bomb. For every Million Dollar Homepage there’s a Russian Mafioso waiting to strike under cover of anonymity. That’s the price of freedom. The trade-off of the Internet.

And just as I could create my own legend, so could someone else tell their version of my story, for good or ill. That ten years of carefully managed image could be destroyed with the click of a mouse, by one determined ex-girlfriend with a lot of time on her hands, brought home everything I loved and everything I hated about the Internet.

A few days after Karen ’s blog appeared, more strange things started to happen. The listings of my books on Amazon started to receive negative reviews, complete with mentions of me spending time in a cell for fraud. My Wikipedia entry that boasted of all the things I’d achieved suddenly sprouted links to Karen’s blog. Even a group I’d created on Facebook was spammed with stories about what a rat I was. Mutual friends who had spoken to Karen said that, while she obviously admitted being responsible for the blog, she swore the other attacks had nothing to do with her.

Weirdly, I believed them – she’d taken responsibility for the blog and there would be no point in her lying about the other stuff. More likely someone had stumbled across the blog and decided to help out a damsel in distress. Perhaps it was someone I knew and who I’d upset in the past – the disgruntled reviewer? Another ex-girlfriend? Perhaps it was just some loser who wanted to impress a pretty American girl who had been wronged. I had no idea. That was the beauty of the Internet: nobody knows if you’re a dog.
Nobody knows anything.

17.1

Karen’s blog made me realise a lot of things: that it was finally time for me to let Savannah get on with her life with a boyfriend who wasn’t such a fuck-up; that almost all farces begin with a well-intentioned lie that snowballs and ends up causing chaos and destruction; that in future it’s probably not the best idea to give a girlfriend a list of people you’ve pissed off in the past. But most of all it made me realise the person I’d become over the previous two years.

Twenty-four months ago I ‘d only had myself to worry about – had Karen’s blog appeared back then it would still have been pretty embarrassing but it wouldn’t have hurt anybody but me. In fact I’d probably have used it as the subject of a newspaper column or to provide a moral lesson towards the end of a book. But now I was trying to raise money for a company and having something like this showing up on Google under my name risked damaging not just my livelihood, but that of everyone I worked with.

And it wasn ‘t just Karen. I looked back at all of the scrapes I’d got myself into during the preceding few years: the arrest, possible fraud conviction, the Hotel California incident with Google; offending Ricky at Adam Street, bitch-slapping Jason Calacanis, getting drunk at the Nibbies, nearly getting jailed for contempt of court, being named and shamed by the Evening Standard – the list went on and on. For a journalist they were all brilliant stories and could provide inspiration for a hundred columns, but for an entrepreneur any one of these events had the potential to come back to bite me on the arse and potentially drag others down with me.
Karen was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Enough was finally enough.

17.2

December 2007 was exactly a year since I ‘d left The Friday Project to start Fridaycities. It also marked the five-year anniversary of me moving to London and starting to go out with Maggie. Despite the fact that the two of us found it hilarious that we’d ever fancied each other, we’d remained extremely close friends

Maggie had recently trained to be a life counsellor, and was someone I knew I could phone up whenever I was feeling sorry for myself and needed to be slapped around the head and reminded how positive things really were. But this time I didn’t need to phone. She’d seen Karen’s site and she invited me round for home-made soup, a DVD and a chat.

Over dinner she asked me how things were going with Kudocities and how I was feeling about Karen. I started giving her just the edited highlights, not really in the mood for any life coaching, no matter how well intentioned. But before I knew it, I was on my feet, pacing backwards and forwards in her kitchen, telling her the whole ridiculous story. All my uncertainties about whether I could cut it as a dot com entrepreneur, how I was worried that Karen’s site was going to reflect badly on the company at the worst possible time – fuck it, how bloody miserable I was about everything.

I went on for a good half-hour, barely pausing for breath. Maggie listened in silence, her eyes following me up and down the room. Only when I’d finished did she say anything.

‘ What I don’t understand, ‘ she started, ‘is why you ever thought you wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place.’

‘I don’t know. I guess I wanted the fame, and maybe the money.’

‘But you’ve just said yourself, the way you live your life makes that impossible. If you had to give it all up: the adventures, the parties, the being your own boss, the working your own hours, the ability to tell that Calacanis guy to stop flirting with your ex-girlfriend and that you’ll drink whatever damn drink you want. If becoming a rich and famous Internet mogul meant you had to give all that up, would you do it? And would it make you happy?’

We both knew the answer.

‘Well then. Why force yourself to be something you’re not? It’ll just make you miserable. You’re not cut out to be responsible for other people’s futures – you’re barely able to manage your own. So stop trying. Do what you’re good at. If you’re meant to be famous and rich you will be, whatever your day job.’

And she was right. It was time to stop trying to be something I knew I couldn’t be. Time to leave the entrepreneuring to people like Richard Moross and Michael Smith and Alex Tew and Michael Birch and Angus Bankes and Nic Brisbourne and Mark Zuckerberg and – yes – to Chad Hurley and Stephen Chen. I might envy all of them, in different ways, but I would never – could never – be like them.

What I could do, though – and what they would never be able to do – was stand at the back of the room, sipping their imported Spanish beer from their free bars, watching them. And then I could go back to my desk late at night and write about what I’d seen, without worrying how it would affect my share price, or whether it would upset my investors.

Larry Page is worth nearly $20 billion, making him one of the top thirty richest men in the world. He has a private jet with a king-size bed and a row of hammocks for parties. Alongside Sergey Brin he regularly appears on the cover of newspapers and magazines around the world. And yet every time he stands on a stage or picks up a pen to write, there’s someone standing over his shoulder, watching him. Someone whose job it is to make sure he doesn’t upset the stock market by saying anything too candid, or by being honest with his peers about the things that interest and excite him.
That’s the real life of a rich and famous Internet entrepreneur. And, Larry, you’re welcome to it.

Chapter Eighteen: ‘The End Game’…