The presentation finally finished, it was time to show it to Angus. Savannah, Karl and I had spent a whole day, and well into an evening, holed up in one of the Feng Shui-ed conference rooms that Peter had built in the office, going through the ten-page slideshow, each taking a different part and each rehearsing and re-rehearsing our parts including our ‘tweaked’ personal CVs.

Karl in particular was very uncomfortable with the idea of us having to pad out our achievements to make ourselves sound more successful. He had always hated the bullshit of business and was adamant that the best policy was to tell the unvarnished truth at all times. If investors weren’t impressed by our CVs, then fuck ‘em. He was particularly unhappy about having to pretend that his novel was due to be published.

‘It’s not true, ‘ he pointed out, with some justification. ‘But it might be. Who knows what will happen in 2008?’ ‘I know what won’t happen. My novel won’t be published. It’s a lie.’

‘It’s a white lie.’

‘What does the colour have to do with it? It’s a lie.’

Eventually we came to an agreement that I could leave his soon-to-be-published novel in the PowerPoint, but he wouldn’t mention it in the actual spoken presentation. And if anyone asked, he was going to tell them the truth. Karl was a writer – a teller of The Truth – and he was deeply against the weird hype games that being in business seemed to involve. Fortunately, I had no such qualms.

With everything prepared, we set off to the Holly Bush, a gastro pub in north London, a stone’s throw from Angus’s house, where we were about to give our first ever live presentation to our brand new non-executive chairman. If there was a better metaphor for where we were and where we wanted to be – that train and tube journey from our office in grotty old Battersea to the leafy suburbs of Angus’s Hampstead – then I’ve yet to find it. That was an area where the For Sale signs outside the houses cost more than my entire new flat in East Dulwich.

After our nervous run-through, interrupted every couple of slides by bar staff collecting glasses and drunks asking to borrow spare stools, Angus seemed to think the presentation was pretty okay – good, even – and he agreed to start making some introductions to the great and the good of the angel world. But first, he suggested, we should have a trial run to an actual investor. A practice presentation but with someone who would give us a hard time; to allow us to harden and temper our presentation in a live furnace. To mix more than one metaphor.
And who better to start with than Nic Brisbourne?

8.1

In his mid-thirties and dressed in the new VC uniform of expensive blue shirt tucked into khaki trousers, Nic Brisbourne is young, smart and very, very important. He is a partner at Espirit, the venture capital firm responsible for investing in a host of Internet companies including Lovefilm.com – the online DVD rental site – and WAYN – a social site for young travellers (which is to say gap-year adventurers, not gypsies. Although that’s not a bad idea.) Obviously we were at far too early a stage to get venture capital money from Espirit but the company also had a track record of making smaller investments in companies they thought might grow into bigger ones, and, more importantly, Nic would be able to tell us exactly where we were going right – and wrong – with our presentation.

This would be our first opportunity to present the company to a serious investor, and as we walked into his glass-walled meeting room I don’t think any of us had been more nervous in our entire lives. If Nic liked the presentation, we could go on to see angel investors safe in the knowledge that the concept of Fridaycities was sound. If he hated it, it might be time to pack up and go home, before we’d even started.

As the closing slide popped into view – a second quote, this time from an obscure blogger who had reviewed Fridaycities, saying the site was more addictive than crack – we held our collective breath and waited for Nic’s verdict. It’s a horrible cliche but the silence seemed to last for half an hour.

Finally, he took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. ‘I like it.’

He wouldn’t invest, of course – we were too ‘early stage’. But he liked it. He had listened intently to the presentation – he had asked the right questions about the numbers, he had interrupted when clearly I was talking bollocks (he knew we were stabbing in the dark when it came to figures) and he had made notes; quite a lot of notes. And at the end of the meeting he even asked us to stay in touch after the site launched. Of course, everyone says that-’stay in touch’ is very often the polite man’s ‘fuck off and never, ever contact me again’- but Nic sounded like he really meant it, even going so far as to join the site the next day and ask a question of his own. Fittingly, instead of uploading a photograph as his profile picture, he chose a cartoon of a man carrying a giant dollar sign on his back.

Quite.

Getting this kind of feedback from a VC before you even begin an angel round is a win-win situation for everyone. The entrepreneur gets feedback for his idea from that harshest of critics, the person who has seen it all before, and the VC gets to see ideas while they’re in their earliest stages, before any of their competitors get a look-in.

After Nic, Angus decided we were ready for our first pitch to someone who there was a slim possibility might actually give us some money.

‘I’m going to try to get us a meeting with Ricky.’

8.2

Richard ‘Ricky’ Tahta had become something of a mini-celebrity in the dot com world since he featured as a white knight in the closing chapters of Boo Hoo, a book about the rise and enormous fall of online fashion store Boo.com.

If you ‘re looking for a guide to how not to start and run an ecommerce business, Boo Hoo is the book to read. Written by one of the site’s founders, Ernst Malmsten, the book tells how he and his business partner, Kajsa Leander, spent almost £80 million creating what they hoped would be the ultimate online fashion store. Despite being launched in 1998, a time when almost no one had broadband at home, the site utilised the latest web technologies to show off its wares. As a result, the front page of Boo.com took literally minutes to load for some users, assuming it managed to load at all. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, costs spiralled as the company opened dozens of offices around the world, and set up a horrendously overcomplicated distribution network with a promise that unwanted goods could be returned free by customers. Their marketing, too, was absolutely mental, with a small fortunate being spent creating what can only be described as the worst cinema advert of all time – a bunch of geeks in sportswear playing basketball.* The effectiveness of the campaign was further reduced by the fact that the site wasn’t even ready when the ads started to appear in cinemas, leading bemused customers to a simple holding page promising that the site would be launching soon.

But the biggest fuck-up of all was staffing, with the book describing in detail a company in which no one took any responsibility for how many people were hired, and what they actually did. Towards the end there’s a lovely episode where a consultant was brought in to manage staff layoffs, only to be fired himself and escorted from the building when it turned out he’d faked his CV. Meanwhile, staff who couldn’t take holiday days due to their crazy workload were offered free first-class flights and stays in five-star hotels as compensation. They weren’t so much spending money as haemorrhaging it.

As the business went from weakness to weakness, the founders started desperately to approach new investors to inject some much-needed cash. One of those they approached was Ricky Tahta, who is presented in the book as an arrogant white knight character, swanning into the Boo headquarters and immediately grilling staff and demanding to see accounts while Malmsten and Leander were away from the office. According to Malmsten, when he called the office to find out what was going on, Tahta swore at him and asked whether he wanted his company to be saved or not. It’s a great story. Just a shame it doesn’t ring in the slightest bit true.

You see, Ricky is actually one of the most polite and professional people you will ever meet – certainly not one given easily to swanning. And I should know, given how horrendously I’d managed to offend him a year or so before Angus suggested we should approach him for investment.

The incident occurred, like so many did, at Adam Street. I was talking to Angus at the bar about the founding of Moreover when he pointed out Ricky across the room, explaining that he had been one of the early investors in the company. A little later, Ricky came over to say hello. The conversation went a bit like this:

Me: (Drunk) ‘So, apparently you’re the person who made a ton of money out of Angus’ company.’

Ricky: (Smiling politely and walking away) ‘…’

Of course, at the time I was a newspaper hack and I didn’t give a damn. I could offend pretty much anyone I liked and still get paid at the end of the month. It wasn’t like I needed anything from these fat cat investors who made their money off other people’s success. Same again please, barman!

‘I’m going to try to get us a meeting with Ricky.’

‘Oh God, is that a good idea? I seem to remember offending him at Adam Street. He was very good about it, though.’

‘Yeah. We’re going to have to hope he’s forgotten about that.’

When Angus called back a few days later to say that Ricky had agreed to meet us, at his office near Bond Street, my nerves got even worse. What if he did remember me? What if he had only agreed to the meeting so he could remind me – in front of everyone – how I’d drunkenly suggested that he had somehow made a wad of cash off the back of one of my friends – and yet here I was now coming cap in hand to him? Perhaps he wouldn’t even turn up to the meeting. That’d learn me.

No, I was being ridiculous. It was a whole year ago. It was dark when we met. I’m sure he meets lots of people. There’s no way he’ll remember me.

But just to be on the safe side, I decided to look as different as I possibly could in the meeting. Out went my usual uniform of jeans and untucked shirt (entrepreneur-casual) and in came a smart suit, tie, combed (combed!) hair and a pair of thick rimmed glasses that I’ve had for years but normally only wear in the privacy of my own home to watch television. When I met Karl, Savannah and Angus outside Bond Street tube on the morning of the meeting, I noticed my reflection of a newsagent’s window. I looked like Mr Magoo, the estate agent.

As we arrived at Ricky’s extremely upscale office, I couldn’t help but notice that someone had chained a knackered, gaudily painted bike to the railings outside, significantly lowering the tone.

‘Nice bike, ‘ I said, sarcastically.

‘That’s Ricky’s bike, ‘ explained Angus. ‘If you look carefully at it – it’s actually worth a fortune. But he’s painted it like that so it won’t get stolen.’

Brilliant. Ricky was definitely our kind of guy.

At that, as if by magic, there he was, walking out of the front door to meet us. I immediately stepped back, so that I was standing ever so slightly behind the other three. Perhaps he wouldn’t even notice me.

‘Hi, I’m Savannah, ‘ said Savannah.

‘Hi, I’m Karl, ‘ said Karl.

‘Hi… Paul.’ I said.

Ricky stared at me.

‘Yes… I know you, ‘ he said, with what was either a knowing smirk or one that said ‘nice try’. I looked across at Angus. There was no danger of misinterpreting his expression. God Help Us.

We’d come prepared with our presentation on my laptop and all of the various wires required to make it work on whatever big screen Ricky’s high-tech office might have. But our host had other ideas. ‘Shall we go to Starbucks round the corner?’ he suggested.

Definitely our kind of guy.

After buying us all coffee, Ricky joined us at the corner table we’d chosen, as far away as possible from the early morning crowd. ‘Okay, ‘ he said, taking a sip of his latte, ‘what have you got for me?’

There’s something both relaxing and nerve-racking about pitching in a Starbucks. On the one hand, there’s none of the formality of a conference room, making it less of a presentation and more of a chat around a PowerPoint. On the other hand, it’s hard to be casual when queues of people in suits waiting to buy their morning coffee are eyeing you with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. I felt like we were trying to organise a bank heist without drawing attention to ourselves.

Before going into the meeting, Angus had warned us that Ricky would almost certainly grasp the concept of the site very quickly and told us not to be fazed if he asked us to skip through some slides, or if he asked unexpected questions. And, sure enough, after the first ‘what is Fridaycities?’ slide he interrupted with a ‘yep, yep, I get that’, a clear cue to skip over the next couple of slides.

I was fazed. Surely he couldn’t have got the idea of the site that quickly.

‘Well, um… what I was going to say…’ I continued.

‘It’s okay, I get it.’

And, the thing is, he did get it. He didn’t need me to walk him through how a question and answer site works. The man wasn’t an idiot. He interrupted again a few minutes later, taking us on a ten-minute departure from the script, as he quizzed Savannah on The Penny and its revenue and distribution models. It was like being in an exam, where the subject was ‘everything that has any relation to anything’ and the pass mark was 100 per cent. It was exhilarating and terrifying and great fun. Thank God we were all wired off our tits on our second Americano in half an hour.

After the presentation, Ricky didn’t say anything but instead suggested we walk back with him to his office. It was the most nerve-racking walk of our young lives. Had he liked it? Had we fucked up completely? Was this the point where he’d remind me about the Adam Street incident and send me away with a clip round the ear? But, instead, as we reached the door and his chained-up, colourful bike, he started:

‘I’ll be honest with you…’

Oh God. Please don’t be honest. Anything but honesty.

‘Honestly, I didn’t think I’d like it. I thought you were going to show me just another social networking site and I didn’t think it was going to be different enough… but…’

But…?

‘But I like it. I really do. I’m tied up with some other things at the moment, so I couldn’t put in the whole amount and I couldn’t do anything straight away. But I like it. Yeah… I’m interested.’

He liked it. And he was interested. The man I’d been so disgracefully rude to a year earlier, who came into the meeting expecting not to like the site – despite those odds, we’d managed to persuade him.

We thanked him for his time, promised to keep in touch and walked away, very, very slowly.

None of us said a word. We just kept walking, the four of us – me, Savannah, Karl, Angus – across the road, round the corner and straight into the pub. Only after we’d ordered four pints of the strongest beer in the house – it was barely past 11.00 a.m. – and sat down, shell-shocked, did one of us finally break the silence. I’m pretty sure it was me, but the whole event is still a daze so it could have been any of us.

‘Fucking hell. Did that really just happen?’

‘I think it did, ‘ said (probably) Savannah.

‘He liked it. He wanted to hate it. But he liked it.’

‘And he remembered you, ‘ said Angus. ‘When he said that I thought it was game over.’

‘But it wasn’t. He liked it. And he’s interested.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck.’

8.3

Buoyed by Ricky’s interest, and using Angus’s contacts, we arranged meeting after meeting over the next six weeks. There was Henry Fyson from Creative Capital Partners, a company part funded by the London Development Agency (an agency controlled by the Mayor of London, tasked with ‘driving London’s sustainable economic growth’) which invested public money in London-based businesses. They liked Fridaycities, too, but the terms of their funding meant that they could only invest if another investor had agreed to put money in as well. So they’d have to wait. Also, they hadn’t decided whether social networking-type sites were a fad or not.

Then there was the senior partner in the investment firm – he should probably remain nameless – who was utterly obsessed with mobile phones. To the point where, after sitting through our presentation, he announced that he liked the idea of Fridaycities but would only be interested if we got rid of all the silly web stuff and turned the whole thing into a service for mobiles. It felt just like we were in one of those cinema adverts for Orange where the studio executives tell the filmmakers that they love their movie about life in Vichy France… but is there any chance that text messaging could be included somehow? Fridaycities relied on people asking very specific questions and receiving very detailed, often quite wordy, answers. We wanted the questioners and the answerers to take time over their contributions and we were employing a team of editors who would further tidy up their spelling and grammar. A bigger gap between that and the short, snappy vowel-less bullshit that passes for mobile phone content there couldn’t be – and who did this guy think he was, trying to get us to change our vision to fit his weird idea of what ‘the platform of the future’ would be?

‘Yeah, we’d absolutely consider making it a mobile site,’ I said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘That would be no problem at all.’

Karl sighed audibly. More business bullshit. Across the table Savannah’s eyes burrowed into me. Was I a man or a mouse?

A mouse. Definitely a mouse. A greedy mouse who would say anything to get that cheese.

‘I don’t think we’d have a problem…’

A sharp heel pressed itself into my leg.

‘…but having said that, our initial plan is definitely for a web service. I think a mobile site would definitely have to wait until phase two.’

‘Definitely,’ said Savannah, definitely.

‘Okay, well, I think you should give it some serious thought. I think you’ll find that web services are definitely going to be superseded by mobile services very soon.’

And that was that. He was wrong, of course – dramatically so. And Savannah was right to jab in her heel. The fact is that almost everyone who has ever predicted that one media will take over from another – theatre will be destroyed by cinema will be destroyed by video/DVD will be destroyed by the Internet – has been proved spectacularly wrong. Mobile phones are great for accessing certain types of information – short, timely text content and audio, for example – but reading lots of text on a small screen – a screen of any sort – just isn’t practical and won’t be for a long time. But there’s something hypnotic about someone suggesting they’ll give you large amounts of money if only you’ll surrender your vision and your principles. Something hypnotic and extraordinarily tempting.

Another irresistible draw, particularly for me, was celebrity. And so when one of Angus’s contacts suggested that we try to get a meeting with Peter Gabriel – the Genesis frontman-turned-humanitarian, now, apparently, turned-Internet company investor – it seemed like a great idea, despite the fact that our pitch had nothing to do with music or saving the earth. Gabriel, Angus’s friend explained, had recently invested in a company called We7, which had perfected the technology to insert targeted adverts into audio files. If the technology caught on, it could well prove to be the Holy Grail that musicians and record companies were looking for to combat Internet piracy. Up until now, the record giants had focused on inventing newer and more elaborate ways to prevent music lovers from uploading songs to the Internet and swapping them with their friends. As a result, dozens of complicated ‘digital rights management’ (DRM) technologies had been created, and an equal number had been cracked by determined hackers.

We7 would turn the situation on its head. The service would work with record companies and musicians to make their music available to download – free and without any DRM restrictions – from the We7 website. The catch was that listeners would be presented with a short advert, embedded at the very beginning of the song, a bit like a radio jingle. And, thanks to the We7 technology, the advert would change depending on who had downloaded the track – a student would hear an advert for a new brand of alcopop, an OAP would get an ad for hearing aids etc etc. The advertising would cover the cost of rewarding the record company and the artist, and the more people shared the tracks, the more advertisements could be ’served’. Suddenly piracy was a legitimate distribution model.

From our point of view, We7 would make the perfect partner for Fridaycities. Our site was city-based and invited users to give us detailed information about their likes and dislikes – exactly the information We7 needed to target its ads.

And then there was the fact that having a celebrity as one of our investors would guarantee us acres and acres of press coverage. So, yes, we would absolutely love to meet Peter Gabriel, although for Karl and me it would actually be the second time we’d met the singer of ‘Solsbury Hill’ …

Chapter Nine: ‘This could be heaven or this could be hell’…