The value of the companies owned by the people squeezed into this tiny room is anyone’s guess. The Internet industry continues to grow steadily but there is a growing level of chatter about what 2008 has in store. Will the industry continue to grow or will there be a second correction? No one is using the word bubble tonight.

I ‘m standing at the back, again, getting slowly drunk with the event’s organiser, Robert Loch. He’s in his element: just over a month earlier, Microsoft invested $240 million for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook. The deal valued Facebook at around $15 billion. He’s won his bet with George Berkowski and will soon be £1, 000 richer. He plans to use the money to install a stripper pole at Mr Rong’s.

Standing next to us is Michael Smith. Michael is celebrating, too. The Receda Cube was eventually found, buried in woodland a hundred miles north of London, by amateur archaeologist Andy Darley. By the time Mr Darley came to the Mind Candy offices in Battersea to collect his prize money, more than fifty thousand players in ninety-two countries had joined in the search. The success of Perplex City has spurred Michael and Mind Candy to launch their next venture: a site called Moshi Monsters, which combines puzzles and virtual pets. It is already gearing up to be the interactive phenomenon of the 2008.

Alex Tew couldn ‘t make it tonight. Instead he’s at home, making arrangements for the Pixelotto prize draw. Standing at a little over $300, 000, the prize fund is slightly lower than the two million dollars that Alex was hoping to split between himself and the winner, but sales of pixels have slowed to a crawl and Alex has decided it’s time to make the draw, close the site and move on to his next idea. When the draw is eventually made a few weeks later, the winner will be one ‘K. Moguche’ from Kenya.

For probably the first time in history, someone in Africa will receive an email, sent from the UK, with instructions on how to claim a huge international lottery win.

Meanwhile, 5, 370 miles away in San Francisco, Richard Moross is in a business meeting, hoping to convince another social networking site to allow its users to create personalised Moo products. Products that now include stickers, note cards, postcards and greetings cards. Business is good, and it just keeps getting better.

Also doing some international networking, is Ruth ‘Mimi’ Fowler who has moved to London to buy a house with the proceeds of her book. She’ll be off back to New York in January though – to Sixth Avenue to be precise – for a meeting with Alison Benson at Pretty Matches who is taking a very careful first look at her recently completed screenplay.

As always, a microphone is being passed around and we ‘re watching and listening as a succession of young – mostly under forty – men – mostly men – rattle off their CVs and their future plans. Suddenly the microphone is thrust into my hand. I knock back the last of my beer and introduce myself.

‘My name’s Paul Carr and I’m writing a book about the dot com industry. So, be warned, if things get too messy later and we end up at the Gardening Club, there’s a very real chance you’ll all be in it.’

Big laugh.

Excellent.

Nothing to see here.

Acknowledgements…

The site remained live, but the only new questions posted during December were from long-time users wondering why everything was so quiet, and why there had been so little news about the much-anticipated relaunch. Things were so quiet in fact that one user even created a sweepstake for when Fridaycities.com would vanish for good.

On 27 December 2007, he got his answer. At the stroke of 10.00 p.m. Fridaycities vanished from the Internet forever.

18.1

At 10.01 p.m. anyone typing in the Fridaycities.com web address would be greeted with a ‘page not found’ error message.

18.2

At 10.05 p.m. on 27 December 2007, a brand new site called Kudocities was launched on an unsuspecting world.

With its new bright red logo and bold new design, it was almost unrecognisable from the Fridaycities site it replaced. Even more unrecognisable, though, was the business behind it. Forced to decide between office rent and paying the development team, Fridaycities Ltd had moved out of its offices and taken up new premises in Savannah’s living room.

Using a small amount of additional investment from Angus, it had been Savannah who for most of December had been liaising with the developers to get Kudocities ready for launch; Savannah who had ensured that she had followed up with all the advertisers who had expressed an interest in advertising on Kudocities ahead of the launch. And it had been Savannah who a few moments earlier had been sitting next to the lead developer when he pressed the button to make the site live.

I remained a shareholder in the company – with shares held in trust for my uncle and my parents in exchange for their original seed funding – and Angus remained non-executive chairman. But the new head of the company – the CEO – was Savannah; the one person who hadn’t gone into the business to become famous and wealthy; the person who didn’t mind swallowing the business bullshit if it got the right result, but who wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. The person who just wanted to help city dwellers share information about their city.

Against all odds, Kudocities was alive. Within hours feedback would start coming in from users. It would be, by and large, excellent. A few days later, the first revenues would start to come in and, all being well, the site would soon secure the angel investment it needed to expand globally. If anyone could make it happen, Savannah could.

Epilogue…

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’…

I remembered, vaguely, speaking to Savannah on the phone the night before when I got back to my flat: I couldn’t remember the access code for my front door and she was good at things like that, so I’d called her and she’d helped me get in. Good old Savannah.

It was the weekend so we didn ‘t have to be in work, but I thought I’d better call her anyway to check that I hadn’t done anything stupid. I picked up my phone from beside my bed and scrolled to the last calls list to redial her number. But, oddly, Savannah’s number wasn’t the last number I’d dialled – Karen’s was. As was the second to last call. And the third. And the fourth. This was very weird – I didn’t remember phoning Karen, but in fact all the last calls I’d made the previous night were to her. I hadn’t called Savannah at all. What the hell? I was sure I’d spoken to her.

It was at that point that I suddenly started to remember things. Oh God – Karen was at the pub, too. I’d phoned her up and invited her to join us because there was something important I needed to tell her. I was going to sort things out.
Oh Jesus. What the hell had I said?

And even if Karen was at the pub that still didn ‘t explain how I’d spoken to Savannah when I’d only dialled Karen’s number.

Unless.

Oh God.

No, it can’t be.

With fear in my heart and panic in my fingers, I dialled Savannah’s number. An American voice answered.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey. I’m not sure I want to know the answer to this question but why do you have Savannah’s phone? And why did she have yours when I phoned last night?’

‘Why don’t you ask her yourself? She’s right here, making a cup of tea.’

OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD.

16.1

As it turned out, the whole sorting things out with Karen and Savannah like a grown-up thing hadn’t gone entirely to plan. Apparently Karen had arrived at the pub to find me with my hand on Savannah’s leg, flirting wildly. Quite reasonably, a loud argument had ensued and, in an act of sisterly solidarity, Savannah had taken Karen to one side to calm her down and have a chat. Evidently I’d been quite happy for this to carry on and had headed home, oblivious to the damage I’d done.

With Karen incredibly and understandably upset, Savannah had offered to let her sleep on her couch, but not before they spent half the night comparing notes on what a complete and utter bastard I was – including things I’d told each of them about the other, and places I said I’d been, and where I’d actually been. And now the two of them were having breakfast. This was my worst nightmare.
Savannah came to the phone.

‘ Well, I guess that probably solves the question of us getting back together, and what I should do about Karen.’ Keep it light, I thought.

‘Yeah – I think that pretty much nails it, ‘ she replied, with characteristic understatement.

*Click *

16.2

Over the next few days I thought about Karen a lot. She wasn ‘t answering my calls and her face had disappeared from the contacts list on my instant message software. In a way I was glad that, no matter how badly I’d handled things, at least things were definitely over now. I didn’t have to make the decision on what to do – it had been made for me. But I still wondered whether Karen was okay; what she was thinking, what she was doing.
I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.
16.3
‘HAHAHAHAHAHA!’

The uncontrollable laughter on the other end of the phone belonged to Sam. Seven days had passed since the incident with Karen and Savannah, and I was trying to forget about all my troubles by deep-cleaning my flat.

‘ What? What now ?’

‘Nothing. Just reading Karen’s blog.’

‘Karen’s what ?’

‘Her blog. Her blog about you. It’s really good.’

‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

‘You haven’t seen it? Brilliant … go to …’

‘You had better be kidding me. She wouldn’t set up a blog about me, she ’s not even talking to me.’

‘Oh, but she is.’

Click. Click.

Oh Jesus.

And there it was. An entire website dedicated to me – created by Karen and full of details of our relationship, stories about how much of a crap boyfriend I had been in every single way. How her friends had always hated me. How I was a worthless ‘douchebag’ (her favourite word). But it was worse than that. Much worse.

She ‘d been recruiting.

Not satisfied with telling her own stories about me, Karen had gone to the effort of tracking down everyone she knew I’d fallen out with in my entire life and encouraged them to add comments to the blog. Ex-girlfriends I’d mentioned casually while we were together, including a girl I’d dated for a couple of weeks before she’d got so clingy my brother took to calling her ‘mental Kate’ (how can you track someone down using only that information? It was like CSI: London ). She’d even got in touch with a guy who had written some reviews for a magazine I co-founded years ago and that had folded after three issues over some pretty dramatic ‘artistic differences’. He still held me responsible and would occasionally post some malicious nonsense about me on his own blog. But now there they all were, almost everyone I’d ever fallen out with, united at last in their hatred for me. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my life. This was more than a Google bomb – this was full-blown character genocide.

Sam couldn’t stop laughing – the bastard.

‘This is without doubt my new favourite site. I’ve bookmarked it, and be assured I’m sending the link to everyone we know.’

The utter bastard.

I laughed about it, too, of course; it’s all I could do. But the truth was it was deeply embarrassing – and hurtful. Which was exactly the point, of course: I’d spent ten years of my life using the Internet for self-publicity and now she was using it against me – embarrassing me like I’d embarrassed her by using my ego and vanity against me.

Now when anyone searched for my name online, among all the stuff I wanted people to see – the Wikipedia page saying that I’d been described as a ‘latter-day Jonathan Swift’ by the Christian Scientists; five years of Friday Thing archives; the books and articles I’d written – there’d be this extra little nugget. This blog telling the world how I’d broken the heart of a girl who had been nothing but nice to me, just because I wanted to have it all.

Chapter Seventeen: ‘Taking stock’…

America had been hit by a credit crunch following an over-eagerness by lenders to loan money to what were called ’sub-prime’ borrowers. Think Ocean Finance customers in pick-up trucks. Amazingly, many of these ’sub prime’ borrowers had defaulted on their loans and the American financial industry had gone into meltdown. It’s a pretty solid rule that when America catches bird flu, the rest of the world stops eating Chicken McNuggets and so there were real concerns among financial experts that we might be heading for a global recession.

For Internet investors, this uncertainty had started to affect their own confidence. What if the companies they were investing in were part of a second Internet bubble? And what would happen if a global downturn made that bubble burst?

Pop!

A clear sign of this new level of uncertainty was the number of discussions being held on Internet panels with subjects like ‘Bubble 2.0?’ and ‘Are we heading for another dot bomb?’ and ‘Do you want to consolidate all of your debts into one manageable monthly payment?’ An even clearer sign came when Robert changed the final question at his Internet People networking dinners.

15.1

Robert ’s Internet People dinners are an opportunity for people in the same sector to get together with their peers to discuss the important issues affecting their industry. Most industries have these kinds of events, to a degree, but entrepreneurs seem disproportionately keen on them. Adam Street alone plays host to at least three industry-leading ones; there’s the Mandrake Club, founded by Channel 4 chairman (and former head of Pizza Express) Luke Johnson and The Carphone Warehouse’s David Ross; there’s the Supper Club, Duncan Cheatle’s dinner club for successful entrepreneurs whose businesses turn over at least £1 million a year; and, of course, there’s Robert’s Internet People dinners, where influential members of the Internet sector gather around a table over a three-course meal and excellent wines to thrash out the future of new media.

Some wag once said that the secret to organising a good networking dinner is to seat each guest between someone they’ll want to work with and someone they’ll want to sleep with. They clearly had never been to an Internet dinner: the industry remains a sausage fest and, despite Robert’s best efforts, it’s rare that there’s more than one female face among the ten guests at each dinner.

It ’s the calibre of these guests that makes an Internet People dinner either a roaring success or a total washout. The beau ideal is to get a good mix of people, representing different areas of the industry. Too many media types and the topics of conversation tend to focus around whether content or commerce is king and whether advertising or paid subscription is the way forward. Too many tech people and the questions are all centred around whether the latest Facebook or Google feature will make it easier or harder to share data between social network platforms – or whether ‘Ruby on Rails’(( The programming language that many next generation web sites are built with.)) is a better platform for web development than some other sodding thing. Too many marketing people and after ten minutes you’re clutching your bread knife ready to kill everyone in the whole room. (Although, to be fair, you do leave with a bigger penis and a foolproof investment in the Democratic Republic of Congo.)

A few days after we ‘d made our decision to go it alone without angel funding for the time being, I was invited to attend a dinner with what might just be the perfect storm of attendees. Nic

Brisbourne was there, as was Martin Brennan from First Capital (another VC firm). Also, Bebo’s Paul Birch; Tom Hughes from Milk Round, a job site for recent graduates; Andy Evans from online ad company Net Communities; and Ien Cheng, a former journalist and now the managing editor of the online version of the FT . The female face at the table belonged to Julia Chalet from WeeWorld which, (despite having the third most porny name after Cyberbritain and Pleasure Cards, is actually a site where you can create little cartoon representations of yourself-’Wee Mees’- which can then be used as your online identity or, as it happens, be printed on the back of your Moo Cards). Finally, there was a really drunk guy who claimed to work for a big merchant bank. I’m a great believer in every dinner having its own drunk guy from the start – someone who is absolutely trashed before the wine has even been uncorked. That way no matter how drunk anyone else gets, they can always feel ever so slightly superior when they wake up in a ditch the next morning without their laptop or their shoes. At least they weren’t as bad as the drunk guy!

My reason for attending was simple: if anything was going to make me remember why I wanted to be an entrepreneur, it was going to be this dinner, with this crowd.

Every dinner begins the same way, with everyone around the table introducing themselves and suggesting a topic for discussion. The topics are all written in a notepad and worked through one by one, in order. There is then one compulsory question – added by Robert – at the end that has to be answered by all attendees. These questions act as a fascinating bellwether for how the industry is doing.

For the first year and a half of the dinners, the question remained constant: ‘In one minute, tell the rest of the group what you believe the future of the Internet will be.’ This became something of a running gag as most of the regulars trotted out the same answer every time, to the amusement of the other regulars and the bemusement of newcomers. My own theory was that the Internet would one day become as ubiquitous and unremarkable as electricity. Whereas today we think of businesses being ‘Internet businesses’ or ‘traditional businesses’, the future would see the distinction removed. Every business would be an Internet business and every piece of technology, from phones to alarm clocks, would be connected in some way to the huge global network, allowing everyone and everything to talk to the other. Like electricity, everything will in some way be powered by the Internet and we’ll only notice it when, for some reason, we’re cut off.

It ’s actually a relatively dull answer, but the fact that I repeated it every single time made it a source of rich amusement for my fellow diners, to the extent that whenever Angus overheard anyone talking about something that was going to be ‘the future’ of anything – he’d say ‘just like electricity, Paul’, simply to wind me up.

One day, after a year and a half, the question changed to something new: ‘In one minute, tell the rest of the room which web services you use every day.’ This change reflected the fact that future gazing had – ironically – had its day. The Internet was no longer just a load of exciting possibilities – it was now a load of exciting realities. The future was now (albeit we were still waiting for our hover-boards and self-drying trainers)!

But tonight Robert had a surprise for us all. A new final question. Only the third in two years.

‘Going round the table … “Is the Internet industry about to experience a boom, a crash or will it stay the same?”‘

Around the table we had venture capitalists, a former financial journalist, several entrepreneurs and even a drunk banker. If anyone could answer that question, then they were probably sitting in this room. It fell silent as everyone was forced to confront the question that, really, none of them wanted to answer. The drunk banker tried to top up his glass from the empty bottle in front of him and decided that he would answer first. Internet People events, like most similar dinners, are strictly off the record, so how everyone voted is a secret. But the results were split like this. Of the ten people around the table:

- six of us believed things would carry on the way they were for a few months, with few big investments or acquisitions, and then when everyone realised it wasn’t a bubble there would be a sharp upward spike

- three of us believed that there would be a dip, and then, after a few months, a spike

- one of us didn’t really understand the question, but wanted to make it absolutely clear that he considered us all his best mates.

The confidence in the room was heartening, but perhaps not surprising. I mean, who around that table was going to say, ‘I predict that in two months I’ll be living in a cardboard box, eating cat food?’ That might have been exactly what I was thinking but who would be stupid enough to actually to say it? These things tend to become self-fulfilling prophesies.

But it was more than just confidence, as one diner explained.

‘The thing is we’re at a point now – towards the end of 2007 – where lots of companies are going to run out of their first funding round very soon.’ He rattled off a list of companies we were all familiar with and whose funding was about to run out, to nods from around the table. ‘So what’s going to happen then?’

Another diner chipped in. ‘They’re either going to have to find an exit or they’re going to die.’

By exit he meant they’d have to go public or sell to a bigger company. Essentially, the argument was that companies were about to run out of money, therefore they were going to have to go public – leading to a big spike in dot com companies going public or getting sold for millions (or billions), and thus creating a boom. The possibility that, by the same logic, the exact opposite could happen didn’t seem to have occurred to any of them. Rather, it had occurred to them but they had all blocked it out. The only way was up.

15.2

Self-confidence is a powerful weapon for the entrepreneur but there’s a danger it can turn into denial. Back at the office, I was very aware that we were tiptoeing a fine line between the two. By waiting a bit longer before we paid non-essential invoices and pushing hard for the bank loan we could just about stay in the black, but we were playing it really close to the wire – a fact that I was trying my best to keep from the outside word. If raising money when you want it is hard, then raising it when people know you need it is impossible.

And there ’s no denying that the stress was taking its toll on our personal relationships, too. Karl, in particular, had never been a fan of business and had started talking openly about wanting to leave Britain with his girlfriend to sit on a beach and write. Savannah – a full ten years younger than Karl – was more concerned that she had to pay her rent and was sitting on a law degree that could be earning her much more than the meagre sum that Kudocities was paying. But she believed strongly in the business, and had become close to the users, so – despite the odd wobble when someone posted something negative on the site – she was determined to plough on.

I still didn ‘t know how to feel. I was still spending all my social time with winners – entrepreneurs whose businesses were getting bigger and better; who still had angel money in the bank and, if my dining companions had been right, were heading towards this huge liquidity payday. And fame! And fortune! I’d be a fool to walk away from the possibility of joining them, and Savannah was right – there was so much potential in Kudocities. It really was an awesome site.

And yet every night I was heading back to my flat in East Dulwich. Worried about the money my parents and my uncle had put into the business; worried about Savannah and Karl; worried about the company and what I’d do if it didn’t make it as far as the relaunch.

On paper I was an Internet entrepreneur like my friends, but in reality the gap between my life and the people I spent my time with was wider than ever.
But whatever insecurities I might have had, none of them excuses the absolutely stupid thing I did next.

15.3

It wasn ‘t my fault, of course. I had arrived home to my empty flat and run myself a deep bath to try to drown everything that was on my mind – just for half an hour while my laptop was busy downloading a day’s worth of personal emails that I hadn’t had a chance to deal with in the office. Walking over to my desk in the corner of my living room, wrapped in a towel, I noticed an icon I hadn’t seen for a long time.

It was a picture of a blonde girl, and next to it the word ‘Hey’. I should have ignored it. I should have checked my email and turned off the computer. I had enough crap to deal with; I really didn’t need this.

‘Hey, ‘ I replied.

‘You never replied to my email.’

‘I didn’t think you ever wanted to hear from me again.’

‘I didn’t. Were you in the bath?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘I know everything. So – I’m off to Pittsburgh tomorrow for a month, but I wanted to see you before I go.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Okay. Shall I come round to yours after work?’

‘No, let’s go somewhere else. I’m going to be in Holborn: shall we meet there? Seven?’

‘Okay.’

I was an absolute fucking idiot. I’d promised Savannah that I wasn’t going to see Karen again. Hell, I promised myself. But why not? Why did Savannah care anyway? And why shouldn’t I see her one last time? I had missed her.

Karen left for Pittsburgh the next day and I left her house, grabbed a coffee from Starbucks and headed for the office, just in time for a meeting. I scraped in with minutes to spare, meeting Savannah at the door as I did.

‘Good night last night?’ she asked, with those eyes.

‘Yep – bit dull really.’

‘Oh, really, I tried to call you about midnight to ask you to bring some stuff for the meeting.’

‘Oh, sorry, did you leave a message?’

‘No.’

Phew .

‘Oh, maybe I was in the shower or something.’

‘I tried to call you this morning, too. About an hour and a half ago. I guess you must have already left the house?’

I shrugged.

‘I guess.’

I felt as guilty as an adulterous husband. Why the hell didn’t I just tell her the truth? ‘Yeah – I saw Karen last night, what of it?’ But I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not when we had so many more important things to worry about. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

Over the next few weeks, Karen phoned me every night from Pittsburgh. The time difference meaning she would be heading out for dinner just as I was stumbling home after whatever networking event or dinner or booze-up I’d been to that night. Before I knew it, we were making plans – when she got back we’d give things another go, I missed her too (I really did), no – Savannah and I were still just business partners – she wouldn’t care …

In deano jupidas.

15.4

The email was waiting for me when I arrived in the office.

To: Paul Carr

Douglas Smith

15.5

‘ Everything’s totally fucked.’

‘Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad.’

‘It’s that bad. It’s worse than that bad. The bank have turned us down for the loan – the fucking SFLGS loan that is designed for people who can’t get bloody loans – Savannah and Karl are working their arses off and I can’t even promise them that they’ll be able to pay rent until Christmas and the developers are taking their sweet time finishing Kudocities which means either telling them to stop work, or letting them carry on, knowing we can’t pay them.’

Sam listened patiently as I gabbled on; listing problem after problem after problem. He finished his pint and stood up to go and get another round – but he’d thought of something to cheer me up …

‘ Still, at least Karen’s back in a week …’

Thud.

The sound of my head hitting the heavy wooden pub table caused the old man at the table next to us to turn round. ‘Don’t worry, old chief, ‘ he said, ‘at your age I was fighting a war.’

Where do I sign?

15.6

Things were starting to get messy again and I knew that if there was any chance of the Karen situation being resolved, allowing me to focus on bringing Kudocities back from the abyss, then drastic action would be required. I would need to do the grown-up thing: to be honest with both her and Savannah and to make my mind up what the hell it was I wanted. Karen was suspicious about my relationship with Savannah and Savannah claimed not to care about Karen, as long as I was honest about what was going on. This was an easy situation to solve.

Easy, that is, unless I was to get absolutely steaming drunk and decide it would be a good idea to introduce them to each other.

I’m not entirely sure what possessed me to make the call or exactly what I’d said, but I do know that last orders had just been called when Karen walked into the pub that Savannah and I had been drinking in since we’d left the office.

In the sober light of day, Savannah and Karen meeting was never part of my brilliant plan to solve all my personal problems. My brilliant plan was that I’d sit down with them both independently. I’d explain to Savannah that I was really sorry that I’d used Karen to try to make her jealous, and to admit that I’d started seeing her again, but that I didn’t know whether it would go anywhere. Be honest. Then I’d explain to Karen that, yes, I still loved Savannah but that she and I weren’t getting back together – certainly not now – and that I wanted to give things a try. It was the only adult course of action.

But then evidently I’d decided, after another stressful day in the office and another evening of drinking with Savannah, that I could kill the two birds of my brilliant plan with one stone by inviting Karen to join Savannah and me in the pub, while at least two of us were plastered.

And that’s the last thing I remember about the evening.

Chapter Sixteen: ‘Two girls, one fuck up’…

So desperate in fact that to raise a bit of extra cash we ‘d bribed Adam Kay – everyone’s favourite singing, swearing doctor – to re-form with his old singing partner, Dr Suman Biswas, for two comeback gigs at the New Players Theatre in Charing Cross. Given that their band – the Amateur Transplants – had split shortly after the release of ‘London Underground’, this had been no easy task. But, as the promoters, we stood to make almost ten grand from the shows, and the spin-off DVD sales. Money that would tide us over for another month or so.

Given that none of us had any experience of putting on a proper show, the gigs went remarkably well, with only half a dozen or so audience members storming out and demanding their money back each night. To be fair, the walkouts had little to do with the content of the shows and a lot to do with the title – it was called The Black and White Menstrual Show – and the fact that we’d decided it was best not to vet Adam and Suman’s playlist before opening night. As a result, it included a song to the tune of James Blunt’s song ‘You’re Beautiful’, which began:

My life is brilliant, my name is James I’m only seven, and that explains Why I’ve never had a best friend Until you came along

But people stop and they look at us And they say that it’s wrong

They say …

… you’re a paedophile

you’re a paedophile

they say

Your name is Clive, and you ‘re forty-five But you don’t let that come between us And you make me hold your …
… hand.

‘ You’re A Paedophile’, as the song was called, was followed by another crowd-pleaser, to the tune of Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby’, about the dangers of having children beyond the age of forty-five …
Your baby’s got a flattened nose A widened gap between his toes …

The extra income from the shows – the first actual revenue that had come into the company since we launched – would allow the development of the new Kudocities site to continue for the time being, but there was no getting away from the fact that our upcoming meeting with Max and Duncan from WeLoveLocal could be the difference between the company surviving and us losing everything.

14.1

With so much riding on closing our angel round it wouldn ‘t be helpful if too many people found out that a Managing Director of the company was awaiting trial on fraud charges; things like that tend to spook potential investors. So I decided, for the first time in my life, to use what I’d learned in my law degree. I wrote a letter to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS publishes a list of guidelines to help their solicitors determine when a prosecution is in the public interest and, more importantly, when it’s not. The idea of the guidelines is to avoid completely pointless cases going to trial just because, say, a custody sergeant is having a bad day. Reading through the guidelines, the fact that they’d decided to push ahead with the trial seemed even more bizarre: mine was a first time ‘offence’, it had been the result of a mistake, no one had been hurt, and I’d offered to make amends by paying the cab driver.

I wrote a long letter explaining all of this and reiterating that I ‘d be happy to pay the thirty quid to the cab driver and save the many times more that it would cost the taxpayer to drag me through the courts. It was a very, very long shot – normally submissions to the CPS would be made by a lawyer, but I was damned if I was going to pay legal fees for something so stupid.

I spell-checked the letter – noticing just at the last minute that at one point I’d misspelt fraud as freud(( I’m sure there’s a name for that kind of error.)) – and then popped it in the post, with a first-class stamp to show I meant business. And then I waited. There were two weeks before my court date.

14.2

The day of our make or break meeting with Duncan and Max Jennings arrived and, as arranged, we met Angus outside the WeLoveLocal offices. When he arrived, he looked – for the first time – as nervous as we did. If these guys didn’t want to invest we were out of options and would have to reconsider completely how we were going to fund Kudocities – if it could be funded at all.

On the dot of ten we were buzzed into the building and made our way up the narrow stairs that led to the offices of WeLoveLocal and the brothers’ parent company, eMomentum. A staffer welcomed us in and offered us a drink. ‘Water, please, ‘ we all said in near-perfect unison. I busied myself setting up the presentation while the others sat and stared nervously around the room, waiting for Max and Duncan to arrive. We were sitting in what seemed to be the company’s conference room; yet another stark, white room with very little furniture, just a few bookshelves and cool corporate toys. A mini-fridge hummed away in a corner even though in the opposite one there was a perfectly good fitted kitchen.

There ’s an unwritten rule, I’m pretty certain, that every successful Internet business must have a mini-fridge in a corner. We’d had one at The Friday Project – even though it remained empty for the entire time I was there as it was too mini to hold even a single upright bottle of beer – and there had been a similar fridge at most of the offices we’d visited. And yet the Fridaycities offices didn’t have one. Maybe that’s where we were going wrong. I made a mental note to log on to Firebox.com when I got back to the office. Surely, a tiny fridge was the least Michael owed me.

A few minutes later, Max strode in, bringing with him apologies from Duncan who had been caught up at another meeting and wouldn’t be able to make it. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief – pitching to one person is always easier than pitching to two – partly for reasons of strength in numbers, but also because, unless the one person is a total despot, it’s unlikely they’ll make a negative decision there and then. There will be at least one other person they’ll need to go away and speak to before saying no, which at least gives you another bite of the cherry.

I fired up my laptop and we began the pitch. With Max we had the distinct advantage that he was the same age as us – or, more specifically, the same age as Savannah and me. This was, of course, totally sickening, but it also boosted our confidence a million times as it was the first time we’d felt like we were discussing the business with a peer, rather than sucking up to a grown-up. It also helped that Max had been a member of Fridaycities since it had been the London by London newsletter. He was an actual, bona fide, fan of the site and of the business, before we’d even opened our mouths. This was good – very good – and it got even better when he was joined later in the meeting by Dan Bower, WeLoveLocal’s technical genius. Turned out Dan, too, was a fan of Fridaycities and was really enthusiastic to hear about our plans for developing the new site.

An extra bonus came when Max said that, while they were weighing up the investment potential of the company, they’d like to buy some advertising space on the site to promote WeLoveLocal. The money they were willing to pay for the space wasn’t great – less than £1, 000, in fact – but it was a financial commitment, which was more than any other possible angel since Angus had give us. And God knows, at that stage beggars could ill afford to be choosers.

‘ That was a great meeting, ‘ said Savannah as we left, once we were out of earshot of the office. Even Karl appeared for once to have enjoyed the experience of whoring himself for the promise of money. Angus headed back to his proper job and Karl set off to the office to finish off the day’s editorial, leaving Savannah and me to consider the morning’s events. We headed to a pub around the corner for some lunch.

‘I think we’re going to be okay, you know, ‘ she said. The meeting had been really positive and, barring some huge objection by Duncan, it really looked like WeLoveLocal might invest.

‘Yeah, I think we are, ‘ I agreed.

‘Unless you end up in jail. That would probably fuck us a bit.’ ‘Yeah.’

Jail prospect aside, I did have a good feeling. There was just something about talking to Max that had given me a buzz that the other meetings hadn’t. It took me a few days to work out what it was: while all the other potential investors had been very enthusiastic about the business and the site, their enthusiasm centred on the fact that it was a good idea, with a solid business model behind it. That is, it provided a good investment opportunity.

I remembered feeling a similar kind of frustration when Clare and I had raised money for The Friday Project. One afternoon we were invited to the RAC Club to do a presentation for a group of elderly angel investors. There were about twenty of them – all men, mean age about seventy – sitting around an enormous conference table. Between them they’d been on the boards of a dozen blue-chip companies and they had all heard of the Internet but knew very little about it. All they did know was that it represented an opportunity.

Before beginning our presentation, Clare and I handed around some copies of the books we were publishing so that they could see the kind of thing we did and we watched in fascination as they picked up the books, glanced inside and then closed them almost straight away. One of them summed up the attitude perfectly: ‘Okay, we believe you know about books – now tell us about the business.’

Most of the people we ‘d presented Fridaycities to had felt the same way. Okay, you guys know content – we get that – now tell us about the business. Prior to the WeLoveLocal meeting, only Nic Brisbourne, who took away and read a copy of the London by London book we gave him as a gift, had actually given a shit about what Fridaycities was saying to visitors. One of the investors we’d met had actually slid the book back across the table without opening it, explaining with no sense of apology: ‘Thanks but I really won’t read it.’ How could he not care what this business – and he’d already said he liked the business and was interested in investing – was saying to the world? Did he really see the journalistic and editorial side of it as just another feature? It was both nutty and phenomenally frustrating given the effort we put into giving Fridaycities a distinct voice: making it informative, entertaining and – and funny, dammit.

But Max hadn ‘t been like that. He was a long-time fan of the content of the site; the questions and answers, the editorial, the voice . He read it, he subscribed to the weekly email newsletter; he understood it. Any schmuck can look at a website, or a magazine, or a book, or a movie and see pound signs. But if they don’t bother to listen to what it’s actually saying, how can they possibly know if it’s any good?

As expected, Max contacted us a couple of weeks later and told us that Duncan was keen to meet us to talk through some specifics of the business. The meeting, back at their offices, couldn’t have gone better, especially when it turned out that a few days before, by a strange coincidence, Karl had published a photo of one of Duncan’s friends on the site to illustrate an article he’d written. It was a review of an event that Karl had attended and he’d simply pointed his camera at a group of attendees and taken the picture. Of all the millions of people in London, he’d accidentally snapped one of our potential investors’ friends.

‘ That’s just one of the many personalisation features we’re developing, ‘ I responded without missing a beat. ‘Eventually we hope to allow you to keep track of where all your friends are through Kudocities.’

14.3

With Max and Duncan now very much on board with the concept of Kudocities, and with a promise that they’d get back to us in a couple of weeks with their answer about investment, Savannah and Karl turned their attentions back to the forthcoming launch of Kudocities – with Savannah focusing on getting the community features right while Karl worked on the editorial. I, on the other hand, turned my attention back to the Crown Prosecution Service and the fact that, with three days to go until my court date, they still hadn’t responded to my letter. I decided to phone the enquiries number they gave on their website.

‘ Hello, ‘ I said, not really sure of the tone to adopt when you’re calling the CPS (I opted for posh but apologetic), ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m calling about a letter I sent you about my court appearance.’
‘Please hold, ‘ said the voice on the other end.

As I sat on hold, I noted that they didn ‘t have any hold music at the CPS – and found myself scribbling a list in my notepad, in the hope that I might be able to use it as a cheap gag somewhere. The list was entitled ‘Top five hold music tracks at the CPS’. It read:

1) Please release me

2) Jailhouse rock

3) He ain’t guilty (he’s my brother)

4) Addicted to love (/crystal meth)

5) When you say nothing at all (but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court).

It was a silly list, and not very funny, but it was the first thing I’d written in almost a year that wasn’t a business plan or a pitch document. Finally:

‘Hello, can I help you?’

After giving my reference number, my scheduled court date and a whole host of other details I was put through to the CPS lawyer who would be able to tell me whether my letter had done the trick. Or at least she would have done if …

‘I’m sorry, we don’t have any record of a letter from you. When did you send it?’

Panic! ‘Um, weeks ago – you should definitely have it. Are you sure? Can you double check?’

‘If we’d received anything from you we’d have it on the computer under your reference number. When’s your court date again?’ ‘It’s in three days.’

‘Oh dear, you’re cutting it very fine.’

No kidding.

‘Can you fax it over to us again?’

Well, yes, I could if we had a bloody fax machine in the office. Come to think of it, does anyone use faxes any more?

‘Yes, no problem, what’s your number there … ?’

Seriously panicking now, I clicked open the file on my laptop and sent another copy of the letter across our office network to the printer, getting ready to dash out in search of a fax. It was almost five o’clock and I knew that even if I could find a newsagent’s with a fax service, there was very little chance the CPS would receive it before close of business. That would give them exactly one day to make their decision and one more day to inform the court of their decision if I was going to avoid having to attend. Shit. Shit. Shit. And then, at that exact moment, as I stood over the printer, willing the damn thing to just print a little bit faster, my mobile rang. It was a withheld number. Maybe it was the CPS phoning to tell me that they’ve found my letter, I thought. I answered with my posh voice just in case.

It wasn’t the CPS but I was glad to have used my posh voice anyway as on the other end of the phone was our bank manager at Lloyds TSB. A couple of weeks earlier, realising that we might possibly need a financing Plan B, I’d decided to ask the bank for a loan under the government’s Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme (SFLGS). These brilliant loans were designed to help new businesses where the founder(s) didn’t have any assets to secure a traditional loan against – people like me, for example, who didn’t own their own house and had bugger all other assets. Under the terms of the SFLGS, a high street bank would provide you with a loan, backed by the Department of Trade and Industry. If you defaulted on the loan, the DTI would cover the shortfall to make sure the bank wasn’t out of pocket. They weren’t easy loans to get, but we’d managed to get one for The Friday Project and I was relatively confident that we satisfied all the criteria (Starting a business? Check. Almost skint? Check. No house? Check). The downside was the sheer volume of paperwork that needed to be completed before we could be assessed for the loan – and the endless meetings with the bank manager to go over that paperwork. The longer the gap between the meetings, the longer it took for everything to be approved, and the more chance we’d run out of cash before the faceless civil servant at the DTI who approves the loans agreed that we should get the money.

‘Hi, Paul, it’s Douglas from Lloyds TSB here. Do you have time to talk?’

I wedged the phone under my chin and grabbed the letter out of the printer, knocking over a half-empty (definitely half empty ) cup of coffee in the process. The coffee ran across the desk and poured into the top drawer where I kept the company cheque book and my spare tie in case I suddenly had to go to an event with a dress code. ‘Fuck. FUCK.’

‘Sorry? Is this a bad time?’

‘Nothing – sorry – it’s a bad line, what can I do for you, Douglas?’ ‘Well, I just wanted to give you the good news that we’ve got the first lot of paperwork back from head office and there are some forms you need to get filled in so we can move the loan forward.’ ‘Okay, no problem. When do you want me to come in?’ ‘How’s Friday?’

‘Um… Friday as in this Friday?’

Three days’ time.

‘That’s right. It’s just that I’m off on holiday for two weeks on Saturday so we really need to get the forms sorted before then or they’ll have to wait until I get back.’

Was it possible that I’d killed an angel in a previous life? Raped a sacred swan? Who up there was doing this to me?

‘Yep, Friday will be fine. What time?’

‘Twelve thirty? I’ve got meetings all day apart from then.’ My court appearance was scheduled for 10.30 which, assuming it lasted no longer than half an hour, would give me exactly an hour and a half to get from Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court to the Kingston upon Thames branch of Lloyds TSB. Assuming, of course, that they didn’t send me to prison or – a more likely scenario – the case preceding mine didn’t run a single minute over time. It was mission impossible.

‘Twelve thirty sounds good to me. See you then!’

I ran out of the office and into the street. I had absolutely no idea where I was going to find somewhere with a fax machine. And now, with a £100k loan riding on me not having to spend a morning in court, not to mention being keen to avoid a fraud conviction, it was absolutely vital that the letter made it to the CPS. I knew that within running distance of our office there were at least three newsagents. I decided to start with the nearest one and keep working down the road until I found one, fell down in an exhausted heap or ended up in Clapham, whichever came first.

The first newsagents – no dice.

The second – yes, they had a fax machine – no, it wasn’t for public use, the newsagent explained; just for sending their daily newspaper order. Could I use it if I paid them for the cost of the call? No. They’d had fraudsters come in and ask to use their phone to dial premium numbers so they didn’t lend their phones any more. I was just about to ask – outraged – whether I looked like a fucking fraudster, and then I remembered what I was asking him to fax. I thanked him for his time.

The third – no, they didn’t have a fax machine, but had I tried the pub next door?

I tried the pub next door. Yes! They had a fax in the office! But the barmaid was the only member of staff in the building and she wasn’t sure how it worked.

‘Pleeease…’ I pleaded. ‘It would get me out of a huge jam.’ Throwing caution to the wind, I blurted out an explanation of the whole sorry situation, trying my best to end with a kind of little-boy-lost face that I figured a barmaid couldn’t possibly resist. I just hoped she didn’t hear the word ‘fraud’ and chuck me out. She arched an eyebrow. ‘So, if I send this fax you could get a hundred grand and you won’t have to go to jail?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Okay, but if I try to send it, you’ll need to give me, like, 50p for the cost of the call so my boss doesn’t go mad.’

Only 50p? I wondered whether I should warn her about the fraudsters. Probably not the right time.

‘Tell you what. If you help me out with this, I’ll give you a pound for your boss and I’ll buy you a drink as well.’

‘Deal. But I can’t promise anything. I’m not really sure how it works.’

She disappeared up the ’staff only’ staircase, clutching my letter. Five minutes passed. Ten. A line of disgruntled drinkers was slowly building around the bar, craning their necks to see where the service was hiding. Finally, she returned, still clutching my letter and looking utterly traumatised by her run-in with 1970s technology. ‘I think it went through okay, ‘ she said.

‘Did it give you any kind of confirmation message?’ I asked – this was bloody important. ‘I mean, did it say ‘OK’ or ‘SENT’ or anything?’

‘I don’t know. It beeped after I dialled the number, then the paper went through. Then it beeped again. I didn’t see a message.’ That would have to do. It was well past 5.30 – too late to check with the CPS if they’d received the fax. But I’d find out soon enough whether my last-minute appeal had been successful or whether I was going to the entrepreneurial gallows. In about twenty-four hours to be exact.

In fact, I didn’t have to wait that long. I got back to the office, wiped up the spilt coffee and headed home for the night. As I was on my way to the station, my phone rang. Withheld number again – I nearly didn’t answer it. Whoever it was could wait.

But I did answer, just in case, and it was the lawyer from the CPS. ‘Mr Carr? We spoke earlier – I’m ringing from the CPS. I just wanted to let you know I received your fax just as I was leaving the office and thought I’d better deal with it now as it was so urgent.’ I was stunned. The entire process had been so boring and traumatic that I’d assumed no one in the British justice system was even human, let alone capable of an actual act of kindness.

‘Gosh, that’s very decent of you. Thank you. And what’s your verdict?’

‘Well, I’ve spoken to my colleague here and we agree with your interpretation of the guidelines. It’s our view that a prosecution wouldn’t be in the public interest.’

‘That’s great news. Can I ask on what grounds you decided that, exactly? Just out of curiosity.’

‘Well, in short, because there’s almost no realistic possibility that you would be found guilty. We’re sorry it went this far.’ ‘That’s fine, ‘ I lied. She was so very nice about the whole thing and I’m so terribly British in these kinds of circumstances. Locked me in a cell for a day? No problem at all. Decided you were going to prosecute me for fraud even though you’d already told me you were going to drop any charges? Don’t mention it. Lose my letter and make me panic right up until the wire? Probably my fault, come to think about it.

‘There’s just one more thing, Mr Carr. The matter of costs.’ Ah yes, of course. Even if the CPS dropped their charges, I’d still have to pay the costs of getting this far.

‘Will it be very much? It’s just that I’m a bit skint at the moment, ‘ I explained.

‘No, sorry, I meant your costs. You’re entitled to claim costs incurred for the time you spent dealing with this.’

‘Really?’

This was nuts. An hour ago I’d been a criminal awaiting trial for fraud, over a £30 taxi fare. And now, thanks to a sternly worded letter and a helpful barmaid who had more than earned that drink, the tables were well and truly turned. Now the CPS wanted to give me money to make up for my lost time – and, hell, I could use it right now. All I had to do was go into the court and collect the forms.

‘Er … no, that’s okay, thanks. I think I’ve had enough of courts for one year. And, anyway, I’ve just spilt coffee on my court tie.’ ‘Oh dear. Well, at least you’ve got Friday morning free to buy a new one now.’

14.4

As a postscript to the episode, a few days later a bulky envelope arrived at the office. Inside was a transcript of my arrest and the two tapes from my interview. Apart from the fact that my DNA would forever be sharing a hard drive with that of Fred West and Jeffrey Archer, all the remaining evidence was mine to do with as I pleased. The bulk of it went straight into the bin but I couldn’t resist pinning up the first page of the arrest record behind my desk, and highlighting the words ’showed no signs of drunkenness – pupils not dilated, speech not slurred’ with a thick yellow marker. Savannah hadn’t believed me before that I’d been sober when I was arrested – but now it was official. Right next to that page I pinned the final page of the transcript of my tape-recorded interview, this time with the very last line highlighted. Apparently my lame ‘ in vino stupitas ‘ joke had been lost on whoever had the unfortunate task of transcribing it.
The official record shows me explaining my behaviour as a case of ‘ in deano jupidas ‘.

14.5

With the loan forms filled out, our bank manager off on holiday and DVD sales still providing all of our income, everything was still riding on the decision from WeLoveLocal.com. I was still hugely confident that the answer would be a resounding yes, but as the days ticked past with no answer, Savannah and Karl began to have their doubts: how long did it take to make a decision? Especially considering how enthusiastic they were during the meetings. Partly through ego – how could they have been fans of London by London and not want to invest in Fridaycities! – and partly through panic at what we’d do if they weren’t interested, I dismissed their doubts, almost out of hand. ‘They’re just looking over the numbers we gave them – we’ll get their answer in a few days, you’ll see!’

And so they did see. The answer arrived while I was out of the office interviewing someone who we hoped might become our new chief technical officer, assuming we ever got the funding to pay him. I could feel the weird buzz in the air the moment I walked back into the office. Something big had definitely happened while I’d been out.
‘What? What is it, ‘ I asked.

‘ Something’s happened, ‘ said Karl, his face utterly without emotion.

‘What? Something good? Or something bad?”

‘Just read your email, ‘ said Savannah.

And there it was …

Hi Guys,

Duncan.

Oh.

I slumped down at my desk. We couldn’t have wished for a nicer, more professional email – straight to the chase, honest, positive, decent. But no matter which way you cut it, it was still the worst possible news. Our angel investment round hadn’t so much hit a wall as ploughed into it before bursting into flames and killing everyone inside.

‘ Fuck.’

I didn’t know what else to say.
There was nothing we could say, and there was nothing else we could do that day. We shut down our computers and went home. ‘Don’t worry, ‘ I said to Savannah as we walked to the station. ‘I know we put a lot of faith in Max and Duncan – but WeLoveLocal was always just one possible investor. There are loads more out there. We’ll just have to come in tomorrow and decide who to call next.’

‘You don’t even believe that though, do you?’ she asked. ‘If there were others we’d have already called them. We’re just too early stage for everyone. And yet how can we get traction – FUCKING TRACTION, I HATE THAT FUCKING STUPID WORD – without the money to launch the site? It’s just a ridiculous catch-22.’

She was right, of course – about everything. And I was bullshitting; just trying to make her feel better when the truth was I had no idea what to do next, who to call. But I really did believe we’d think of something. We’d have to, otherwise everything we’d achieved up until then – the twenty thousand users, the test site, the re-branded and relaunched Kudocities that was nearing completion – would all be for nothing. We’d be just another fatal crash on the information superhighway.

14.6

I may not have had the first idea what to do about our fundraising woes, but I had at least made one sensible decision that week. I’d been seeing Karen more and more since our first dates and I was spending an increasing amount of time at her house. The only problem was that I had developed the rather unpleasant habit of only turning up very late at night, after spending the entire evening with Savannah, either working late in the office or going to some networking event or other. When Savannah left to go home, I’d head back to Karen’s – at whatever the hour – and, saint that she was, she’d let me in and make me something to eat before we’d both crash into bed. The next day I’d disappear back to work and start the cycle again. I was treating her more as a guest-house than as a girlfriend.

Unsurprisingly, this routine had started to wear a bit thin with Karen who pointed out that I only ever seemed to end up back at her house when I’d been out late with Savannah. And she was right: the intensity of the investment process had brought Savannah and I closer than we’d been for years and I much preferred to spend time with her after work than see anyone else. Of course we’d agreed there was no way that she and I could possibly get back together while we were trying to raise money for Fridaycities – we didn’t need any more stress or weirdness – but the truth was that, even so, I didn’t want to be with anyone else. I decided to stop acting like a dick and end things with Karen.

The next night, I went around to Karen ’s house, as promised. She’d made a traditional Polish chicken dish for dinner (much of her family was Polish), and she looked absolutely stunning. It was as if she knew what I was going to say and wanted to present one last sartorial ‘fuck you’. Like the scumbag I am, I kissed her – I couldn’t help it – and then told her there was something I needed to tell her.

14.7>

Karen took things remarkably well, considering the ham-fisted way I broke up with her: telling her that I still had feelings for Savannah and that I couldn’t carry on seeing her. She sent me a long email a few days later – her birthday – telling me that she never wanted to see me again, and I could hardly blame her. But what was important was that I wasn’t living parallel realities any more – telling Savannah that Karen didn’t mean a thing, while telling Karen that Savannah and I were ancient history. It was unfair and mean, but most of all it was fucking exhausting. I’d finally done the right thing. It was over. And in a couple of week’s time, Karen was off back home to Pittsburgh for a month. Out of town, out of mind.

‘ So let me get this straight, ‘ said Sam, as we sipped our beers and compared our lot, ‘you’ve dumped Karen – who was hot as hell, who put up with far more shit than you had any right to expect her to, who cooked for you and who for reasons I can’t fathom seemed to think you were some kind of a catch in order to … sorry, what exactly?’

‘ … in order that I don’t have to lie to Savannah about it any more.’

‘Savannah, who you work with and who has a boyfriend and who doesn’t want to go out with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

And that about summed it up. I had no girlfriend, no money, no idea how we were going to raise money for Fridaycities – but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d done the right thing for once.

Great.

14.8

Following the news that WeLoveLocal didn ‘t want to invest, there was an obvious question we needed to ask ourselves. Did we definitely need to raise angel funding in order to launch Kudocities or could we at least get the site up and running without it?

There was no doubt that with the new site under way and revenue coming in, we’d stand a much better chance of getting other investors to the table. But could we afford to do without angel funding until then? Putting the question was a bit like being shipwrecked and asking whether food and shelter were simply bourgeois affectations. Exactly what choice did we have?

Even with the DVD and the bank loan (Lloyds permitting), we would still be sailing extremely close to the wind and it would put enormous strain on the business and on all of us. We agreed to plough on but also agreed that self-sufficiency would only be a temporary measure and that we’d continue to push hard to find other possible angel investors. It was really the only decision we could make, apart from simply packing up and going home.

I didn ‘t say anything to the others, but at the same time I was asking myself an even bigger question: was I cut out to be an Internet entrepreneur? Even assuming the bank gave us the loan and things turned around, I had to admit I’d been a pretty crap Managing Director. Fridaycities and Kudocities had been running for nearly a year and I’d failed in my most important job: raising money to keep the company alive. I’d learned about PowerPoint and I’d created a decent presentation and I’d produced a blueprint for Kudocities, but without any investment none of that meant a thing. All my insecurities and memories of how much simpler things had been when I was a journalist came flooding back. Savannah and Karl had left for the evening and the office was deserted: I got up from my desk, closed the door and sat down on the floor with my head in my hands and sobbed.
I was exhausted.

Chapter Fifteen: ‘Denial’…

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I was still wearing the same clothes I’d put on the day before. All except my belt and my shoes. I was in agony having spent seven hours lying on my back on a thin rubber mattress, laid on top of a concrete shelf. I didn’t even have a blanket so I was also freezing cold. Above me on the ceiling were the stencilled words: ‘Have information about a crime or people involved in criminal activity? Speak to us in confidence and you could reduce your sentence.’ I wondered whether, if I told them that a friend of mine at secondary school had once stolen a copy of Schindler’s List from WH Smith in Dartford, they’d at least give me something to keep me warm.

As anyone who knows me will testify, there are many – many – occasions on which I should have been arrested. Occasions on which my being bundled into the back of a Black Maria would be entirely justifiable, if not on grounds of public safety, certainly those of my own. But this really wasn’t one of them.

It was totally and utterly ludicrous. I hadn’t even been drunk: it even said so on my arrest record … ‘Showed no signs of drunkenness. Pupils not dilated, speech not slurred.’ There it was in black and white. Neither drunk nor disorderly. And yet here I was, very much under arrest. Locked in a tiny concrete box, where I’d spent the previous night, the entire morning and, now, much of the afternoon.

It was all Savannah’s fault, of course. For months after launching the pilot version of Fridaycities, she had been suggesting that we organise a semi-formal ‘meet up’ for the users who had been helping us test the site. A few beers in a pub to get to know our punters and then perhaps on to a club, depending on how terrifying they turned out to be in person. Now, with Kudocities in the planning stage, time was running out before we threw the doors open to the masses, so she’d chosen a pub, put an open invitation on the events section of the site and the first Fridaycities London ‘meet up’ had been confirmed.

The evening was a huge success – the users turned out to be a pretty normal bunch, all told; even the nutcases. There was a UK Independence Party supporter called ‘devilskitchen’ (they all insisted on using their online identities as that was the only way most of them knew each other) – we’d had a heated debate about whether UKIP was a joke party with a joke of a leader who could only communicate through shouting (yes) or whether it was a legitimate force of political opposition (no). Then there was ‘BraveNewMalden’ and ‘Mamfer’ and ‘MonkeysAhoy!’ and ‘Pottytime’ and a couple of dozen others – all of them great fun, and big fans of Fridaycities.

It was a long night, and by 2.00 a.m., buoyed by the success of the evening, Savannah and I had ended up, along with a five or six of the more hardy users, partying away in a nightclub off a back-street near Oxford Circus. I was rather hoping the fun wouldn’t end but Savannah, being far more sensible than me, decided it was time to call it a night. She came over and shouted into my ear, over the deafening music, that she was going to get the night bus home.

Now, I am nothing if not a gentleman. Particularly at 2.00 a.m., after a pub crawl, and for reasons somewhere between chivalry and a faint hope that she’d be so grateful that she’d realise I was the only man for her and would immediately decide to go out with me again, I insisted that she would under no circumstances get the night bus. Instead I would pay for her to get a proper black cab home.

You hear such terrible stories, don ‘t you? As my mum would say. The only slight snag was that I didn’t actually have any cash left, just the company debit card that I’d been using to ply the users with drink, and my own credit card. No problem, I thought, and I forced the company card into Savannah’s hand along with my pin number that I had scrawled on a piece of paper. She protested that there were better uses for the card – getting the users drunk so they’d say nice things about the site for one – but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Very reluctantly, and reminding me sternly that I wasn’t responsible for her safety any more, Savannah took the card and left. I later found out she took the night bus anyway, empowered woman that she is. She’s so cute when she’s empowered.

Two hours later – the specifics are a little hazy by this point – and I’m in the back of a black cab parked outside my house, being yelled at by a cab driver. And I do mean yelled at.

13.1

‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T HAVE ANOTHER FUCKING CARD?’

I suddenly snapped sober. After walking up and down Tottenham Court Road for the best part of an hour on leaving the club, I’d managed to find a cab that accepted credit cards. It was only at the end of the thirty-minute journey home that I realised my credit card – the only one I had – had expired the previous week. And the bank hadn’t sent me a replacement.

Just my luck, I thought. This is what happens when you don’t open envelopes from the bank.

‘Look, I’m really sorry, mate, ‘ I pleaded as he opened the little plastic window separating him and me – presumably in case I’d been unable to hear how loud he was yelling with it closed. ‘I’ve got my wallet here with a business card in it – my house is here, right here. If you phone me tomorrow, mate, I’ll make sure you get paid. It was a genuine mistake, mate.’

Apparently I thought that by calling him mate, repeatedly, I would in some way endear myself to him. To make doubly sure, I’d also adopted a fake cockney accent that was even worse than the one used by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins .

No dice.

‘I DON’T FUCKING WANT YOUR BUSINESS CARD; WHAT FUCKING USE IS A BUSINESS CARD? I CAN’T FEED MY KIDS WITH A BUSINESS CARD …’

He was right, of course, but was also misunderstanding the subtleties of my business card plan. I wasn’t suggesting that he should take the card and attempt to feed it to his young, but rather that he should use it to contact me the following day to arrange payment. Payment that he could then use to buy a KFC Bargain Bucket or whatever it was that idiot cab drivers feed to their children. I tried again, more slowly this time, even going to the effort of showing him how the name on the business card matched the name on the credit card I’d given him moments ago. I was clearly who I said I was – we could easily resolve this if he’d just wait until the next day.

‘ARE YOU FICK OR SOMETHING, MATE? I NEED TO BE PAID, OR YOU’RE NOT GETTING OUT OF THE CAB.’

It was a stalemate, and no mistake. Getting desperate now – and wanting nothing more than to get into my house and go to bed, I made what was in hindsight quite a facile suggestion.

‘Well, if you take me back to my friends in town, I’m sure one of them will lend me the money.’

‘I’M NOT TAKING YOU ALL THE WAY BACK INTO TOWN. IF YOU WON’T PAY, THEN THE ONLY PLACE WE’RE GOING IS THE POLICE STATION.’

‘It’s not that I won’t pay … I …’

This was getting ludicrous but, actually, thinking about it, his police idea wasn’t so bad. At least I would be able to explain the situation to someone who wasn’t shouting and they could ensure I paid up the next day.

‘Okay, ‘ I said, finally, ‘let’s do that.’

‘DO WHAT?’

‘Let’s go to the police station.’

‘SUIT YOURSELF, MATE.’

And off we went.

On arrival at the police station, the desk sergeant came up with a foolproof way to verify I was who I said I was. If I could give him the number of someone who he could phone to confirm my identity and my address, then he would make a note of those details and ensure I sent the cab driver the money the next day. If I didn’t, I’d be committing fraud and would go to jail. Which I didn’t want to do.

It was a sound plan – with only one snag. Who the hell could I phone from a police station at 4.00 a.m. who:

(a) wasn’t one of my parents. That would be hideous

(b) wasn’t a friend who would immediately tell all of my other friends, thus condemning me to a lifetime of ribbing about my ‘criminal record’

(c) wouldn’t ignore a phone call from a strange police station phone number at four in the morning

… ?

There really was only one person who fitted the bill. Savannah.

‘You can phone my friend Savannah. She’ll confirm I’m me. Her number is 07 …’

The desk sergeant started to dial. The cab driver glared at me, still convinced I was pulling a fast one.

Then the sergeant put the phone down and sighed loudly. What the hell was going on?

‘That number’s no good, ‘ he said, sternly.

‘What do you mean no good?!’

‘I mean it’s not a valid number.’

‘Look, try it again, please – 07 …’

He tried again. Still nothing.

Oh God, what the hell was going on? Where was Savannah? And why wasn’t her phone working? She was my only hope. Things were suddenly not good at all.

‘I swear that’s the right number – it’s the only phone number I know off the top of my head. If I was making it up, I’d hardly be able to give you exactly the same number twice, would I?’

‘Be quiet. Sit down. I’ve tried it twice.’

‘Oh don’t be so stupid, ‘ I said, to the police officer, stupidly. ‘You’ve got my details, I’ve given you my friend’s phone number. Fuck’s sake, I haven’t even committed a proper crime. Tell you what, why don’t you call the number on the business card I’ve given you? The mobile phone in my pocket will ring. Then you’ll know that’s my business card – with my office address on it – and I can go home to bed and sort this out tomorrow.’

Given that (to the best of my knowledge) I was the only one of the three of us who had been drinking that night, it still amazes me that I was the only one who saw the crystal-clear logic in that solution.

‘You can’t verify your own identity, sir.’

‘Well, I seem to be doing a better job than you are, officer.’

Big mistake.

‘Just sit down.’

Meekly, miles from home and absolutely shattered, I sat down.

An hour – a pointless hour – passed.

5.30 a.m.

I tried one last time to be reasonable: ‘Look, this is stupid. It was an honest mistake. I’ve done all I can do this morning. You’ve got my card and my details. Are you going to arrest me for something or can I just go and come back tomorrow?’

The desk sergeant looked up from his forms and sighed.

‘You are currently being detained.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means you’re being detained.’

He looked at me like I was a simpleton. It was a simple enough concept, and yet one I’d shown myself unable to grasp – being detained meant I was being detained. Duh.

‘So what happens if I try to leave?’

‘You can’t.’

‘So, I have been arrested then?’

‘No, you’re being detained.’

And on and on and on we went, back and forth. I literally had no idea what he was planning to do. And that’s when the horrible realisation hit me: neither did he. He was just waiting out the clock. In another hour or so the day shift would start. He’d go home to bed and I’d be someone else’s problem.

‘Well, if you’re not going to arrest me or tell me what you mean by “you’re being detained” then I’m going to leave.’ I felt a surge of rebellion. I knew my rights.((I had no idea what my rights were.)) And I was taking them home with me, to bed.

‘I wouldn’t recommend that, sir.’

‘Because I’m being detained.’

‘Because you’re being detained.’

‘But you won’t tell me what that means.’

‘It means you’re being detained.’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake.’

I stood up, calmly, and took a step towards the door. You have never seen someone get out from behind a desk quicker. I hadn ‘t made it more than four steps before the desk sergeant was in front of me, slapping on a pair of handcuffs.
‘I’m now arresting you for making off without payment. You do not have to say anything …’

13.2

There then followed the most boring experience of my life, an experience I can relive at any time in the comfort of my own home – because from the moment they slapped on the handcuffs, I have a word-for-word transcript of everything that happened. It’s all written in neat block capitals and photocopied from a custody record, beginning with the fact that I wasn’t drunk. Which is handy because no one would believe that when I told them.

Highlights include:

- my first ride in the back of a police van, locked inside a metal cage. A useful tip if you find yourself in a similar situation: they really hate it if you mess with the handcuffs. Twirling them round and round your wrists, say. Apparently some people deliberately move their wrists around like that and then claim the resulting marks were the result of police brutality. ‘He’s messing with the handcuffs, Sarge, ‘ said one of the policemen who had come to pick me up. ‘Stop messing with the handcuffs, ‘ his colleague warned me. Or what? I thought. You’ll take them off me?

- the inside of a second police station. This one in Peckham. Another long hour passes as I sit, waiting to be checked in.

- having my photograph and fingerprints taken. I asked if I could pull a funny face for the photos. I was told I could. I did. There’s a famous mugshot from when a very young Bill Gates was arrested in New Mexico for speeding in 1977. The fact that he simply smiled for the camera always struck me as a missed opportunity; even a lack of ambition. If there was a chance you’d become rich and famous and that some journalist would dig out your old police records, then you wanted your mugshot to at least look amusing. Mine will definitely add a bit of light relief to my appearance on This Is Your Life .

- a DNA swab. This I refused. There was no way on earth I was going on a DNA database with all the rapists and murderers. For what? For an expired credit card? At this point I learned something I didn’t know before: you’re not allowed to refuse to give DNA. Fingerprints you can refuse, but not DNA. And even if you’re acquitted or released without charge, they got to keep the DNA. For ever. Even worse, I was told by the very stern custody sergeant that if I refused to give a mouth swab voluntarily they’d have to put on special gloves and it would be more difficult and uncomfortable for me. And they’d assume I had something to hide. Just for shits and giggles I made them put on the special gloves before reluctantly allowing them to take the swab. They looked just like ordinary gloves to me

- just before being bundled off to my cell, I noticed a sign that said one of the cells was closed due to ‘ligature points’. I asked whether I could have that cell as it provided the only possible escape from the tedium of the arrest process.

Before going to the cell, I was asked, like in the films, if I’d like to make my one phone call. Yes, I bloody well would. I dialled Savannah. She had some ’splainin’ to do.

It was at that exact moment – as I dialled the number and heard the ‘number not in service’ tone – that I realised what had happened and why they’d thought I’d given a fake number for Savannah. You see, Savannah – the only person who could have prevented me from being arrested – had had her phone stolen from outside a restaurant two nights earlier. This fact I had known. I’d know it because it was me who had called up the phone company on her behalf to have it cancelled. This fact I’d forgotten.

‘This number is not in service. Beep-beep-beeb.’

Until that exact moment.

I explained everything to the custody sergeant – the stolen phone, the fact that I’d totally forgotten about it but that it was easy to solve: if he would just give me my mobile back and let me make another call, I could swallow my pride and call a different friend.

But he refused. I’d had my chance to make a phone call and I’d blown it. And with that it was off to the cells, where, after sleeping through breakfast and lunch, I’d woken up, starving hungry and freezing cold, several hours later.

13.3

Lying on that thin rubber mattress, staring at the ceiling, I ‘d had plenty of time to think. With no interruptions, no ringing mobile, no choice but just to lie and think – about what I’d achieved, and about where my life was heading. And what I saw made me depressed. Three years earlier I’d been bringing in a few hundred pounds a month, if I was lucky; I had little or no prospect of striking it rich or ending up on the front pages of the papers (unless it was because I’d written the article) – but I was happier than I’d ever been. I was getting paid for something I loved doing; I was picking my hours and I didn’t have to answer to anyone.

A year later, at The Friday Project, I was earning a lot more money, and my name was appearing semi-regularly somewhere towards the back of the papers and there was a moderate chance that I could end up striking it moderately rich. But I was actually less happy; I’d had to force myself into an office routine, I had to answer to shareholders and I was getting paid to edit other people’s words, rather than write my own.

And now what was I doing – apart from languishing in a police station cell? I was trying to make myself ludicrously rich and ridiculously famous; the next Steve Chen or Chad Hurley. And to achieve that I was whoring myself to venture capitalists and the only things I was writing were PowerPoint presentations and business plans. The further up the ladder of ’success’ I’d tried to climb, the less happy and content I’d become. In fact, it occurred to me that, were it not for the fact that I got to sit opposite Savannah every day, I’d actually be pretty fucking depressed.

I got up from my freezing ‘bed’ and pressed the buzzer on the wall. It didn’t make a sound. I pressed it again. And again. Nothing. Just silence. I pressed it again, keeping my finger on it for a good thirty seconds.

Nothing. I started banging on the door.

‘Hey! Is anyone there? I’ve been in here for hours!’

Footsteps. Clump, clump, clump. A little metal window in the door was pulled open.

‘Can I help you?’ asked a gruff sounding pair of eyes on the other side of the door.

‘Yes, I hope so. I’ve been locked in this concrete box for hours.

When are you going to let me out?’

‘There’s a solicitor on the way to see you. She’ll be here soon.’ The window snapped shut.

‘But no one knows I’m here, ‘ I protested through the door. ‘People will be worried.’

But that was the problem. No one would be worried. It was the weekend. Anyone trying to get hold of me would just assume I was lying in bed at home, hung-over and ignoring my phone. Hell, they’d be hung-over, too – they probably wouldn’t even phone. I could be rotting here until Monday afternoon before anyone even got curious, and even then Savannah would just assume I’d gone round to Karen’s house and refuse to call me on principle. I was going to die in this concrete box; a miserable failure, with only a stencilled entreaty to grass up my mates for company. I lay back on my shelf, consigned to my fate.

An hour or so later (I had no way of knowing), the footsteps returned. But this time they were accompanied by a second sound: the clip of high heels. The little metal window opened again.

‘Mr Carr?’ said a soft sounding, faintly condescending female voice. ‘I’m Jacqui – and I’m a legal representative. Would you like to talk to me?’ At that point she could have been Jacqui the Jehovah’s Witness and I’d still have invited her in for a chat.

13.4

Jacqui’s first victory was to convince the custody sergeant to allow me to get my phone back so that I could find the number for the office. I knew that Savannah had planned to head into work that afternoon to post a report about the party on the site. I prayed to God that she would be there when I rang. I dialled the number and it rang. And then it rang some more. And rang. Until, just as tears had started to well up in my eyes …

* Click *

‘Hello?’

‘Oh thank God you’re there, ‘ I said, trying not to sound too

pathetic. It was all I could do not to sob with relief on hearing her voice. After ten hours in a cell. I was pathetic.

‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

I told her everything and, to her credit, she gave me all the sympathy I deserved.

‘It’s not bloody funny, ‘ I said.

But it was, really.

‘I’ll be right there, ‘ she said. ‘Just try not to get yourself into any more trouble before I get there.’

I was finally interviewed at four o’clock by two women police officers. It was exactly like it happens on TV with the big tape machine on the table and people announcing themselves when they enter and leave the room. There was even a good cop and a bad cop, although the bad cop clearly hadn’t been doing the job very long as her badness was limited to laughing at what an idiot I’d been to get myself arrested for something so bloody stupid.

‘So, you gave one of your cards to your friend without checking that the other was valid?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you tried to phone her even though she’d had her phone stolen.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though it was you who’d reported it stolen?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she’s on her way now to verify that?’

‘Yes. Actually, she’s probably been sitting outside for the last hour.’ ‘Is she a blonde lady? Funny accent. Dutch or something?’ ‘Yes. That’s her.’

‘She’s very pretty. Your girlfriend is she?’

‘Look, is this going to take long?’

In the end, the three of us – me, the good cop and the bad cop – came to an agreement. Assuming Savannah would verify who I was and lend me the thirty quid for the cab, which the police would then forward to the driver, the matter would be closed. No charge, no record, just an innocent mistake and a night in a cell to remind me to be more careful next time.

‘ In vino stupitas, ‘(( Literally: ‘ I’m a snotty nosed little prick who did Latin at school. Please lock me back in my cell officer, but not before you’ve given me the hiding I so richly deserve.’)) I said.

‘What?’ asked the good cop.

‘Nothing. I just want to go home and get some sleep.’

As I sat waiting in the interview room, the good and bad cops went outside to explain to the custody sergeant what we’d agreed, and that they were going to recommend ‘NFA’- no further action.

But he had other ideas.

‘I dunno, ‘ he said, sucking air in through his teeth. ‘He seems like a good candidate for a caution. I think I should ask the CPS whether they want to press charges.’

‘What?’ said Jacqui.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Sorry, ‘ said the good cop. Apparently no matter what we’d agreed, what the custody sergeant says, goes. And with that I was marched back to my cell. Another hour passed, all the time with Savannah still – presumably – sitting outside, waiting, prettily. And then footsteps again.

‘Please tell me it’s good news. They’re letting me go, right?’

By this stage I’d been locked up for fourteen – maybe fifteen – hours. I had no idea of time. I didn’t even know what day it was any more.

Jacqui frowned. ‘They’re – I can’t believe this – they’re going to charge you under Section 2 of the Fraud Act.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me.’

Fraud?! I was in the middle of trying to raise money for a new company – money I’d have to be credit- and police-checked before I could get – and now I was being charged with fraud!
Section 2 of the Fraud Act (‘fraud by false representation’) reads:

‘ (1) A person is in breach of this section if he -

(a) dishonestly makes a false representation, and

(b) intends, by making the representation -
(i) to make a gain for himself or another, or

(ii) to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

(2) A representation is false if -

(a) it is untrue or misleading, and

(b) the person making it knows that it is, or might be, untrue or misleading.

(3) “Representation” means any representation as to fact or law, including a representation as to the state of mind of – (a) the person making the representation, or

(b) any other person.
(4) A representation may be express or implied.’

Or, to put it another way, if you get into a cab and you know that you don’t have the money to pay, then you’re committing fraud. The fact that I didn’t know I didn’t have the money and that it was a total accident was something I’d now have to prove in court, in front of a magistrate – or, if I preferred, a jury of my peers. And if I was found guilty, the Fraud Act allowed me to be sent to jail for anything up to ten years.

‘ What the hell is going on?’ I asked Jacqui. ‘Why did the custody sergeant ignore what the other two suggested?’

‘I have no idea. Did you do anything to annoy him?’

‘Well, I did make a joke about hanging myself. And I pulled a funny face in my mugshots. Oh, and I told them they’d have to pry my DNA out of my cold dead cheeks.’

‘Yeah, that would probably have been it.’

And with that I was charged, bailed and released to appear in court a month later. I was given back my shoes, my belt, my phone and my wallet and led out of the custody suite. Savannah was sitting outside the station on the front steps, reading a magazine. She looked radiant. I looked like I’d been raped by a hedge.

‘Hey, ‘ I said, quietly.

‘Hey, ‘ she replied. ‘You okay?’

‘Not really. I haven’t eaten for God knows how long, I slept in a concrete cage last night and most of today – oh, and instead of allowing me to pay them the £30, they’re sending me to court on fraud charges. But, God … It’s good to see you.’

‘I wish I could say the same but you look like crap, ‘ she smiled. ‘But come on, let’s use some of that £30 to go buy you a Happy Meal.’

‘Thank you.’

What I really wanted to say was ‘I love you’.

Chapter Fourteen: ‘Running on fumes’…

I am resolutely not a morning person.

The reason for my exhaustion was partly due to the fact that I’d been having trouble sleeping, with the terrifying reality of our fundraising situation and the prospect of Kudocities launching in a couple of months whirling around my head and keeping me awake into the early hours. But mainly it was due to the fact that, the previous night, I’d been on a second date.

Twenty-six years old, blonde, American, smart and funny, Karen had recently arrived in London to read Middle Eastern Studies. Being new in town she’d signed up to the test version of Fridaycities after seeing a link to the site on the popular London blog Londonist.com. She had created a profile in the hope of making new friends and, as was expected for new members, she had also uploaded a photograph.

I had always had a strict policy when it came to meeting women on the Internet: I didn’t do it – wouldn’t do it – not ever. No matter how many of my friends told me that times had moved on and that ‘all kinds of people find partners online now’, it still smacked to high heaven of desperation. I mean, honestly, how mentally unstable does a pretty girl have to be that she can’t go out into the real world and find a boyfriend? What part of her personality is so hideously off-putting that she would have to hide behind a computer monitor? And it’s just as sad for men – if you don’t have the confidence to approach a girl in a bar, or at work, or on the train or anywhere else for that matter, how goofy are you going to be when you have to have an actual first date?

Online dating was for losers.

And then Karen signed up to Fridaycities, created her profile and uploaded her picture. And she was fucking stunning. So much so that I sent Matt, who runs Londonist.com, five hundred Kudos to thank him for directing her to the site. I convinced myself that making contact with Karen wouldn’t be Internet dating at all: she hadn’t signed up to Fridaycities to find a boyfriend, although she had flagged herself as single in her profile; she just wanted to make some new friends in a new city.

The truth was, if she was half as hot in real life as she was in her profile picture, then she was well worth abandoning my golden rule for. If things went well, I could always tell my friends I’d met her in Starbucks. I decided to drop Karen a line, in my guise as a Fridaycities staffer welcoming a new member, using some of the interests she’d listed on her profile to spark a conversation. This plan would turn out to be more difficult than I’d hoped: when I looked at her profile I found that the only interest she had listed was ‘coffee’, which struck me as slightly narrow-minded. I told her as much in my email and she sent back a funny reply informing me that actually she liked many, many things other than coffee and if I was really interested I should ask her about them.

I was really interested.

As we emailed back and forth it soon became clear that we had lots of things in common: our politics, our sense of humour, even our musical tastes. A few weeks earlier I’d been mocked mercilessly on the site for asking whether any of the other users would be going to see Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, who were due to perform a gig in Hammersmith. Karen revealed that she, too, was a fan of the band and that we should definitely go to see them together when they were next in town.

Before I knew it, it was 4.30 the next morning; we’d been emailing back and forth all night and had then moved on to Instant Messaging. Karen was great, and I was slowly becoming fascinated by her. But I couldn’t ask her out. Absolutely not. For two reasons…

1) I’d met her online. She could be a total freak. I had my golden rule.

2) She was basically a taller, less Anglicised Savannah.

I mean, who was I trying to kid here? Here was this girl – this blonde, American, funny, smart girl – and I’d decided in less than six hours that I wanted to go out with her. Meanwhile, I was spending all day every day with Savannah – the one-time love of my life – before she went home every evening to her live-in boyfriend and I went home to my empty flat. You don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the psychological box to work out what was going on in my head.

But, I told myself, Karen wasn’t exactly like Savannah. For a start, she was taller. She liked coffee, while I knew for a fact that Savannah preferred tea. She was from Pittsburgh (Go Steelers!), not California.((I’m aware one is a city and the other is a state.)) She was single. God, the two of them were almost polar opposites. And, anyway, there’s nothing wrong with having a type.

But I still didn’t know anything about this girl. And I’d still met her on the Internet.

And yet. And yet.

Suddenly my Instant Message software pinged, heralding the arrival of another message from Karen.

Karen (4:45 a.m.): So, you should probably ask me out then.
12.1

Our first date was incredible: exactly like they’re supposed to be in the movies. We began with dinner in a Polish restaurant near Knightsbridge before going on to her friend’s birthday party near Carnaby Street before ending up at the Roxy, an indie club near Tottenham Court Road where we kissed for the first time to the sound of ‘99 Red Balloons’ by Nena. At just after 2.00 a.m., finding myself briefly alone at the bar, I took the opportunity to send Karl a text message. He was the only one who knew where I was (I’d considered telling Savannah, ostensibly to warn her that I might be late to work the next day, but really in the hope it would make her sickeningly jealous). Of course Karl’s first reaction when I’d told him about Karen was to roll his eyes: ‘Of course you’re going out with her; she’s exactly like Savannah.’ But what did he know? The text I sent from the bar simply read,
‘ Smitten.’

For our second date, we ‘d gone to the theatre to see a new comedy show based around the international arms trade. What better way, I reasoned, to appeal to her political side (Middle Eastern Studies!) while also introducing her to the British sense of humour? What I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that the show would be one joke after another full of obscure British references – references to members of the shadow cabinet, to long-passed storms in Westminster teacups, even to children’s television shows of the early 1980s. I had to spend the entire interval and much of the rest of the night explaining to Karen – at enormous length – why Antonia de Sanchez was funny, or what an emu might be doing on a roof with a TV aerial. But, despite the slightly odd topics of conversation, we had a great time, ending up back at her place which is where, after about an hour’s sleep, I’d woken up less than forty minutes before I was supposed to be on the other side of town, speaking on a panel about the future of social networking. And to make things worse, I was supposed to be meeting Savannah there.
Oh God. How the hell was I going to make it in time? And, more importantly, how was I going to stop grinning long enough to actually speak?

12.2

I crashed through the doors at the back of the hall with minutes to spare, to be met by a far from impressed Savannah.

‘Good night?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows towards the church roof. After my first date with Karen, I’d decided to come clean with Savannah about what I was doing, figuring it was better coming from me than her reading about it on my Fridaycities profile. I’d expected her reaction to be positive – for months I’d been trying to convince her, subtly and not so subtly, that we should get back together. After all, we were spending most of our time with each other and everyone who saw us – cab drivers, people in bars, people in meetings – assumed we were a couple from the way we flirted and bickered. But every time Savannah had rejected me, saying there was no way she and I would ever get back together, especially now we were working together.

But instead of being pleased she actually seemed hurt: ‘So all that stuff about us getting back together was just bullshit was it?’ she asked.

I protested: ‘But you told me there was no way on earth we’d ever get back together.’

‘There isn’t.’

‘Well, okay then.’

‘Okay.’

Back in the church hall I knew she knew I’d come straight from Karen’s. It was strange, really; a pathetic part of me wanted her to be horrendously jealous that, after almost two years of me hinting that I wanted us to get back together and being rebuffed every time, I was finally moving on. But an equally pathetic part of me wanted exactly the opposite: for her to think that my dates with Karen didn’t mean a damn and that she only had to say the word…

I’d seen this kind of behaviour before, of course, and I realised to my horror what I was doing. I was acting like every ex-girlfriend I’d ever complained about – convincing myself that I was falling for someone new just to compensate for not having what I really wanted.

‘Yeah, it was okay, ‘ I lied. ‘I didn’t get home till late and then forgot to set my alarm.’

‘Sure.’

‘No, really.’

‘Drink your coffee. You’re on in two minutes. You slut.’

The event was the New Media Knowledge Forum, an annual conference to discuss the hottest trends in new media, which of course this year could only mean one thing: social networking. Throughout the day a whole host of panels and presentations had been scheduled. There was a debate on how the mainstream media should use social networking, featuring representatives from the BBC, Channel 4, the Guardian, Yahoo! among others. There was a keynote speech by Nic Brisbourne about how actually to make money out of the social media, all ending with a free-wheeling, wine-fuelled panel on ‘future gazing’ where the audience would get a chance to grill a selection of the day’s speakers on what the future held for social media. The highlight of the day, though, was the early morning keynote speech by Jason McCabe Calacanis, the founder of a new search site called Mahalo.

Calacanis had gained fame – infamy is perhaps a better word – during the first boom as the publisher of the Silicon Alley Reporter, a must-read trade publication covering the Manhattan new media community (the so-called Silicon Alley, a sort of homage to northern California’s Silicon Valley). Calacanis was a famed party animal and the Silicon Alley Reporter would often feature reports from glitzy new media gatherings, leading one New York magazine to describe him as the ‘yearbook editor of Silicon High’. Calacanis rode out the dot com boom by selling the Silicon Alley Reporter and founding a pure Internet media company called Weblogs, Inc. Much like Nick Denton’s Gawker empire, Weblogs, Inc. specialised in publishing ultra-targeted blogs for various niche groups (gadget freaks, film nuts etc…) in the hope that advertising dollars would follow closely behind. The difference between Gawker and Weblogs, Inc. was that Gawker chose to roll out a relatively small number of sites and concentrate on building them each into major brands, while Weblogs, Inc., created dozens and dozens of sites – fifty in its first year of operation – in the hope that a few would be successful. Between Calacanis and Denton, similarity had bred contempt and it wasn’t long before the two men became mortal foes, with Calacanis poaching blogger Peter Rojas from Gawker’s gadget site, Gizmodo, to join his own, Engadget.

One of Calacanis’ closest friends was once quoted as saying: ‘Jason would never stab you in the back. He might stab you in the face, though.’ It’s not clear if the friend was speaking metaphorically: Calacanis holds a black belt in Taekwando.

Watching the situation from this side of the Atlantic, Robert Loch’s view on the Calacanis/Denton debate, and their constant sniping at each other, was slightly more to the point: ‘I just wish Jason and Nick Denton would stop whining and sleep together so the rest of us can get some peace.’

I had never met Calacanis but knowing that he was a sworn enemy of Angus’s old pal Nick meant I was keen to see his keynote. But, sadly, by the time I rushed in, he’d already left the stage. Ah well, I would have to catch up with him at the after-party which, befitting his status as visiting foreign dignitary, was being held in Calacanis’ honour back at Adam Street.

But first I had business to attend to…

12.3

‘The next panel is called “The Upstarts”: Does Social Media Have Long Legs to Match its Long Tail?’

The event ’s organiser, Mike Butcher, took to the stage and introduced our panel. Mike was a famously outspoken dot com journalist and he and I hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye. A couple of years earlier we’d had a very public spat after he wrote an article accusing me of using my Guardian column for blatant self-promotion (he was absolutely right, of course, but there was no need to draw attention to it). Given our history, I was quite surprised to be invited to take part at all, but since the spat we’d run into each other a couple of times and had made up. He’d (sort of ) taken back some of his nastier comments and I’d called him a wanker. All was well again.

His introduction continued as I took my seat behind a long table containing a row of microphones and lots of little bottles of water. I poured the contents of one into a glass and drained it in one gulp. God, I was exhausted.

‘ The panel will talk about whether or not the entities being created at the moment – sites like Trustedplaces.com (another local review site, and a competitor to WeLoveLocal.com) and Fridaycities, whatever Fridaycities is…’
He couldn’t resist. Wanker.

Aside from Mike, the only person on the panel I’d met before was Walid Al Saqqaf, the Parisian co-founder of Trusted Places. Although, like WeLoveLocal, Trusted Places was technically a competitor, we’d decided to restrict our competitive urges to regular Mojito-fuelled games of table football in Walid’s favourite French bar, Cafe Kick. Walid would beat me to a pulp every time. It was embarrassing, but I was honing my skills and one day I’d beat him. Or at least he’d surrender – he was French, after all. The other panellists included Phil Wilkinson whose site, Crowdstorm, aimed to bring people together to share information and reviews about products they want to buy either online or on the high street. Next to him were the Internet consultant Jemima Gibbons and Justin Davies from Buddy Ping, which was a mobile social network for people on the move. I immediately thought back to our mobile-obsessed VC; maybe I should introduce him to Justin.

With all the panellists introduced, Mike took a deep breath and asked his first question, directed at Walid.

‘Walid, you’ve recently raised money. How much was that?’

It’s always the first question.

Walid happily explained how Trusted Places had raised half a million pounds in angel funding (which was true: they had, the bastards), and that they were using it to develop Trusted Places’ personalisation features and also to develop a mobile version of the site.

In my head I edited our Word document, adding the line

Kudocities: the mobile version.

Gulping down my second glass of water, I braced for Mike’s first question aimed at me. I was sure he’d be unable to resist either pitting Walid and me against each other, or somehow making me defend Fridaycities.

‘I have two questions…’

Or maybe he’d do both.

‘First, how do you differ from Trusted Places? Are you basically the same?’

He obviously wanted me to say Fridaycities was far, far better than this two-bit (well-funded) pretender, but I wasn’t going to play his game. Instead I took exactly the opposite tack, pouring praise on my friend Walid and explaining how we each offered a different spin on a similar idea to users. In fact, I went on, we expected many users to be members of both Fridaycities and Trusted Places.

Take that, you cocky little git.

But, of course, I couldn’t resist adding: ‘It’s worth pointing out, though, that Fridaycities is about asking about anything at all, not just about restaurants and bars.’

And then came Mike’s follow up.

‘And how do you react to people who say that there’s an element of flash in the pan to all of this social networking business?’

‘Oh, that’s simple…’

Pause.

‘I ignore them.’

The audience laughed, and so did the panel. I’d dodged a bullet. But in reality, every single person in the room was, like me, laughing more out of nervousness than anything else. We were all in a constant state of terror about that very question. What if social networking was just a flash in the pan? What if, despite the hundreds of millions of people flooding to MySpace and Bebo and Facebook and the gazillion niche social network sites, it was all just a fad – like the hula hoop or Tab Clear? What if, while we were all rewriting our business plans to become social networks, Internet users found some other kind of site to get excited about. None of us had any way of knowing – given that none of us knew anything at all. All we could do was laugh about it – and cross our fingers tightly behind our backs.

One thing that the whole panel could agree on was that local social networks – that is, networks based around the users’ physical location – were the future. People were hardwired to be more interested in people on their doorstep than people halfway around the world. And if the Internet really was all about sex, then statistically it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to have sex with someone in the same town or city as you than halfway across the world. I found all of this hugely comforting; yes, there was still a huge chance that what we were doing would turn out to be a flash in the pan, but at least we’d be one of the brightest flashes. For a few seconds, I felt what I thought was a flash of confidence. It might just have been the coffee finally kicking in.

By the time the floor was opened up to questions, I was surprised at how amicable the proceedings had remained – particularly as several of us on the panel were competitors. All that changed when a stocky American in the audience stood up, not to ask a question but to make an observation:

‘I just want to say, as an entrepreneur from the US…’

Uh-oh, I thought to myself. He sounds like an activist at a TUC conference. ‘As a Marxist single father, I just want to say…’

He went on: ‘People in our industry are delusional. Instead of saying “why can’t something happen?” we say “why might it happen?” and I think that’s an asset.’

Ah, the old ‘entrepreneurs should be dreamers first, pessimists last’ argument. It was a stereotypically American viewpoint, and apparently we in the UK were letting the side down. He explained.

‘You guys need to listen to me. Last night I went to a networking dinner over here and I was surprised and depressed at how quick everyone is to kick each other and be cynical. And the press is so cynical about stuff. I wouldn’t want to be an entrepreneur here, because you’d get your ass kicked. I’d want to go to the US.’

Well, fuck off back to the US then, you smug Yankie cunt, I thought, suddenly feeling the same overwhelming urge to defend our national honour that I felt every time Walid put another little plastic baby football past my defender and into the back of the net. How dare he come over here and lecture on being positive?

‘Wait a minute…’ I interrupted, incensed. ‘I really have to defend British cynicism here. That cynicism is what makes Britain such a wonderful place to live in.’

‘Yeah!’ The audience – 99 per cent cynical Brits – were with me, too.

But the American was having none of it. ‘Yeah, but there are parents who use that attitude towards their kids and they turn out neurotic.’

I really couldn’t help myself; he’d left himself wide open.

‘I think you’ll find we have fewer therapists over here than you do in America.’

Big laugh, even a smattering of applause this time. And then, as the other panellists weighed in, too, I swear I could hear the first swells of ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ in the background. Sensing a full-scale diplomatic incident was about to erupt, Mike stepped in to move things along. ‘There’ll be a fight later on in the car park, ‘ he joked.

At least, I think he was joking.

I felt pretty good about my performance on the panel. I might have damaged the special relationship ever so slightly, but, given that I could barely keep my eyes open, I was pretty damned pleased with myself for putting the lippy little fucker in his place. Hopefully it would get a mention in the press coverage of the event, giving Fridaycities a much-needed publicity boost. What with that and the news that local social networks were the future, I could go home and get some sleep before the party.

With Jason Calacanis in attendance, I had some serious schmoozing to do later. I only hoped he wouldn’t hold the fact that I’d bitch-slapped one of his countrymen against me. Nah, he’d probably find it funny – judging by his spat with Nick Denton, Calacanis was as cynical as they came.

Savannah was less than impressed by my new-found national pride.

‘You really get off on stuff like that, don’t you?’

‘What? I was just fighting Britain’s corner.’

‘No you weren’t. You were playing to the gallery and you know it. You’re such a bloody child sometimes.’

She was clearly still jealous about my date with Karen. That was the only explanation.

12.4

The after-party began at eight o ‘clock the following evening at Adam Street, although describing it as a party isn’t entirely accurate. Mike had restricted the invitations to just the speakers and panellists and a smattering of other web luminaries. The aim was to give everyone the maximum opportunity to mingle with each other and to meet the guest of honour – which suited me down to the ground. By a total coincidence, Robert was hosting a networking dinner in an adjoining room so I knew the soiree would get a lot more crowded later on. Savannah and I had an hour at most to track down Calacanis, sell him on the idea of Fridaycities and convince him to introduce us to his wealthy Silicon Alley mates so they could invest in us. Hell, if we did a good enough job, maybe he’d invest himself. What was it that idiot American had said at the conference? ‘Dream more’? Okey dokey.

But first I had to work out which of the dozen or so people in the room was Jason Calacanis. I cursed myself quietly for missing his keynote speech, but fortunately Angus was on hand to help me out.

‘ Which one’s Calacanis?’ I whispered.

‘He’s around here somewhere, ‘ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you. But then you’re on your own. Remember: be nice to him; be impressive. He’s very important.’

‘10-4, chief!’

‘Jason, have you met Paul and Savannah from Fridaycities?’

Jason McCabe Calacanis turned round and smiled.

Oh. Shit. Of all the arrogant, stocky Americans, in all the audiences in all the fucking world, why did I have to bitch-slap the important one? Shit, shit, shit. Un-be-shitting-lievable. There was only one grown-up way to deal with a situation like this: suck up like a vacuum cleaner…

‘Hi, Jason, nice to meet you! I just wanted to say I really, really enjoyed your keynote speech yesterday – you made some really interesting points, ‘ I lied, praying that he wouldn’t ask me any questions about a keynote speech I hadn’t even heard.

‘Thanks very much, ‘ he said, ‘I think it went pretty well. So, where are you guys from? Fridaycities? What’s that?’

Oh thank God, he hadn’t remembered me. No, wait a damn minute here! He hadn’t remembered me! He hadn’t remembered a single word I’d said about Fridaycities or presumably anything else I’d said on the panel. And I know for a fact he was in the same room because I’d spent five minutes arguing with him. But not a flicker of recognition.

The bloody smug Yankee cu… But Angus’s words were ringing in my ears. Be nice. Be nice. Be nice.

‘Let me buy you a drink. Savannah will tell you all about what we’re doing.’ He graciously agreed to let me buy him a double whisky- ‘Scaatch on the rocks’- and I ran off to the bar, leaving Savannah to begin the pitch.

‘Hey, buddy, what can I get you?’ asked Andreas, Adam Street’s head barman.

‘A double Scotch on the rocks for my new friend, a beer for Savannah and I’ll take a rum and Coke. Actually make it a double.’

‘Tough day?’ asked Andreas.

‘Ask me again in an hour.’

The main bar at Adam Street is, I swear, one of the wonders of the modern world. Andreas is a walking, talking encyclopaedia of cocktails and the menu is packed with his inventions, including the most recent addition: the Bobby Loch.

Late one evening Robert – who practically lived at Adam Street before he moved into Mr Rong’s – had convinced Andreas that, as he spent so much money at the bar, it was only right that he had his own cocktail on the menu. He saw himself like a member of the Rat Pack who would insist that the pianist played their signature song whenever they walked into their favourite bar. Adam Street didn’t have a pianist, but it did have Andreas.

The next time Robert came in, he was served the very first Bobby Loch – a variation on the Zombie, but even more potent with at least two extra types of rum thrown in for good measure. To give you an idea of how strong that is, you need to know that the Zombie is one of the strongest cocktails there is. Invented in the 1930s by a restaurateur called Donn Beach, it’s served in a tall glass containing fruit juice, various liqueurs and a whole lot of different types of rum. Beach invented it for a friend of his who was about to go to San Francisco on a short business trip. His friend drank three of the things before leaving and on his return complained that the drink had turned him into a zombie for the entire trip. Which is perhaps not surprising, given that it has the same alcoholic strength as seven normal cocktails.

And, incredibly, the Bobby Loch was even more potent than the Zombie. In fact, so potent was it that Robert and I would order them whenever we were with friends who weren’t heavy drinkers. He and I had developed a pretty good tolerance for them over time, but even we couldn’t drink more than two without the room starting to spin. Three, especially after wine with dinner, and it was Goodnight Vienna.

Having already insulted the guest of honour, the night was starting to look like it might yet turn into a Bobby Loch night. But that would have to wait – I only had about forty-five minutes of schmoozing time left.

I wandered back to Jason and Savannah and, although Jason was talking animatedly, I could tell the schmoozing wasn’t exactly going according to plan. Calacanis didn’t seem really all that interested in hearing about Fridaycities, but, on the other hand, he was clearly absolutely fascinated by Savannah. In fact, he was busy telling her about his summer house. This, it should be noted, is the man who told the New York Observer in 2000: ‘I can’t tell you how many propositions I get, it’s absolutely insane… My life is surreal. I’m not used to women liking me… it’s depressing to think they like me for my Rolodex, or for what I can do for their dot com.’ The article was entitled ‘They’re Single, Ambitious, Worth Millions, But Can New York Women Download Their Megabyte Egos?’

I caught the tail end of their conversation: ‘You really should come over to visit some time. You can stay in my summer house. And of course you can bring your boyfriend. Do you have a boyfriend… ?’ I plonked down his drink and sat on the stool that was between them. It was the only grown-up course of action.

‘One double whisky on the rocks, ‘ I smiled sweetly, through gritted teeth. I couldn’t really blame him, of course – Savannah was looking particularly hot that evening and, anyway, he was a married man. There was no reason for me to dislike him over some harmless flirting.

‘He’s a bit… much, ‘ said Savannah as Calacanis disappeared to make a phone call.

‘Do you think?’ I replied. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you can’t possibly be jealous.’

‘Jealous! Don’t be stupid. Why on earth would I be jealous of a multi-millionaire describing his fucking summer house to …’ Before I knew it I was raising my voice.

‘To what? Your business partner?’ She silenced me with a raised eyebrow. Busted.

‘Well, I just think we should be trying a bit harder to network.’

‘Actually, I’ve got his business card and I told him I’d send over some information about Fridaycities.’

‘Well … uh … that’s good …’

One Bobby Loch, please, Andreas.

Not long after, Robert’s dinner spilt out into the main bar. Suddenly the room was packed. It had been one of the better attended Internet People dining events and I recognised at least a couple of the angel investors and VCs who had suddenly appeared. At a stroke, the combined net worth of the room had increased considerably, which could only mean one thing – we were about to witness a subtle, but definite, dick-swinging competition.

‘Who wants a drink?’ shouted Calacanis over the hubbub. ‘My round. Paul?’

I ordered a dark rum on the rocks; Savannah the same, but with Coke.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a man’s drink, Paul?’

Oh yes, I thought, rum, the drink of choice for Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, pirates … and girls.

‘Double Scaatches for everyone, ‘ he shouted, to no one in particular. ‘Hey, Paul, you don’t mind getting them in do you?’ He threw his Amex card across the table at me; it landed on my lap.

Be nice. Be nice.

‘Sure, no problem, ‘ I replied, hissing under my breath at Savannah, who was smirking away: ‘You’re really enjoying this aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Evidently revenge for my second date with Karen was a dish best served on the rocks. I scooped up the red Amex and stomped over to the bar. ‘Fifteen double whiskies, ‘ I said, before suddenly realising what I was holding in my hand. A multi-millionaire’s Amex card. How often does that happen? For a glorious moment, an image flitted across my mind: a press release, headed: ‘Fridaycities secures first round funding from Jason Calacanis’ credit card:

City-based social networking site today announced the closure of its angel round, with an undisclosed six-figure investment from Jason Calacanis’ American Express card. The deal was announced to industry journalists today, and will be announced to Calacanis in about thirty days.

Heh. But, no, that would be slightly too much revenge for some harmless flirting and a bit of macho grandstanding. Instead I shouted back over to Andreas who was lining up the whiskies. ‘Actually, can you stick a couple of rum and Cokes on that order as well and two – no – make it four Bobby Lochs? Just leave them in the bottle for now – I’ll get them later when we’ve finished these.’ The least the cheeky fucker could do was pay for Savannah’s and my drinks for the rest of my night.

Later on, after Calacanis had left to go back to his hotel, Angus asked me how the networking had gone. I rolled my eyes. ‘He’s a dick.’

‘Really? I thought he seemed decent enough. Why do you say that?’

I explained about the flirting, which carried on even after I’d told him Savannah and I had once been a couple (at which point, incidentally, he’d smirked at Savannah and expressed surprise that she’d dated below her league. Which may or may not be a fair point); then there was the stunt with the drink; and just the fucking arrogance of the man.

‘So, you don’t like him because he does exactly the same kind of things as you do, but with fifteen million times better credit?’

Yeah, that was about the size of it.

But at least the free drinks took some of the sting out of that particular unpalatable truth.

12.5

My encounter with Jason Calacanis gave me good reason to stop and take another look around at where my life had taken me, or perhaps where I’d taken my life. I’d had my first book published at twenty, been a ‘latter-day Jonathan Swift’ at twenty-two, a Guardian columnist at twenty-three, the Managing Director of a book publishing house at twentyfive, and now … and now … having given it all up in search of YouTube-founder levels of fame and fortune I was … essentially nowhere. Speaking on panels at the pleasure of former adversaries, dating a girl I wasn’t in love with and in love with a girl I wasn’t dating and spending all my time schmoozing and pretending to like people in the hope they’d give me some money. I couldn’t have been more depressed at what I saw in the mirror of my career – I was succeeding backwards.

I had spent the last two years trying to be a big-shot business person and it had so far come to nothing. Jesus, I couldn’t even get arrested in this town.
Things couldn’t be any more depressing.

And then I got arrested in this town.

Chapter Thirteen: ‘Banged up’…

‘ Social networking’ was an Internet industry buzzword that described any site that brought people together and allowed them to bond over their shared interests. Fridaycities – sorry, Kudocities – was a social network for people who wanted to bond over the cities they lived in, but there were also social networks for people who were looking to buy houses, social networks for dog lovers,((Dogster – the fourth porniest name on the Internet. )) social networks for book lovers; there were almost certainly social networks for people who loved joining social networks.

But while these niche social network sites were hot, and getting hotter, the real giants of the social networking world – the only ones worth any actual money – were the ones that ignored niches and threw open their doors to the world. And the biggest of these social network giants was MySpace.

Launched in 2003, MySpace was created as a social networking site for young people who wanted to discover new music. Members were able to set up personal profile pages to share their favourite bands, along with all manner of other likes and dislikes. Very quickly, having a cool-looking MySpace page became as important to young people as having the right pair of trainers, or using the correct slang. Yagetmi?

Unfortunately, somewhere down the line, the definition of ‘cool’ among MySpace users apparently got confused with the definition of ‘hideously tacky’ and the site’s millions of profile pages became a cacophony of flashing images, gaudy background colours and photos of underage teens posing in very little clothing indeed. The phenomenon inspired a popular online competition by cult video blogger Ze Frank called ‘I knows me some ugly MySpace’ with viewers encouraged to send in links to the ugliest profile pages they could find. Meanwhile, the trend for posting misleadingly posed profile photos became the subject of a song: ‘You look a lot fitter on your MySpace picture (than you do in real life)’- which became a hit on… where else… ? MySpace.

MySpace enjoyed phenomenal growth, thanks in part to favourable press coverage which typically gushed about how the site was a true Internet rags-to-riches story, founded by twenty-somethings Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. But behind the media myth, things were not quite what they seemed.

According to the official company line, MySpace was founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson who worked for a company called eUniverse (later renamed Intermix). eUniverse was founded by an entrepreneur named Brad Greenspan, but Greenspan later left the company, handing over full control of MySpace to DeWolfe and Anderson. As MySpace grew, Tom Anderson, who was twenty-seven when the site launched, became an Internet celebrity thanks to his role as the default first ‘friend’ that was added to every new MySpace user’s profile page. This instant fame led to Anderson being nicknamed ‘America’s first friend’ by various news magazines and inspired one T-shirt entrepreneur to produce a shirt bearing the slogan ‘Tom is not my friend’. Hundreds of thousands were sold.

In 2005, with MySpace boasting over 100 million users, the company (and parent company, Intermix) was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580 million, making the end of an amazing ride for two plucky young entrepreneurs.

The only slight problem with this history is the fact that it ’s not true. For a start Tom Anderson had been fibbing to his hundred million friends. He wasn’t twenty-seven at all when he started the company. In fact he was thirty-two. Using a younger age was a shrewd marketing move by the founders to help them appeal to the site’s target teen demographic. And that’s wasn’t the worst of the allegations surrounding MySpace. In 2006, the technology site Valley Wag (one of Nick Denton’s Gawker portfolio of sites) published a damning investigation by journalist Trent Lapinski((Who wrote his article at the age of nineteen. Or fourteen in Anderson years.)), using information provided by Greenspan who, it had become apparent, hadn’t left MySpace voluntarily at all but had been forced out for reasons unknown. Whatever the truth about Greenspan’s departure, he was certainly extremely pissed off and launched a site – www.freemyspace.com – to tell his side of the story, giving Lapinski all kinds of juicy details about the real story of MySpace.

For a start, Lapinski ’s article claimed, MySpace was far from the cute garage start-up that everyone loved. Instead it had begun life as a sinister ploy by hardened marketing execs at eUniverse to persuade young people to opt in to receive targeted advertising from youth brands. The use of Tom – originally hired by the site as a copy editor – as everyone’s first friend (with his revised age) was a clever ruse to give some youth appeal, sorely lacking in the other founders.

For his part, Greenspan had a history of being involved in somewhat dodgy advertising schemes, including creating the ad software behind the Kazaa file-sharing network which had become popular with music and movie pirates. DeWolfe, too, had previously been the founder of an email marketing firm named ResponseBase – which was acquired in 2002 by none other than eUniverse, but not before building up a database of thirty million email addresses.

The team, with their roots firmly in the world of online advertising, set up MySpace and quickly began to build up the membership base by instructing employees to invite everyone in their email address books to join. Those first contacts invited their friends and so on and so on – and the rest was (somewhat revised) Internet history.

So is Tom really your friend? Or just a marketer ’s shill? As the man himself put it in an email to all MySpace’s staff during the first days of the site: ‘I am as anti-social as they come, and I’ve already got twenty people to sign up.’ At the time of writing, anti-social Tom has 217, 701, 025 friends and analysts predict that MySpace could be worth as much as $15 billion. The man has clearly got over his shyness.

But while in 2007 MySpace was still the largest of the social networks, its position was by no means secure. In fact, there were two rivals yapping at the giant’s heels, including one that had specifically set out to steal the lucrative youth demographic. The fact that this rival had already succeeded in achieving that in several European markets was impressive. The fact that the rival wasn’t American but British was astonishing.

11.1

I’ve got a feeling we’re not at Open Coffee any more, Toto.

As I approached the velvet rope that separated the nightclub from the outside world – and vice versa – I was greeted by the imposing form of a Maori warrior in full traditional dress, clutching a guest list. Say what you like about the Maoris, they run a tight ship. A quick scan of the list, a grunt of approval and the rope was lowered, allowing me inside.

I had come to Mahiki – the favourite late-night haunt of Princes William and Harry – for an event called ‘Lessons Learnt’. The evening was organised by Robert and it was already encapsulating everything that an Internet People event should be.

I had actually been slightly disappointed that my name was on the Maori’s list – it’s hard to think of a better anecdote than the one that begins ‘What? These bruises? Oh, yeah, a Maori threw me out of Prince William’s local…’ but maybe next time. Walking downstairs to the basement – which, if I hadn’t been told by every tabloid that it was one of London’s hottest party venues, I could have easily mistaken for a tacky Hawaiian-themed dive in a chav holiday resort – I edged my way to the bar, wading through crowds of well-dressed entrepreneurs and paid £10 for a bottle of beer. Looks like it’s not Marbella either, Toto.

The plan for the evening was to gather together the brightest and the best of the British dot com scene and give each of them a minute with a microphone to share the one piece of advice they wish they’d been given before they’d started in business.

The main attraction of the night – and the reason the event was unmissable for anyone who had even a passing interest in social networking – was Michael Birch, the founder of teenage networking site Bebo: the site that had MySpace running scared, especially in Europe.

Birch may not have the pro file of Tom Anderson or Chris DeWolfe but he is a fascinating character, and humble, too, having failed at various businesses before hitting upon the one that was fast becoming Europe’s big hope against a Murdoch-owned MySpace.

Birch’s first – and least successful – enterprise was a site called Babysitting Circle that allowed local teenagers to arrange babysitting appointments among themselves (nobody signed up). Then there was the online will-writing service (nope) and the birthday reminder service, Birthday Alarm. This last one actually did manage to get some ‘traction’ (a stupid industry term meaning people actually used it in decent, and growing, numbers) before being used as a springboard to launch Bebo.

Bebo was a real winner – co-founded by Birch and his wife, Xochi, with help from his brother, Paul – a social network along similar lines to MySpace, but with a more European flavour and sticking firmly to a youth demographic while MySpace had started to morph into a showcase for musicians and celebrities. The site quickly became the third most popular site of its type in the world, with tens of millions of members creating profile pages. For anyone over the age of twenty a visit to the site is a baffling experience; a world apparently populated by aliens with their own language. The Birches raised $15 million to develop Bebo, a good chunk of which must surely have been spent on special software to remove grammar and punctuation.

For sure, Bebo is a site for total fucking idiots – the Jeremy Kyle juniors, if you like – but give a few dozen million of those idiots pocket money and you can see why the company has been valued in the hundreds of millions and had MySpace worried. Hell, give a few dozen million of those idiots typewriters and they could write Shakespeare. Although they’d spell it ‘ShAkz9er3′.

Taking the microphone, and ignoring the one minute rule imposed on everyone else to keep the event moving allegro, Michael Birch had two pieces of advice to share with the assembled crowd, who fell totally silent for the first time all night as he cleared his throat to speak. Yeah – screw you, Prince William; to this crowd, Michael Birch is true royalty. I took out my notepad, pen poised, while next to me Jemima Kiss, a blogger from the Guardian ’s website, cracked open her laptop to report the momentous event live.

‘The one piece of advice I wish I’d been given before moving to the US to start Bebo is…’

The room held its breath.

‘…is to look the other way when crossing the road. Turns out they drive on the other side over there.’

Big laugh.

Rich and funny.

Wanker.

But seriously folks.

‘No, really, the best bit of advice I can give to any entrepreneur is to be a cheap bastard… that’s a really good tip… and if you do manage to fool a VC into giving you lots of money then make it last. We worked from our bedroom for four years before we had enough money to pay for the money we were spending.’

As one, all the entrepreneurs in the room looked down guiltily at their bottles of £10 beer.

With that Birch handed over the microphone and headed back to the bar, as a hundred would-be social network entrepreneurs slowly began to edge in his direction, in search of the illusive business card swap.

11.2

Next to the stage came another celebrity – albeit of a more traditional tabloid type – Jamie Murray Wells, the founder of Glasses Direct. In contrast to most people in the room, Jamie was no stranger to Mahiki. The headline in the Sun a few weeks earlier had said it all: ‘ Anyone fancy a Goodtime Girl? (That’s cocktail Kate drank on date with Wills’ mate) ‘. Kate being, in this case, Kate Middleton. Wills’ mate, in this case, being twenty-five-year-old Jamie Murray Wells.

Young, quietly spoken and modest in appearance, Murray Wells nonetheless has a remarkable public profile. By night, when he’s not dancing with future princesses, he’s making tabloid headlines for his other extra-curricular antics. Another story in the Sun a few weeks earlier had revealed that Murray Wells had been injured when, along with a friend, he had been caught breaking into a girls’ boarding school searching for ‘totty’ (unfortunately it was the Christmas holidays so no one was there – and Murray Wells later fell off a water tower, breaking his leg).

But by day Jamie makes headlines for something far stranger: driving the optometric industry stark staring mad.

It all began while Murray Wells was studying English at the University of the West of England in Bristol and discovered that he needed reading glasses. Perhaps it was the hours hunched over books. Perhaps it was the fact that he lived with five girls that started to turn him blind. Either way, what follows was one of those classic entrepreneur moments: he was quoted £150 by an optician for what was basically two pieces of plastic and ‘less metal than you’d find in a teaspoon’. A bell went off in his head. Surely the mark-up on these things must be astronomical. So Jamie did what born entrepreneurs do when bells go off in their heads: he did some research, speaking to opticians and people who work in optical labs and – basically – anyone who might be able to explain where the £150 goes. And this is what he found out: the real cost of a pair of glasses is about £7. The rest goes on cost of sales – those stark white shops and teams of sales staff don’t come cheap – and huge, huge profits.

The second thing he found out was that the way most high street opticians work is, basically, a scam: you turn up, have an eye test for about £20 (barely enough to cover the cost to the optician for carrying it out), you get your prescription and then you get sold a pair of glasses (or two) at a £143 mark-up. But what the high street optician doesn’t tell you is that there is absolutely no legal reason why you can’t go to the optician, have the cheap eye test, get your prescription and – well – leave. Just walk out. Take the piece of paper with your measurements and get someone else to provide the glasses.

Someone like Jamie Murray Wells.

With those discoveries made and a business plan written, Glasses Direct was born. With just £1, 000 from his student loan, Jamie commissioned a web designer to build a prototype of his website and then set about establishing relationships with exactly the same suppliers that provide frames and lenses to the big high street names. At first the suppliers were terrified of pissing off their best customers, but Jamie promised them he’d keep their relationship with Glasses Direct a secret. Money is money is money – and soon Jamie had a website and a supplier who would provide him with pairs of glasses to fit his customers’ prescriptions. Prices? From £15 a pair. First year turnover? £1 million. In 2007, the company received £2.9 million in funding from Saul Klein’s Index Ventures and Highland Capital, who also invested money in the successful betting site, Betfair.

And it was with that success, and Murray Wells’ growing profile, that the trouble started.

It turns out the major high street opticians don’t like it when twenty-five-year-olds start stealing millions of pounds of their business, especially when £1 million turnover for Jamie represents a loss of sales of many times that for his traditional rivals.

Alarmed by Jamie’s success, the General Optical Council((There’s a General Optical Council – it’s the quango that regulates the optometry industry; aren’t you glad you now know that?)), under pressure from Boots, Specsavers, Dolland & Aitchison and Vision Express, decided to consider whether selling prescription glasses online could be ‘harmful’ to customers. The chairman of the committee holding the debate? Brian Carroll, a consultant for Boots Opticians.

Reading from the top then…

C

ON

FLI

CTOF

INTEREST

Murray Wells is understandably a little concerned by his rivals’ tactics. Until the GOC makes a ruling, the company can’t raise any more venture capital money or consider a flotation to raise any more cash. The very survival of his business rests on it. And – surprise – the GOC is taking its sweet time. Jamie even tried to get himself elected on to the committee himself, hoping it might push things through. But the managing director of Specsavers stepped in and nominated his own candidate, encouraging his staff to support his choice, against Murray Wells. Checkmate.

The Specsavers connection is particularly ironic given the brilliant story that Sam Lewis had told when he came back from attending (don’t ask) a lunch hosted by the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers. Imagine the masons in verifocals.

Sam had been invited to go along to the lunch by a friend whose father had been a high-up figure in the organisation, on the strict instructions that he behave himself and not upset any of the old men in attendance. Which, of course, was like asking a bull not to do anything to upset a red rag. Sam and I had been out at a party the night before so, of course, with the lunch starting at noon, he rolled up still drunk and immediately laid into a bottle of red wine. Soon the other members began to file into the dining room and the sight was one that would disturb even a sober mind: a line of elderly men, all wearing what appeared to be brass gongs around their necks filed in and took their seats. Then one stood and announced the arrival of the most senior member of the company. A slow hand clap began to build, louder and louder, as the entire room rose to its feet. Sam stood up, managing to join in the clapping while still clutching his wine. Clap, clap, clap, louder and louder, until finally the grand master appeared, also wearing a large brass gong, his arrival signalling that the dinner could begin. Jamie Murray Wells had the distinction of being unofficially banned from attending these lunches and Sam’s friend had pleaded with him not to mention Jamie or Glasses Direct.

‘So what do you make of Glasses Direct?’ Sam asked, turning to one of the old men sitting at his table, a senior manager at one of the big optical chains. Sam’s face was a mask of innocence.

The manager ’s face darkened. ‘Jamie Murray Wells? A terrible business. Terrible. Just terrible.’

He continued.

‘After all, we’ve only just recovered from the trauma of Specsavers .’

So Jamie could be forgiven if he had stood up that night at Mahiki and offered the advice: ‘Choose an industry that isn’t populated by protectionist old wankers who fear and loathe the Internet – and change in general.’ But instead he gave something more practical, learned from his company’s recent ill-fated celebrity ad campaign.

‘When choosing a spokesmodel to promote your glasses brand, try to choose a celebrity who actually wears glasses, rather than paying an absolute bloody fortune for Nancy Sorrell… who doesn’t.’

Apparently, on comparing the fee paid to Sorrell – who is famous for little more than being Vic Reeves’ wife and once appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here – with the number of extra glasses sold as a result of her advertising campaign, Glasses Direct found that each extra pair had cost them more than £400 in promotional costs.((Murray Wells’ advice evidently fell on deaf ears. Nancy Sorrell was recently revealed to be the new face of Pampers despite, as far as I can tell, not wearing nappies.))

Some you win.

11.3

Bringing to an end the formal part of the evening, Robert took back the microphone and announced that he wanted to make a prediction. More of a bet, really, concerning not MySpace or Bebo but the third major social network…

Facebook.

Facebook was founded in 2004, a year after MySpace, by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard. After arriving at Harvard, and keen to make new friends, Zuckerberg had become frustrated that the Ivy League university offered no searchable album – or face book – of fellow students. It seemed to Zuckerberg that such an album would be a great way to get to know his fellow students and also to put a name to the many new faces he met wandering around campus. So, at first on his own and then with help from friends, he decided to build one, calling it The Face Book.

The site was an immediate success and by the end of The Face Book’s first month of existence more than half of the Harvard undergrad population had signed up. Word soon spread to other Ivy League schools and, by popular demand, the service quickly expanded to cover Stanford and Yale. By April 2004 there were face books for the entire Ivy League.

Buoyed by this rapid growth, and seeing huge potential in The Face Book as a business, Zuckerberg and his friend Dustin Moskovitz quit university at the end of the academic year and moved to Palo Alto, California, to develop the service properly. They quickly closed a round of angel funding with $500k from Peter Thiel, who had previously co-founded the online payment site Paypal. By December, less than a year after The Face Book’s launch, the service had over a million users. As the number of users grew, so did the features offered by The Face Book – or just plain Facebook as it was renamed in 2005. Students could send each other messages, organise their social lives and generally keep tabs on what each other was getting up to during their college days.

At the end of 2005, Facebook boasted sites for students in over two thousand colleges and more than 25, 000 high schools throughout the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK and Ireland. With investment money pouring in, including a further $12.8 million in venture capital from VC giants Accel Partners, analysts were suggesting a valuation of up to $2 billion for the company, which at that point was still restricted to registered students – those with recognised academic email addresses. Then, on 11 September 2006, Facebook went global. From that date on anyone with an email address – not just students – could register on Facebook. A new open-to-all social network giant was born.

But the question remained: how much was Facebook really worth? And that was the subject of Robert’s bet at Mahiki.

He had been prompted by a comment made earlier in the evening by George Berkowski, then BT’s head of Internet strategy but soon to launch his own start-up – a dating site called Woo Me. Berkowski had seen details of a (rejected) offer by Yahoo! to buy Facebook for $1 billion and argued that Zuckerberg had made a huge mistake by turning it down. Robert disagreed. He was convinced that in a few years Facebook would be worth much, much more than ‘just’ a billion dollars, so much so that he was prepared to risk some money of his own. Standing at the microphone, Robert laid down his challenge: would Berkowski take his bet – that in four years time Facebook would be worth over $4 billion?

The stake: £1, 000.

Berkowski, a tall, brash Australian – every bit a match for Robert’s confident swaggering – immediately accepted the bet and the two men shook hands, to cheers from around the room.

The evening ended, as so many Internet People parties do, with ‘networking and drinks’. Which is, of course, a euphemism for ‘getting very drunk indeed’. My last memory of the night is standing at the bar, sucking on an enormous straw – one of half a dozen such straws – jutting out of a giant wooden treasure chest filled with luminous coloured booze. ‘This is great, ‘ I half-slurred to the beautiful Brazilian model whose mouth was clamped around the straw next to mine, and who was holding on to the bar with both hands. ‘What’s in it?’

‘Everything.’

‘Okey dokey.’

11.4

Facebook ’s rapid growth was both a blessing and a curse to Kudocities. Our main selling point, the ability to ask and answer questions about your city, had very little to do with social networking, and so wasn’t at all threatened by Zuckerberg’s continuing success. However, we were planning to make most of our revenue through things like private messaging, quick ticks, stealth dating and the like – all of them social networking-type features. With Facebook getting huge traction in London and offering far superior social features, not to mention millions more users, it was idiotic for us to try to compete on that front. We decided that when we launched the first proper version of the site we’d focus on our strong points – the questions and answers – and tone down the social features, instead making it a doddle for Kudocities’ members to invite each other to become friends on Facebook.

Our decision could hardly have turned out to be more prescient. A couple of weeks later, Facebook announced that it was going to launch a feature that would make it easy for sites like ours to build services (known as ‘applications’, or ‘apps’) which could integrate with Facebook. For example, we could build an app that would let users actually submit questions to Kudocities from the comfort of their Facebook profiles. Answers would then appear both on Kudocities and on Facebook and we would each take a share of the advertising revenue. Even better, it was a two-way street, making it easy for us to allow Kudocities users to become Facebook friends with each other and for Facebook users to sign up to Kudocities. This was perfect – and we had the advantage of having already decided to go down that route while other social networks had to scramble to figure out their Facebook strategy from scratch to avoid being left behind.

As a final added bonus, Facebook’s announcement had got investors all in a lather. Any company that was looking to raise angel or VC money for the next few months better make sure they have a Facebook app somewhere in their business plan. The next day, back in the office, we took out our working blueprint for Kudocities and added a new section…

Kudocities: The Facebook App.

The investors would surely be putty in our hands; if only we could find some who would actually talk to us. With money fast running out, and only Duncan and Max left to pitch to, it was time to create a bit more hype…

Chapter Twelve: ‘Relationship Status: Complicated’…

With Ricky also busy with his other projects, Nic and Espirit not in a position to consider investing until we were at a later stage and Henry Fysom at Creative Capital not able to invest until someone else did (and our mobile phone guy an idiot), our fundraising truck had basically stalled.

But Angus ’s contact book had one possibility left: Max and Duncan Jennings, two brothers from Newcastle who had made a ton of money from their online marketing business and had spent some of it developing a local reviews site called WeLoveLocal.com. WeLoveLocal was similar in many ways to Fridaycities in that both sites dealt with local people, talking about local things. Angus had heard on the grapevine that the company had some spare money that they were keen to invest in interesting new projects.

Ordinarily the decision to call them would have been a no-brainer – they had money, we needed money – but there was a catch. The brothers were also potential competitors, so if we told them our plans and then they decided not to invest, we’d have basically given away all our secrets for nothing. Frankly, though, at this stage we weren’t exactly drowning in investment options so Angus agreed to get in touch with the brothers and set up a meeting.

While Angus went back to the phones, Savannah, Karl and I went back to our whiteboard to examine what we’d learned in the nearly eight months that Fridaycities had been in test mode. In that time, nearly twenty thousand people had signed up to the test site and we’d learned a lot about what they liked about the site and what they didn’t; what worked and what didn’t. Some users loved almost everything while others hated it all in equal measure. But there was one thing that everyone agreed on: the name ‘Fridaycities’. It was awful.

Every single person we spoke to – users, potential investors, friends, family – asked the same question: ‘Why the hell did you call the site Fridaycities – what does it mean?’ People who didn’t know the site assumed it was some kind of bar review site for people going out on the piss at the weekend in cities. Which, judging by the questions that had been posted over the preceding months, was about 50 per cent true.

As we were still in test mode there was time to revise the name before we launched properly to the public. But not much; so if we were going to think of something new, it was essential that we get it right. I decided we needed some more outside advice; this time from someone who knew a lot about branding. Someone, in fact, who had been the first person to tell me – months earlier – that Fridaycities was a crap name. I decided to phone Richard, hoping he was in the country.

10.1

Richard Moross is thirty years old, and a taller, better dressed man you will struggle to meet. There’s a scene in the film Men in Black where Will Smith is being indoctrinated into the MIB agency. He’s taken to a completely white locker room and Rip Torn’s character (Chief Zed, the head of the agency) gives him ‘the last suit you’ll ever wear’: black jacket and trousers, white shirt, black shoes.

Now, imagine that look but replace the white shirt with a black one. That’s Richard. I’ve known Richard for nearly three years – been to parties with him, had lunch with him, gone to the pub with him, visited his office, travelled on long-haul flights with him, even been bowling – and I swear I’ve never seen him dressed in any other outfit. His flat, meanwhile – a bachelor pad in west-central London that he uses on the rare occasions he’s in town – is stark white and achingly cool, exactly like the MIB headquarters. I’m assuming it’s just a coincidence but if I discovered that the flat once belonged to the film’s production designer I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Richard is the polar opposite of me not just in height and dress sense but also in terms of his work ethic. A designer by upbringing, he founded a company called Pleasure Cards in 2004 with cash from venture capitalists The Accelerator Group, the same people who backed Agent Provocateur and also Michael Smith’s Mind Candy. The concept was simple (sort of ): Pleasure Cards (the second most porny company name in the world, after Cyberbritain) would be the hip alternative to boring business cards, for creative and design types. Supplied in packs of one hundred, the front of your Pleasure Card would carry the usual business card information – name, phone number, email address and the like – but on the reverse you could let your imagination run wild. Professional designers were invited to upload designs and images for the cards to Pleasurecards.com, where they could choose the ones they wanted to appear on the back of their personalised cards. Every time a designer’s work was used on the back of a customer’s card, he or she received a small royalty and the rest of the price of the card would go to Pleasure Cards. As an additional gimmick, each customer would also have their own ‘PEP’((I have no idea.)) number, printed on their cards, which was linked to a personalised page on the Pleasure Cards site where they could add additional information about themselves: updated contact details, favourite music, photos – that kind of stuff.

The really cool thing about the cards was how good they looked. These were really, really nice cards. About the same width of normal business cards, but half the height, they were also identifiable even at a distance as being Pleasure Cards rather than humdrum old business cards. Really, they were stunning
There was just one problem.

No one wanted to buy them.

While the designs were great and the cards were beautiful, the problem lay with the Pleasure Cards website: it was beyond difficult to navigate, and the PEP numbers were a step of complexity too far for the time-poor, cash-rich hipsters the company was aiming for.

As Richard admitted to the Guardian a year or so later, ‘it sucked’.

Mightily.

So Richard went back to the drawing board. Over the next few months he raised some more money (a lot more money) from two more large VCs – Index Ventures (home of Danny Rimer) and Atlas Venture – and began completely to reinvent the business.

The first realisation he had was also the most ground-breaking: users didn’t care about choosing thousands of pre-submitted designs from top designers. Someone’s business – or pleasure – card is the ultimate statement of who they are, and customers wanted the backs of their cards to reflect that. So Pleasure Cards dumped the designers and instead created an ingenious system where customers could upload their own pictures from photo-sharing sites like Flickr or social network sites like Bebo.

The PEP number? Gone. The complex order process? Pared down to an almost Zen-like experience. The cards still looked the same, and they were still as gorgeous as a pre-rehab starlet, but that one change of gimmick – allowing customers to express their personality on the back of the card as well as the front – was all it took to make business explode.

In a little over a month the relaunched site had received orders for over a million cards, each printed on the company’s spanking new state-of-the-art printing machines and packaged by hand in their spanking new warehouse conversion offices.

But along with the shift in business model came another, perhaps equally significant, change.

10.2

Shortly before Richard ’s grand relaunch, I met up with him in New York for the US branch of Michael and Judith’s Second Chance Tuesday. It was a ridiculously hot summer’s day and, with a few hours to kill before the event, we went for cocktails on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort, overlooking Soho House. I felt like a fish out of water, but Richard, with his air of James Bond cool and his Men in Black dress code, took the opulent surroundings in his stride, even managing not to gawp at the stunning supermodels parading around the hotel’s rooftop pool. He ordered us Perfect Manhattans (the one with both sweet and dry Vermouth – not to be confused with the Dry Manhattan or any of the other million variations on the theme) and I asked him how the relaunch was going.

‘ It’s going really well. We’ve got the investment in, the new site’s almost ready for testing. It’s all great, but I wanted to ask you something… what do you think of the name “Moo”?’

‘ Moo? Like a cow says?’

‘Yes. Moo.com.’

‘Is it available? Surely someone already owns Moo.com? Are< there really no dairy farmers on the Internet?'

'Yes, someone else has it. But we're going to try to buy it. I reckon if we make the offer in the right way, we can get it for ---.' 'Fucking hell.' The amount was enough to cover Fridaycities' costs so far several times over. This was the difference between a company with venture capital funding and one still hunting for angel investment.

'Yeah - it's a lot of cash, but I think it's worth it.'

'Moo. Mooooooooo. Mooooo dot commmmm. I like it.' 'Good. So do I.'

Of course, Richard had already decided that he was going to buy Moo and no doubt he'd already made an offer. He was just testing the name out on everyone he knew to see whether anyone totally hated it. But I've always admired people who have confidence in their own decisions but can still make others believe, genuinely, that their opinion matters a damn.

'Okay, my turn - what do you think of Fridaycities for the site we're about to launch?'

'Honestly?'

'No, I'd like you to lie to me. That's why I asked.'

'Well, I mean, it's crap, isn't it? Really bad. It doesn't say anything. Why do you insist on using Friday for everything?'

'Because - you know - there's The Friday Thing and The Friday Project, and now this. Like Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic and...'

'So now you're going to be Richard Branson?'

'I might be.'

'Yes. Okay. You might. But you're not. And even if you were it's still a crap name. You need a name that instantly "positions" the site with the people you're trying to reach. It's just common sense. Fridaycities is separate from the things you've done in the past - it's a new thing - so you need a new brand.'

'Hmmmm. Maybe you're right.'

Of course he wasn't right. Fridaycities was a bloody brilliant name. And, anyway, what did a company name really matter? Take a random example off the high street: The Carphone Warehouse. Wasn't that the most inaccurate brand name in the world? They didn't have warehouses, they had tiny kiosks. And carphones? What the hell is a carphone these days? You're not even allowed to use your phone while driving. They should be called The Streetphone Kiosk. But their weird brand didn't matter because, once a company has been around for a while, customers stop analysing the actual words and they just start recognising the brand. Who actually hears Virgin Megastore now and thinks of a hypermarket full of chaste girls? Who hears Google and thinks just how ridiculous it sounds? It's a typo for God's sake. After a while, people would forget that Fridaycities was a stupid name and they'd just start using it without thinking.

If I'd stopped being so arrogant for one tiny second, I'd have realised that Richard was right and it was me who wasn't thinking. The Carphone Warehouse grew quickly because in the first few years of its existence the name reflected exactly what it offered - a vast warehouse full of carphones; the kiosks and phone driving ban came much later - and Virgin got the attention it got in the early days precisely because its name was a bit controversial; a bit sexy. And how many people heard the word Google and forgot it in a hurry? Richard had realised that Pleasure Cards - with its slightly porny connotations - wasn't right for what he was offering. Moo Cards, on the other hand, was perfect. It was quirky, it was cute, it was easy to remember: just like the cards themselves. And he was right about Fridaycities - it was a crap name, one that confused people at exactly the time we most needed them to love and remember it.

10.3

It wasn ‘t going to be easy to go back to Richard, months after our cocktails in New York, and admit that user feedback had proved him right, but I swallowed my pride and sent him a text: ‘Are you in London?’ When he replied that he was, but was off to San Francisco in a couple of days, I asked whether he fancied a quick beer in a little pub off Charlotte Street later that evening.

Before Richard even had a chance to sit down and take off his (black) jacket, I cut him off.

‘Don’t say I told you so.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, ‘ he replied, taking a sip of his beer. ‘About what?’

‘We’re going to change the name of Fridaycities. Everyone thinks it’s crap’

‘I tol-’

‘Don’t.’

‘Okay, but I’m pretty sure I did tell you so, months ago.’

‘You may well have done. And, okay, you were right. It is a crap name. But I’ve got a new one.’

One of the things that had caught us by surprise during the test phase of the site was how popular our reward points system had become. Called ‘Kudos’ points, users earned them by responding to questions posted by other users, or by inviting their friends to join, or by submitting questions that made it into our weekly newsletter. The more they contributed to the site, the more points they earned. There was a leader board that showed the users with the most Kudos points every week and competition to move up the board had become fierce. The popularity of the points was made even more bizarre by the fact that they were basically worthless. You couldn’t use them for anything; couldn’t spend them on anything. They just were.
But the users had started to assign Kudos points with their own value – giving them away to others on the site who answered their questions and even offering actual physical items for sale in exchange for Kudos. Without meaning to, we’d created a currency based entirely on knowledge and we’d decided that the new site would be entirely built around the points.

Richard listened intently while I explained the new focus of the site, and when I was finished he smiled broadly: ‘I really like that. It sounds cool.’ Which was a huge relief as the designers had been working on the new functionality of the site for weeks.

Then came the big question: ‘What do you think of the name “Kudocities”?’ I asked. ‘Karl came up with it – sticking with the cities idea, but focusing on the Kudos points – I think it really works.’

Richard looked thoughtful. ‘So, that’s Kudocities to rhyme with atrocities rather than Kudo Cities to rhyme with judo cities?’

‘Yeah, Kudocities.’

‘Yes. I really like that. That’s good.’

‘You really think so?’

‘Yeah, I really do. And anyway, anything would be better than Fridaycities.’

‘Cool, thank you.’ Of course, I pretended that his was just one of many opinions I was soliciting; that really we’d already decided to go ahead with Kudocities. In truth, a wave of relief was sweeping over me. I really valued Richard’s opinion and if he’d hated the new name I think I’d have gone straight back to the office and started all over again. Or thrown myself under a bus. Either or.

But he liked it.

Kudocities.com it was.

Chapter Eleven: ‘MySpace or yours?’…