September 2006, and deep in the bowels of the Adam Street private members’ club in London a very special group of people is crammed into a private room, supping imported Spanish beer from a free bar.
The value – on paper at least – of the companies owned by those squeezed into this tiny, boiling space would dwarf the debt of a small African nation. Among those present are some of the key players in Europe’s Internet industry. The content creators, the entrepreneurs, the inventors, the investors; these are the new media moguls. And tonight they’re in their element.
I’m hiding at the back of the room getting slowly drunk with the event’s organiser, an entrepreneur who helped raise a ridiculous sum of money for a business networking site that had projected revenues of precisely zero. His mantra, he tells me, is ‘revenue is the enemy’. It’s not clear what that means, but I have to admit it sounds great.
A microphone is being passed around and we’re watching and listening as a succession of young – mostly under forty – men – they’re mostly men – rattle off their CVs and their future plans.
‘He,’ whispers my drinking buddy, pointing the neck of his beer bottle at a short, well-groomed man wearing a yellow checked jacket and bright red trousers, ‘was in the FT yesterday. Apparently BT are going to buy the company he co-founded for half a billion dollars.’
‘Fuck,’ I half-whisper back. One habit you soon pick up, hanging out with dot com entrepreneurs, is swearing. ‘That’s a terrible fit. It’s like Friends Reunited1 all over again. What the hell are BT going to do with them?’
‘ Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No, the story’s bullshit. Totally made up. And they fucking printed it. ‘
‘Fuck.’
‘Of course they printed it. They called the investors to check it out, but they refused to comment. So they ran it as a “rumour”. And why not? It wouldn’t exactly be the most outrageous deal of the year, would it?’
He has a point.
‘Do I even want to ask who “leaked” it?’ I ask.
My friend smirks and looks down at his beer bottle. He’s a notorious gossip monger, and the rumour has his fingerprints all over it – not least because the man in the red trousers is one of his best friends.
Before I can respond – not that I know how to – an enormous cheer goes up. The previous introduction had come from Sean Seton-Rogers of venture capital firm Benchmark; the one before that from Angus Bankes, the technical genius behind Moreover.com, the news aggregation service that was recently sold to Verisign for $30 million (‘thirty million and change’, the tall American standing behind me stage-whispers to no one in particular). Angus would also – in less than a year – be hugely responsible for my future. But I didn’t know that at the time.
These guys are huge players, business celebrities almost. Benchmark were the investors behind eBay; and Bankes, as well as cofounding Moreover, is the former business partner of Nick Denton, founder of Gawker.com – the super-powerful Manhattan media gossip blog whose fearless rabble-rousing and snarky commentary have struck fear into the hearts of America’s old media elite and made Denton one of the most influential editors in New York. But right now, no one cares about Benchmark, or Moreover, or even Gawker.
The cheer has been reserved for Alex Tew. Twenty-one years old, baby-faced and clearly loving the adulation, Tew (pronounced ‘chew’) is the newest, youngest mogul in the room. Even by new media standards, he’s dressed casually – baggy jeans, hoodie and horrendously expensive trainers. Trainers which, in less than a year’s time, I would throw from the side of a roof-top hot tub into the streets of Soho. But I didn’t know that then.
Only twelve months earlier Tew had been sitting in his grotty student flat in Nottingham, on his grotty student bed, trying to find a way to supplement his student loan without actually doing any work. Turning to a fresh page on his notepad, he had written a question. Six words: ‘How can I become a millionaire?’
And with that simple question an Internet celebrity was born. After rejecting a number of possible money-spinners Tew came up with the brilliant but simple (natch) idea of setting up a website containing 10, 000 tiny squares, each just ten pixels high by ten pixels wide. These pixels – all one million of them – would be sold to advertisers for a dollar each.
Tew gambled that the idea would be quirky enough to get huge media attention, driving traffic to the site and giving advertisers an audience worth paying for. The gamble paid off. The world’s media loved the story and The Million Dollar Homepage sold out of pixels in less than six months. So popular was the site that it even became the target of the Russian Mafia, who bombarded it with millions of fake visitors, making it impossible for anyone else to access it. Only if Tew paid a huge ransom would they stop their attacks. Alex stood firm and used a chunk of his new-found wealth to hire a new hosting company that specialised in defending against cyber attacks. The new security measures did the trick and the extra cost was more than covered when Alex fed the story back to the press, bringing more traffic to the site and hundreds of thousands more dollars into the kitty.
In a little shy of twenty-four weeks Alex Tew went from poor student to dollar millionaire – and the crowd tonight loves him for it. Who cares if the shelf life of the business could be measured in months rather than years? Who cares that not one of the site’s countless imitators has managed to turn a student scheme into a sustainable business?
The word in the room is that Tew is getting ready to launch his next venture – one he promises will make even more money than the first. I believe him. And so does the crowd.
In the old media world, successful media businesses try to build bigger and bigger newspaper circulation, or to produce long-running TV shows that will go into syndication, or long-running film franchises with career actors and merchandise spin-offs, or to create best-selling, ten-book-deal authors. Stability and longevity is the key, with the long-term cash cows allowing media owners to take risks on new talent and first-time directors and authors.
In this new media world, however, the exact opposite is true. Stability means nothing. Audience attention spans are short and a million Next Big Things are always around the corner. Fads can be created in the morning, be hugely profitable by lunch time and dead in the water by midnight.
Never have wealth and fame been so easy to achieve, and so quick to vanish. Trends change so fast that the best many new media moguls can do is ‘get in, get rich, move on’. And no one in this room tonight exemplifies that ideology better than Alex Tew. A true five-minute new media mogul.
Suddenly the microphone is thrust into my hand. ‘Paul Carr,’ I begin. ‘I’m co-founder of a web-to-print publishing company called The Friday Project and I used to write a new media column for the Guardian …’
Fuck it, no one cares. I’m doing okay, making a living, but I’m a book publisher and before that I was a journalist. Old media. Not sexy, not exciting.
‘ …and given that I’m not trying to raise any money, I’m really just here to get drunk on Alex’s tab.’
Big laugh. Excellent. Nothing to see here. Time to get drunk, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow I’ll be at my desk, looking for new and interesting websites that we might be able to turn into new and interesting books.
I’ve been around the people in this room for my entire working life, and count many of them among my good friends. I’ve written about them in newspapers, and I’ve published their books. I go to their parties, and share their successes and failures. But I’m not one of them . And that’s fine by me.
And yet, in the back of my mind, a little bell is ringing. Ring. This guy – this kid – is a dollar millionaire. He’s four years younger than me. The Million Dollar Homepage was a bloody good idea – he deserves the success. But I’m a writer – I have a dozen good ideas before lunch – I deserve it, too. Ring. Ring. Ring.
‘That’s it for tonight, everyone. Finish your drinks and make your way outside.’
Suddenly my friend reappears. ‘Drink up. We’re going on to the Gardening Club.’
‘The Gardening Club? That’s a fucking dive.’
And it really is – a tiny, sweaty nightclub tucked away in a corner of Covent Garden, underneath the Rock Garden restaurant. It’s a favourite of students and tourists – where the drinks are cheap and the women are available on draught.
My friend looks at me as if I’m an idiot.
‘That’s the point, you twat. It’s student night and all the American students from the LSE2 will be there. Fit, smart American girls – and a pound a drink; what’s not to love?’
‘I’ve got work tomorrow.’
‘Ha. Yeah. Shut up. We’re leaving in five minutes.’
I put on my coat and walk out on to the Strand, where maybe half a dozen of the Internet’s brightest and best are waiting to make the five-minute walk to a dive bar for £1.00 Vodka Red Bulls and dancing until dawn.
Life doesn’t get much better than this, I think.
It’s amazing how wrong a person can be.
3 Quibbles on Prologue
Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore is the painfully true story of how Paul Carr attempted to become a dot com billionaire and in doing so lost his reputation, the love of his life and very nearly his freedom. It was originally published in 2008 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is available in all good bookshops. The complete ebook edition is available free via this site for reasons outlined here.
[...] first chapter – the Prologue – is now live. Go, read, comment. Related ReadingThe Prologue: Yours for the [...]
I can’t be bothered to post my niggles week by week chapter by chapter, here’s a great big boring list with all of them thrown together:
- Alex Tew made shed loads of money and so is celebrated as a genius, Ben Cohen didn’t make shed loads of money and then sent out a dumb press release, and so is vilified as the world’s greatest idiot. But Cohen’s business ideas (1. an internet community for Jewish people 2. pornography) were at least as good as Tew’s (1. use family connections to make a big media story out of ludicrously overpriced advertising space, a media story so big that the space actually becomes worth the asking price 2. do exactly the same thing again). Tew was very lucky, and Cohen a little childish.
- the book’s title is based on the idea that as a journalist hanging out with successful internet entrepreneurs Paul was a failure surrounded by successes – “bringing nothing to the party”. But this is nonsense, he bought bucketloads of press coverage, about the most valuable commodity there is in the internet industry (see: Alex Tew)
- the business side of the story is sold as a story of failure, yet actually, despite a total lack of experience in anything other than humourous writing (not normally of much commercial worth), Paul nonetheless founds several successful internet companies on the back of his writing, with real orders from real customers, earning not insignificant revenues. So what if he failed to become a billionaire, most new businesses make no money at all.
- the tag line says he “lost his repuation”, yet via his book he’s currently more famous and widely read than ever, and I’m sure has no shortage of job offers
- the tag line says Paul “lost of the love of his life”, and the relationships are generally described as failed or messed up. Yet “Savannah” (presumably not her real name) merely decides she’s only interested in him as a friend, so Paul hardly “lost” her. In fact, in general terms the book seems to feature Paul constantly sleeping with a succession of highly attractive, intelligent girls, a testament to how confidence and being good at making people laugh are a ticket to lots of sex. Just now I read Paul’s blog and it seems some girl who reads his twitter stream developed a crush on him, went to an internet event just to hunt him down, and then afterwards wrote on her blog admitting all of this. Me, jealous?
- the opening of Mr Wong’s is a brilliant scene – it must be awesome to have an obscenely rich friend who opens an exclusive club in central London just for the hell of it. But the stuff about a threat from Chinese triads is total fiction.
- the section with him being thrown in a cell and put “at risk of going to prison for seven years” is blown out of all proportion. Basically he was accused of commiting a very minor crime that he didn’t even commit, he then got very mouthy and awkward with a succession of policemen, and so (quelle surprise) they messed him about in turn. He would have been extremely unlucky to be convicted of fraud.
- the story of how thinkofthechildren gets Paul into trouble due to the inability of some people to understand sarcasm is funny, as is the same thing happening again at a big google party. But it’s dumb how these incidents are bigged up as making him either a) a satirist of Swift-esque proportions or b) a crazed, drunken lunatic.
- finally, the book begins with a BASIC program that just prints a stupid, unfunny phrase over and over again on the screen, and this is described as proof of a deep rooted rebelliousness and desire to “subvert the norm”. But hasn’t everyone who ever tried to learn to program as a kid has done exactly the same thing?
Hi James,
Thanks for taking the time to post such a long quibble, on Christmas Day of all days. Figured the least I could do is to respond to your points…
“- Alex Tew made shed loads of money and so is celebrated as a genius, Ben Cohen didn’t make shed loads of money and then sent out a dumb press release, and so is vilified as the world’s greatest idiot.”
If you’d been around in the early days of UK.com you’d know that Ben did far more than send out one press release. He sent out hundreds of the things, plus countless letters to newspapers and boasts of being a millionaire when he wasn’t. Alex actually became a millionaire. In cash. Also, you mention Alex using family connections to help grow MDHP. He didn’t.
“the book’s title is based on the idea that as a journalist hanging out with successful internet entrepreneurs Paul was a failure surrounded by successes – “bringing nothing to the party”. But this is nonsense, he bought bucketloads of press coverage, about the most valuable commodity there is in the internet industry (see: Alex Tew)”
I did indeed get bucketloads of press coverage – because I was a journalist and wrote it myself. I admit as much in the book. I was surrounded by people with millions of actual pounds. I had absolutely fuck all.
“- Paul nonetheless founds several successful internet companies on the back of his writing, with real orders from real customers, earning not insignificant revenues.”
I wish. I was kicked out of The Friday Project which later went bust and then I was kicked out of FridayCities which had no revenues. I suppose The Friday Thing was a success in that it had revenues, but only enough to pay our writers and server costs.
“- the tag line says he “lost his repuation”, yet via his book he’s currently more famous and widely read than ever, and I’m sure has no shortage of job offers”
I was libelled all over the Internet and was kicked out of two companies. I’m pretty sure that counts as losing a reputation. You’re right though to say that I went on to gain a different one. That’s sort of the point of the book.
“- the tag line says Paul “lost of the love of his life”, and the relationships are generally described as failed or messed up. Yet “Savannah” (presumably not her real name) merely decides she’s only interested in him as a friend, so Paul hardly “lost” her.”
I really don’t want to go into specifics on that one, except to say that I wish you were right. I haven’t spoken to Savannah (her real name) in two years.
“In fact, in general terms the book seems to feature Paul constantly sleeping with a succession of highly attractive, intelligent girls, a testament to how confidence and being good at making people laugh are a ticket to lots of sex.”
Yeah, you got me: that part is true. Go me!
“- the opening of Mr Wong’s is a brilliant scene – it must be awesome to have an obscenely rich friend who opens an exclusive club in central London just for the hell of it. But the stuff about a threat from Chinese triads is total fiction.”
It was a throwaway joke because the venue was in Chinatown. Hopefully that was clear. Also, as was also hopefully clear (because I explicitly said it), Rob didn’t pay for the venue – a “mysterious benefactor” did.
“- the section with him being thrown in a cell and put “at risk of going to prison for seven years” is blown out of all proportion. Basically he was accused of commiting a very minor crime that he didn’t even commit, he then got very mouthy and awkward with a succession of policemen, and so (quelle surprise) they messed him about in turn. He would have been extremely unlucky to be convicted of fraud.”
That’s not really a quibble given I say as much in the book. The seven years concerns the maximum term available. Obviously that was never going to happen – the problem was that a fraud conviction (which was a very real possibility – believe me, I was there) would have ruined my chances of ever raising money for a company. It would also probably have barred me from getting a US Visa.
- the story of how thinkofthechildren gets Paul into trouble due to the inability of some people to understand sarcasm is funny, as is the same thing happening again at a big google party. But it’s dumb how these incidents are bigged up as making him either a) a satirist of Swift-esque proportions or b) a crazed, drunken lunatic.
I’m not sure I said either. I was totally sober – hungover, actually – when I wrote TOTC. The Swift thing (which I admit in the book to dining out on) was a quote from the Christian Science Monitor.
- finally, the book begins with a BASIC program that just prints a stupid, unfunny phrase over and over again on the screen, and this is described as proof of a deep rooted rebelliousness and desire to “subvert the norm”. But hasn’t everyone who ever tried to learn to program as a kid has done exactly the same thing?
Of course they have. I’m not sure I’ve ever claimed a deep-rooted anything.
Hope that clears up your concerns! Thanks again for the comments – I really do appreciate you taking the time to post them, especially on Christmas Day.
P
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