Kevin rolled his eyes, shaking his head.
‘I think Kevin has a good point,’ said Andrei. ‘The way the cyber world develops isn’t set in stone. Social networking sites took a step forward towards Deep Connectedness. With Fisbbowll, I think we’re taking another step forward and we’re getting to a much deeper, more meaningful level. But to do that, we have to have a broad conceptualization of what Deep Connectedness might mean. We need to be inclusive. We need to offer as much as we can. Because what Deep Connectedness looks like when it fully develops – what the players in that world look like – I think that’s something the cyber world itself will have to choose. It may look different in different places. It may look different on Fishbowll compared to some other site. That’s because people would be using Fishbowll and other sites for different aspects of Deep Connectedness, which is totally cool. So, philosophically, I agree with Kevin. The cyber world will evolve as suits it best, just like the physical world. There’ll be things that don’t work and therefore disappear – evolutionary dead ends, if you will – and things that do work and survive. I don’t know that it won’t be, but I hope Fishbowll isn’t a dead end. What I am pretty sure I do know is that the best way to make it one is if we sit here deciding how everything’s got to be. That decision has to come from the users.’ Andrei glanced at Kevin. Then he shrugged. ‘That’s my perspective.’
‘I don’t disagree with it,’ said Chris. ‘I don’t disagree with what either of you have said. Kevin, the distinction I drew between true and false Deep Connectedness is an artificial construct, I agree. And by the way, I think it’s great that you guys think about this stuff and debate it.’
‘Like we need your approval,’ growled Kevin.
‘I also think that most people are so focused on their own selfish desires for whatever they can get out of what’s put in front of them that they will pay very little attention to the way things are developing. So the way things develop … I think that’s going to happen blind.’
‘Evolution is blind,’ said Andrei.
‘True. But not even evolution is as blind as we are. When social networking sites took off, if people had been told they could have a free site where all their data’s exposed so any advertiser can hit on them, or they could have a site that might cost them a few bucks a year but their data would be completely protected and they’d never see an unsolicited message, what do you think they would have said? That’s the trade-off, right? But look where we are. Now, what does that tell you?’
‘That we’re a sad species,’ muttered Kevin.
Chris laughed. ‘What I’m interested in is what would be the effect on Fishbowll if it became known that x per cent of profiles were … I won’t use the word false … let’s say pseudonymous.’
‘They do know. It’s right there on the home page. You may encounter avatars, pseudonyms and even real people.’
‘Do people read that? Do they process it?’
‘Did you?’ retorted Kevin. ‘Look, it’s there. We’re not people’s mothers. Fishbowll’s there for them. They do what they want with it.’
‘I think it could have an effect,’ said Andrei, ‘if something happened to make it a real issue that there are people using Fishbowll under pseudonyms. You know, if there was some kind of major crime or something that could somehow be linked to that.’
‘Like people who don’t commit crimes don’t use pseudonyms,’ said Kevin.
‘Exactly,’ said Andrei. ‘I think the effect would be short term. I’m trying to build something for the long term. I’m looking ten, twenty, thirty years out. I want Fishbowll to be the true global dating site for ideas, the place you go to make connections. I want the clusters that are only potential today, because people can’t find their way to others in their cluster, to become real. And that can only happen through Deep Connectedness. And if that’s going to happen, like I said, it’s going to happen in the way the cyber community wants it to. Which means we need to have that broad conceptualization, be open to what they want. If they want pseudonyms, it’s going to be with pseudonyms. Or not. I don’t know. I don’t care. The only thing I do know is that it’s not going to happen in the way three guys at Yao’s says it has to happen. That might work for a few years, but after that, if we don’t let our users mould our service in the way they want it to be, someone else will appear and fill that gap. I don’t want to leave a gap. I don’t have an ideological need that forces me to leave that gap.’ Andrei looked directly at Chris. ‘Do you?’
Chris laughed. ‘I have no ideological need at all.’
‘So we’re good?’ said Andrei.
‘We’re good.’ Chris looked at Kevin. ‘I wasn’t questioning the decision, Kevin. I just wanted to understand how it was made.’
The next time Chris had a chance to talk to Kevin, he mentioned Tonya again. He said Ben had told him that Kevin had done a Cooley.
‘Wow,’ said Kevin, ‘Ben’s really been talking, hasn’t he? Why are you so interested?’
‘I’d like to see how it’s done.’
‘Why?’
‘I just would.’
‘Go take a class,’ said Kevin.
‘I don’t think they have classes for this.’
‘Bad luck.’
But Chris persisted whenever he had the opportunity, trying to get Kevin to show him Tonya’s home page. Kevin said the home page was deregistered. They both knew he could recover it if he wanted to. Chris told him that Ben had said he used Photox and had actually improved it, and asked Kevin to show him what he had done to the program. Grudgingly, Kevin mentioned some of the technical details. Chris wanted to know more. Over time, Kevin’s conversations with Chris grew longer. The chance to talk about his obsession got the better of him, especially as Ben, who had shared his early forays into psuedonymity, seemed to have had some kind of religious conversion against it. Kevin was still somewhat resentful of Chris, and he wasn’t completely sure that Chris wasn’t going to turn around at some point and ridicule him over his online personas, but eventually, one night, Kevin couldn’t help himself. He pulled up a home page dominated by a picture of a grinning woman sitting in a boat with a great white rearing out of the water in the background. ‘This is Tonya!’
Chris sat beside him, fascinated. He was full of questions about what Kevin had done, how he had conceived of Tonya’s persona, how he produced the photos, how he had introduced her into Fishbowll. Kevin clicked through a few more photos that he had posted on the site. The same woman’s face peered out, at a party, with friends, and, of course, on boats or in the water. A couple of pictures showed her bobbing at the surface in a shark cage, a big grin on her face and the tiniest bikini imaginable covering her butt. Chris couldn’t believe Kevin had concocted those photos out of fragments of other shots.
By now, Kevin had lost the last vestiges of his suspicions about Chris’s motives and was enthusiastically telling him how he constructed and managed his personas. Photoxing photos was only part of it. You had to get into the head of the persona. You had to know the kind of things they would they do, the kind of things would they say. It all had to be coherent.
‘It’s like being a novelist,’ said Chris.
‘A little, I guess. You know, there was a time when I was a kid that I wanted to be a screenwriter.’
‘Really?’
‘I never thought I could be an actor.’
That wasn’t the last time they discussed his pseudonymous activity. They bonded over it. Kevin’s residual resentment of Chris for being allowed to buy into Fishbowll drained away. He revealed other profiles to him, personas he had kept secret from Andrei and Ben. Chris kept asking him questions, wanting to know more. They spent hours at Kevin’s screen, looking over messages that had come in for his personas, deciding how to act, what to say, what photos to concoct. Chris couldn’t seem to get enough of it.
Then Chris said he wanted to develop a profile. Kevin shared his improved versions of Facemaker and Photox, and helped him do i
t.
19
BY THE END of September Ben had left the house to go back to Stanford for his senior year, taking his aquarium with him. One of the programmers had left as well, although the other one living at the house had got a leave of absence to stay on at Fishbowll. Chris was spending less time at the house and more in LA. On one of his trips back, he suggested to Andrei that they get an office. Andrei was resistant, but they needed more programmers and people with commercial skills. Were they all going to live and work in the house? Eventually Andrei agreed. Chris contacted a realtor who was recommended to him by the guy who had found him FriendTracker’s office in LA four years previously.
In the third week of October, just shy of its first birthday, Fishbowll moved into its first office, a bare, 1,200 square-foot space over a frozen yoghurt shop and minimart on Ramona Street, Palo Alto. Desks came from a local second-hand office furniture store. Other stuff depended on whatever anyone wanted to bring in. But there was one thing that Andrei insisted on. He drove with Ben to a store called Fish Palace and together they bought a six-foot aquarium and stocked it with three dozen fish.
On the day they moved into the office on Ramona, Fishbowll consisted of eleven people: Andrei, Kevin, Ben, Eric Baumer the infrastructure guy, and seven programmers. Chris, who was a lot more than a passive investor, made it a round dozen. Ben would come into the office some days when he had time between classes and Chris was there when he came up from LA, although he and Andrei often hung out in the house on La Calle Court, where Andrei and Kevin and one of the programmers continued to live.
Life in the office was chaotic. It was the scene of typically heroic Fishbowll wheelspins as the user base continued to grow and new features were added, but everything else was dealt with ad hoc by whoever had the time and inclination. Eric commuted from Hayward each day but talked mostly to Chris, even if Chris was in LA and Andrei was sitting three yards away from him. Ben was handling press relations, customer service, legal matters and just about any other outward-facing stuff from his student room at Stanford, fitting it in around his course programme, which didn’t make for the most responsive approach to a workload that was growing exponentially as the website expanded. For three consecutive weekends the infrastructure was close to breaking, despite Eric’s titanic efforts to keep the site running. Eventually he rang Chris in frustration and threatened to quit.
Chris got on a plane, came into the office and sat down with Andrei and Eric. He told Andrei that Eric didn’t feel valued by him and that Eric thought Andrei had no idea what it was taking to keep the site running.
‘Eric, that’s not true,’ said Andrei. ‘You’re a Stakhanovite.’
‘I don’t want to be a fucking Stakhanovite!’ yelled Eric. ‘I want to run a site that’s got a better than even chance of staying up! We need to do stuff to the architecture so it doesn’t suck up so much server space.’
‘I know,’ said Andrei.
‘No. We need to do it now! Not after you’ve done whatever hundred thousand projects you’ve got in mind. Now, Andrei!’
‘He’s right,’ said Chris. ‘And you don’t need to be doing that kind of stuff yourself, Andrei. You should be working on new stuff, groundbreaking stuff. You need more programmers doing this kind of thing.’ He glanced at Eric. ‘Can you excuse us for a minute?’
It was a nugatory request, because there were no partitions in the office and everyone was already listening to what they were saying anyway. But as requested, Eric got up and stalked off to sit symbolically on the edge of a desk a couple of yards away.
‘You know what?’ said Chris. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
He and Andrei went out and started walking up Ramona.
‘You asked me to join Fishbowll because you wanted my advice,’ said Chris.
Andrei nodded.
‘And I presume you want me to be honest with you.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘OK, well, I think there are a couple of things that have happened. The first is, Andrei, you’re running a business now. I don’t claim to have all that much experience in that area, but when a guy like Eric, a guy who’s been keeping this website running when I don’t know how it’s been possible to do that, given the features you keep adding … when a guy like Eric says he doesn’t feel you listen to him, you need to take notice of that.’
‘I don’t know what he’s talking about! He’s a Stakhanovite. I’ve told him he’s a Stakhanovite.’
‘That’s not what I mean. When it comes to the operational stuff, he talks to me.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Well, I shouldn’t be running your operations. Trust me – you don’t want me doing that. Basically, Andrei, you need to decide what you want to do. What’s your role? Do you want to develop the functionality, do you want sit there coding all day – and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, because your ability to do that is what’s got Fishbowll to where it is today – or do you want to lead this business? Now, I found Eric, and I found this office, but there’s a million things that need to be done. We need more people. Someone’s got to recruit them, Andrei. And the more people we recruit, the more time and ability it’s going to take to manage them. Maybe we should get a CEO, and then you can focus on the coding.’
Andrei stopped on the pavement. ‘Is that what you think? Is that what you came up here to tell me?’
‘It’s an option. Someone needs to lead this business. As a business. Not just do coding.’
Andrei folded his arms. ‘You’re right. I need to decide.’
Chris nodded.
‘I want to lead this business.’
‘That was quick.’
‘I know what I want to do,’ said Andrei.
‘You might want to think about it.’
‘No. I don’t want to just do coding. I’ve seen what’s been happening. I know we need more people. I should have done something about it. I need to step up to the plate.’ Andrei looked at him. ‘Or do you think I’m making a mistake?’
‘Not necessarily. Not if you want to do it. But if you want to be CEO, then you need a manager to manage the management stuff.’
‘Isn’t that what Eric does?’
‘Eric handles the infrastructure. I’m talking about … call it a chief operating officer. Someone who’ll do the recruitment, manage the people, all that stuff. You can do what the CEO does – lead the company, set the vision, decide where the people focus their time and where they don’t.’
‘And code?’
‘The really important stuff. Only that.’
Andrei started to walk on. ‘A chief operating officer. You mean some guy in a suit.’
Chris sighed. He’d had his own troubles with guys in suits, but they had their role. ‘We can get him out of a suit.’
‘Why can’t you be the COO?’
Chris laughed.
‘Why not?’
‘Trust me, you don’t want me doing that. You want someone who knows how to really operate a business. Someone who loves to do that stuff, all the shitty little stuff, day in day out.’
‘I don’t want anyone in a suit in my office.’
‘Then we’ll get him out of it. And we’ll get someone who knows what an internet start-up is like. But honestly, Andrei, if we don’t get this person now, I fear for what’s going to happen.’
‘We’re going corporate,’ muttered Andrei.
‘We’re facing reality,’ said Chris.
Andrei walked in silence. He knew that Chris was right. And he also knew that if he was going to lead Fishbowll as it continued to grow, if that was the challenge he was setting himself, he had to stop wishing it could forever be like it had been in Robinson House or La Calle Court. It was only a year since Fishbowll had started, but those days were already gone. It was childish to pine for them, childish to complain about going corporate. Andrei promised himself then and there that he would never complain about it again. If he did, everyone else would too.
; ‘I know a headhunter who does a lot of recruitment for startups. She can help us get a COO. I can handle this for you, Andrei. It’s just … you need to be happy that we need to do it. And I really think we don’t have a—’
‘I know,’ said Andrei. ‘Enough. I know. You’re right.’
‘So I’ll go and talk to this headhunter?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you said—’
‘No, you shouldn’t handle this for me. I should handle this myself. I have to start to lead this business, isn’t that what you’re saying? If I can’t do more than code the website, then I should hand over to someone else.’
‘And you’re sure you want to do that? A lot of start-ups bring in a professional CEO. The VC firms almost always demand it.’
‘We haven’t gone to a VC firm. It’s my call.’ Andrei paused. ‘You really don’t think I’m making a mistake?’
‘You’re a programmer. You have no experience of being a CEO. You have a massively growing business.’ Chris grinned. ‘Hell, I say, do it!’
‘I’m serious,’ said Andrei. ‘Tell me if I’m wrong.’
Chris nodded. ‘Seriously? I don’t know if you’re going to be a good CEO. But neither do you. And that’s a good thing. I’d be a lot more worried if you said you thought you were going to be great. You’re going to have to learn a hell of a lot, Andrei. Don’t kid yourself.’
‘I’m willing to learn.’
Chris grinned again. ‘Right! Let’s go and get you a damn good COO.’
‘Give me the name of the headhunter.’
‘Let’s go and see her together.’
‘I said I’d handle it,’ said Andrei. ‘I need to lead. I need to do this stuff.’
‘Andrei, there are a lot of flaky start-ups out there. If she’s going to get you a great guy, she needs to know this isn’t one. Let me come with you. Trust me on this. That’s the first thing you’ve got to learn, Andrei. What you can do yourself and when you need help.’
Andrei looked at Chris for a moment. ‘OK. We should have a meeting with the guys. They need to know about this COO thing.’
Fishbowl Page 16