Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  ‘You think I should have sold?’ asked Andrei.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But back then? Did you think so?’

  ‘I don’t know what I thought. A hundred million dollars. That was like … Is this serious? Is this for us? Tell me the truth. Were you tempted? You must have been tempted.’

  Andrei shrugged.

  ‘I bet you were!’

  ‘A little.’

  Ben laughed. He sucked on his beer, then he put it down. ‘That was before Chris came along.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Andrei. ‘That was before him.’

  ‘You know, about Chris – you should watch out.’

  Andrei looked at Ben. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I just want to be honest with you. As a friend, someone has to tell you. I don’t know if he has the same vision you have, Andrei. Fishbowl’s yours, not his. You built it to what it is. Just remember that.’

  ‘Is this about Farming again?’

  ‘It’s about lots of things. He’s not … he’s not serious.’

  ‘Chris? What are you talking about? Do you know how much time he’s put into this?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. It’s a game. Everything’s a game to him.’

  ‘Look, Chris has his faults. OK? I know that. I don’t think of him like I used to. I used to be a little in awe of him. Not any more.’

  ‘You should think about whether he’s the right kind of person to be involved.’

  ‘He has a lot to offer, Ben. He shares more of my vision than you think. And he isn’t leaving.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I’m just saying—’

  ‘Don’t go! Look, Ben, don’t leave now. Please. Something’s about to start. Something totally awesome. I want you to stay and be part of it.’

  Ben waited for Andrei to tell him more, but he didn’t.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Ben eventually. ‘What would I do?’

  ‘You can’t leave now. I’ll give you a team. I’ll talk to Jenn. We’ll make sure everyone knows exactly what you do.’

  ‘What’s this amazing thing you’re talking about?’

  ‘It’s an idea Chris and I have been thinking about.’

  ‘Chris and you?’

  ‘We still haven’t got it all worked out, but we’re pretty close.’

  Ben waited again to hear what it was.

  ‘Look, don’t leave, Ben. You’ll regret it. Just wait. The ride’s not over. It’s only beginning. At least think about it. Will you think about it?’

  ‘I have thought about it.’

  ‘Think about it some more. Let’s talk about it again.’

  ‘Tell me what this thing is you’re thinking about.’

  Andrei hesitated. ‘I will. I promise.’

  Conversations between Andrei and Ben continued for the next few weeks, but Ben couldn’t be persuaded to change his mind and Andrei, for some reason, didn’t reveal the big idea he had hinted at. When Ben asked Kevin if he knew what it was, Kevin claimed that he didn’t.

  Eventually, Andrei grew reconciled to the prospect of Ben’s departure. He tried to accept that becoming a therapist was more important to Ben – at least at this point in his life – than continuing at Fishbowl. The night before Ben left, Andrei went with him and Kevin for one last meal at Yao’s. Lopez served them, just like in the old days, and when Tony Yao heard that Ben was leaving, he came out of the kitchen to say goodbye. Andrei had his usual noodles, but he didn’t have much of an appetite. It was the passing of an era.

  The next day Ben was gone.

  Within a week Andrei had sat down with Kevin and Jenn McGrealy to let them in on the big idea that he and Chris had been hatching.

  33

  THE IDEA HAD germinated early in Chris’s mind, even before he flew to Palo Alto to propose the first experiments in Farming. At that point the notion was barely formed, embryonic, but if it hadn’t been in his head in some shape, he wouldn’t have bothered with the experiments. On Andrei’s side, the idea occurred to him later, as the experiments neared their end and he began to focus on the possibilities they opened up – and also the limitations.

  For both of them, Farming, in the form in which it had been put into practice in the Fish Farm, was a sideshow. It was labour intensive, requiring a highly skilled, emotionally intelligent sales person to spend his or her time behind a palotl, developing and working a network in order to encourage awareness of a particular brand. Any one person could manage only five or six palotls at a time, so the model would only ever work for high-value items, for which each individual sale generated a substantial revenue. If that was all that could have been achieved with Farming, neither of them would have thought it was worth the effort. It might have been a new model of advertising on the net, one many more times effective than the existing model for the products to which it could be applied, but it would never take the place of the existing model because those products were so restricted. The really interesting questions were: what if it could not only complement the traditional model but displace it? And what would it take to do that?

  Naturally, they saw the first question differently. For Chris, what they had achieved was proof of user acceptance for a radical new model of marketing – but the real prize would be a form of selling that could extend across all goods and services, no matter how low in value, from bubblegum to soda. For Andrei, what they had was a limited and inefficient form of connectedness between organizations and individuals – but potentially the harbinger of a radically new form of connectedness with a scale and reach never seen before. Where their interests converged was in the second question.

  The answer to it was clear: what was required was the development of an automated program that produced and managed palotls indistinguishable from those of the manually operated palotls of the Fish Farm. A program that could scan the network, identify people who were potentially responsive to a particular message, create customized personas indistinguishable from real people to engage those individuals, develop connections, hold conversations, build relationships and deliver the message in the most effective way and at the optimal moment calculated to achieve a positive response. Set free in the Fishbowl environment, with a defined set of objectives, it would be independent, capable of learning by itself, adapting, developing. As Chris might have put it: create that program and you could sell anything, whatever its value. As Andrei might have put it: create that program, and you could create connectedness between an individual and any organization, whatever its size.

  The common objective of developing an automated palotl program meant that they were never forced to confront each other’s divergent conceptualizations of what such a program would be for. In fact, each of them thought that they were in control of what they were about to do.

  It was Chris who first broached the idea of trying to develop a palotl program during one of his fortnightly trips to Palo Alto, during the Farming experiment. Typically, he regarded the prospect as both unprecedentedly momentous and belly-achingly hilarious. The idea of a program that could rifle unseen through the electronic world, listening, morphing, talking, asking, answering and selling stuff as if it were a regular person was so abominably horrendous that it titillated the cynic in him like nothing else he had ever known. But if they could pull it off, it would also be the greatest technical advance in his adult lifetime, with the prospect of wealth on a scale almost unimaginable.

  After two years of working with Andrei, Chris honestly didn’t know the extent to which Andrei really didn’t care about the money that Fishbowl was capable of earning, just as he still didn’t know if Andrei’s remarks sometimes betrayed a parchingly dry deadpan humour or utter, naive seriousness. All Andrei ever talked about was Deep Connectedness, and he professed indifference to Fishbowl’s commercial success as long as it generated enough cash to keep funding its development. Was that real or put on? Andrei would have been far from the first tech CEO to hide his true commercial aspirations behind such a preten
ce. Chris was sure that Deep Connectedness was the only thing that had mattered to the Andrei he had first met over dinner at Mang, but he found it hard to believe that nothing had changed as Fishbowl generated ever larger revenues and its valuation climbed. Yet even if Andrei was only affecting his dorm-boy altruism, Chris knew that, as a result, he couldn’t openly appeal to an interest in money – he would have to leave that to Andrei, who was smart enough to see the potential, and let him work it out for himself. So in proposing that they try to develop a palotl program, Chris emphasized what he knew Andrei would openly respond to: the size of the challenge, the magnitude of the technical advance, the gain in efficiency.

  Andrei, for his part, thought that he had stepped out of Chris’s shadow. He rarely had moments now when he wondered if he was the right person to lead Fishbowl and, when he did, he wouldn’t have considered handing over to Chris, as he had sometimes considered in the past. Chris’s offer to return his shares when he had proposed the Farming experiment had been a kind of trigger that changed the way Andrei saw him. It had struck him as impulsive and immature, and Andrei now thought he could see those traits in Chris going all the way back to when he had first met him. The way he had behaved towards James Langan had been unnecessary and spiteful – they had all gone behind James’s back, but there had been no need to taunt him with it at the end. Chris deserved the punch he had got. And in retrospect, the way Chris had behaved during the first summer of Fishbowl’s existence in La Calle Court had been more frat-boy than any of them. Chris also had an unsavoury habit of hitting on young Fishbowl staffers, which had already resulted in a couple of settlements for sexual harassment costing significant sums of money.

  But Andrei wasn’t considering cutting his ties with Chris. He no longer needed him for his business acumen, having a team of people with more of it than Chris would ever have, but he still valued Chris’s curious, restless mind, his iconoclasm. Fishbowl could never have too much of that. As long as he knew Chris’s faults, he thought, he would be able to take the best of what Chris had to offer for Deep Connectedness while preventing him from doing any damage to the business.

  But Andrei’s understanding of human nature was never his strong point. After two years, he still hadn’t grasped the complex and changing mix of drives that impelled Chris Hamer – and he had no idea that he hadn’t grasped them. Chris was fascinated by big ideas, and had been genuinely bowled over by Andrei’s vision of connectedness when he had first come across Fishbowl. But even then, at the very start, he had sensed the commercial potential, which was always of interest to him. As that potential had got bigger, with no sign of tailing off, it had become more important to Chris. And at the same time, in Farming, the mischief-maker in Chris found himself with the opportunity to put something so cynical, so exploitative into the world that not even Mike Sweetman at Homeplace had ever thought of it. And the best thing about it was … the more mischief he made, the more money he stood to earn! It was like FriendTracker again, but a thousand times bigger.

  So under a mutual misunderstanding of who was leading whom, and why they were doing it, Andrei and Chris began working together to sketch out the project that would be Fishbowl’s greatest advance yet, and arguably the thing that would change the nature of the internet for ever.

  The size of the challenge was beyond daunting. Automated programs to converse electronically, or chatbots, had been around since a primitive prototype called ELIZA was unveiled in the 1960s. What Fishbowl would be attempting to achieve was exponentially more sophisticated than anything that had been developed since. Anyone looking carefully could identify existing chatbots without much difficulty, even the most advanced. And a palotl needed to be much more than a chatbot. It had to have pictures of itself, family, friends. If you weren’t going to use Photoxed images of real people, you would need image-generation software that was hugely more advanced than anything that was currently available. The program would need to learn and adapt. The artificial intelligence integrated in it would need to be at a level that was far beyond anything yet created.

  Investigation of the possibility of achieving all of this started as Chris’s Farming experiments drew to a close. Each fortnight, Chris came to Palo Alto to meet Andrei and Kevin to review progress, and usually stayed over at the condo. The next day, he and Andrei would go to Yao’s and, over noodles and kung pao chicken, out of view of anyone else in the company, they began to outline a picture of what the future would look like. They continued after the Fish Farm was set up, spending hours at Yao’s talking through the problem, identifying the needs, roughly architecting the outlines of a solution. As their ideas developed, Andrei’s early thoughts about the breadth and power of the potential benefits of this type of Deep Connnectedness began to crytallize. He realized that it could be used for far more meaningful objectives than selling. It could play a transformative role in medicine, education, legal services – anything that could be done remotely but required the empathy and adaptability of a fellow human being.

  Between meetings, Andrei spent time investigating chatbot engineering to try to determine how far away from that solution the current state of technology was. He read up on artificial intelligence and came to the conclusion that, eventually, the necessary advances would be made to enable such a program to be created. It was only a question of time – but how much of it? If Fishbowl got enough smart people together, could the problems be solved in a reasonable period, or was it something that would take decades of painstaking, plodding work as one advance built slowly on aother? In other words, if they decided to take on the challenge, was it only a question of how much money they were prepared to spend?

  Andrei didn’t know.

  Chris was desperate to get Andrei to go ahead. If he could have funded the work himself, he would have, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to raise anywhere near the money required. He needed Fishbowl to do that. It wasn’t a program designed purely for selling stuff, Chris kept reminding Andrei. While that was a legitimate form of Deep Connectedness, it would receive the earliest attention only because it was needed in order to repay the costs of the program’s development. Then there would be all the other uses they had been talking about. Imagine bringing medicine to a billion people in Africa. Imagine bringing education to every slum in Asia and every favela in South America. These were new forms of Deep Connectedness just waiting to be developed. To the extent that they even existed today, they were hopelessly inefficient.

  Nonetheless, Andrei had his doubts. There was no guarantee they would succeed. And even Fishbowl’s coffers didn’t run deep enough to fund this by itself. They would need to raise money. And it certainly wasn’t something they would want to do as a public company under the beady eye of Wall Street’s analysts, which meant they would need to find the money elsewhere.

  That wasn’t a problem, said Chris. By now, there wasn’t a venture capitalist in the world who wouldn’t have been interested in taking a stake in Fishbowl. As he had a year earlier, before the Farming experiments had diverted him, Chris suggested they should go and see Bob Leib – this time not to get his advice but to get his money.

  But Andrei still wasn’t sure whether, however much money they threw at it, it would be enough. Fishbowl had grown through steady, incremental, multi-faceted innovation. Throwing a huge sum at one specific project in the hope of a Great Leap Forward wasn’t something he had ever done before. His procrastination went on for weeks. These were the same weeks during which he was trying to persuade Ben to stay at the company, when he kept hinting at a huge project that he and Chris were planning.

  Andrei was still caught in two minds when Ben left. Somehow, his departure seemed to intensify the need to decide.

  Andrei met Chris again at Yao’s.

  Chris had made all the arguments before: ‘Someone’s going to do it,’ he said to Andrei. ‘If we’ve worked out that this is the future, so will someone else. The prize will fall to the one who dares to try.’

  ‘Do you know h
ow much we’re talking about spending?’ said Andrei.. Every other project he had taken on, every problem he had set out to solve – he had always believed there was a solution in reach. It was only a matter of being smart enough to find it quickly. But in this case, no matter how much they spent, they still might fail. They might not get the program to the level of sophistication required within years or even decades.

  ‘Andrei, Bob Leib is going to bite your hand off when we make him an offer. He’ll be getting a stake in Fishbowl, which he dreams about getting, and at a mother of a discount from its value even as it is today. So even if we blow all his cash and nothing comes of it, there’ll be enough in the future from what we already do to give him a return he doesn’t deserve. Don’t lose any sleep over Bob Leib.’ Chris leaned closer. ‘If we succeed … the returns will blow his head off. He’ll be on his knees thanking you for taking this chance.’

  That was another thing that worried Andrei. Chris had told him to keep talk of their plans vague and not mention the idea of developing a palotl program if and when they went to Leib. ‘We should tell him,’ said Andrei.

  ‘Not if you want to get this done. He’ll only thank you in retrospect. Tell him up front, and you’ll spend the next six months working out a business case to get him to agree and you’ll be giving him and his boys a progress report at every board meeting to get them to release the next bunch of funds, which will only be a quarter of what you need. You want to try to run this project like that, go ahead, tell him.’ Chris laughed. ‘Trust me. That’s how these guys are.’

  Andrei watched him doubtfully.

  ‘Don’t worry about the money. Just think about what it would be like to solve this motherfucker. It’s going to be like nothing else we’ve done. This kind of thing happens once in a generation. Once in a century. That’s what Fishbowl is for. The big stuff. The stuff no one else will do. We’re going to do something that would take fifty years if we left it to the rest of the world to find a way. And we’re going to invent Deep Connectedness in a way that no one has ever seen before. It’s a quantum leap in efficiency. It’s not about advertising. It’s about education, it’s about medicine, it’s about changing anything you want to change. And are you telling me that’s going to make the world worse?’ Chris smiled. ‘Are you seriously telling me that? Andrei, I’d go further. We can’t not do this. We’ve got a responsibility to try.’