The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus

by Adam Leigh

  Subconsciously, I realised that Dimitri could be an asset in my eventual escape plan. I therefore tried to befriend him and give him, as best I could, some tips on how to be, quite frankly, a little less weird. I explained that I wanted to help him integrate into the company better and we agreed to meet for a chat in a coffee shop every week, at the same time and table (he really didn’t do flexibility).

  He was very receptive to advice. Dimitri approached life’s intricacies like a solvable mathematical equation. I found myself distilling social problems into made-up equations. If I told him that to have friends, you needed to make an effort, he would stare at me blankly. However, if I wrote down on a piece of paper the spurious notation Friendship = Consideration + Empathy + Effort, we were cooking on gas. As a consequence, he became totally committed to self-improvement. Soon, it was hard to hear his name mentioned, especially by women, without the comment: ‘Oh Dimitri, he is so sweet.’

  I grew to like him, and we became friends. He had a charming determination and his pursuit of a solution to any issue that confronted him was single-minded and absolute. He developed his own image, which some mistook for pretension but was basically a reflection of his adherence to routine and consistency. A white tee shirt, black jeans, white trainers. Summer or winter, and always pristine. Although still only twenty-three, he had a maturity that belied his stubble-free baby face, and a kinetic energy focused on solving the next technical challenge that came his way, as long as it was bigger than the last.

  He was the first person I spoke to outside of my family about the opportunity. I texted him from a few extra days of paternity leave I’d decided to take, and asked if we could meet up. A confused response arrived: Not normal meeting time. Why? I had underestimated that recalibrating his routine was not always easy. I replied: Big opportunity. Confidential. Then, to arouse his inner coding ambition, I sent another one simply saying: Technically huge challenge.

  Two days later, we sat in a discreet corner of our normal rendezvous location (not our regular table, engendering a bit more angst and fidgeting) and made brief small talk.

  “Why have I not seen you for a while?” he asked.

  “I’m taking some extra paternity leave. I’ve just had a daughter.” Nope, he was none the wiser. Paternity leave and children were code he had not learnt to write or understand. Not an auspicious beginning for the concept I was about to pitch to him.

  We caught up on his life. He had a new girlfriend from the office, which surprised me as he had never discussed anything intimate. I actually got more than I bargained for. He explained their dating routine, which had very little inherent romance and was operated with the rigour of a project plan. Drinks, dinner and sex were all slotted in with a fixed time allocation. I couldn’t take any more time-based explanations of his relationship, so I kicked off the conversation.

  “Dimitri, I want you to join me in a start-up that I think will make you rich and famous.” It seemed, these days, that I couldn’t chat without sounding like I was pitching or making grandiose statements.

  “I’m not so interested in the money. But fame, I like. I want to be recognised as someone who can build anything. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I can promise you that you’re the only person on this planet who can make this work.” This language was getting out of hand. Was I ever going to be able to have a business conversation in which I was not hyperbolising the simplest comment?

  “Tell me, Alex. Tell me how.”

  I knew Dimitri was going to be a part of this before I started to explain my thinking. He was as vain as any feckless artist or creative visionary. It wasn’t conceit or self-belief but the competitive need to be better than anyone else. I therefore explained the idea in terms of global reach and scalability. Unsurprisingly, he had no interest in the proposition as he couldn’t have cared less about a business based on assuaging parental guilt. He cared about functionality and distilled the challenges into three questions:

  How could we create an experience that turned a need into a solution, and how would we create enough solutions?

  How did we roll out globally?

  And, most importantly, when could he start?

  I stuttered vague answers to the first two questions but had a much more definitive response for the last one. We could hand in our resignations together. We’d have to be careful that it didn’t look like I had poached him directly because I was sure I had a non-solicitation clause in my contract, but I was happy to stretch the truth if required to explain.

  It was interesting that he asked so little about funding, revenue modelling and his ownership of this venture. His ambition was born out of his superior intelligence. It was propelled by a need to be the cleverest technician who could create something amazing from scratch. He either trusted me implicitly or did not have the emotional sophistication to worry about sacrificing everything to the whim of someone else’s business idea.

  We talked for three hours, until I got an angry text from Sarah yanking me back to the world of practical rather than virtual parenting. In that time, Dimitri had already started to shape a plan on how he was going to build my idea. Using his iPhone calculator and a scrap of paper, he mapped out the build time required and the structure of a team needed to help him along the way.

  Dimitri was extremely animated by the time I got up to go and was scrawling code – indifferent, if not oblivious, to my departure. Sensing the momentous possibility of our future professional union, I quoted Humphrey Bogart, with an unconvincing attempt at an American accent.

  “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Without blinking or averting his gaze from his crazed working, he simply replied, “Who is Louis?”

  “It’s from Casablanca,” I explained.

  “Pointless conversation. I have never been there.”

  ***

  I needed someone to bang heads together and keep us all in check. As I spent more time with Julian, I realised that he was focused on doing the deal, rather than the softer values of people or company culture. I had a solution.

  Alice Evans was the most ruthlessly organised person I had ever met. She had run major digital transformation projects (a bit of industry jargon for creating transactional websites and apps to help businesses operate differently) for nearly fifteen years. Her reputation was formidable, as she matched her efficiency with a determination that was rather scary.

  Alice was riddled with integrity. She would always do the right thing even if it wasn’t the most convenient option. She had a proper moral code. I couldn’t even remember the code to my gym locker.

  The adherence to good conduct and appropriateness came from her religious background. Her father was a Presbyterian minister in a small village, and she had been a bookish child who was obedient, courteous and deeply unhappy. In her teens, she grappled with her sexuality and realised, to quote the popular expression, that she was the ‘only gay in the village’. She thus fled to study in London, settling into an urban life free from the judgement of a blinkered rural community. But she had absorbed the values of decency, hard work and spiritual courage that her father quietly promulgated from his tiny pulpit. This proved a formidable combination in the tech world she entered post-university. She had a mantra, which she referred to as the Eleventh Commandment for the digital age: ‘Thou shalt not cut corners.’

  Alice met her partner and future wife, Caroline, at university and they were the model of domestic calm. They had two small sons, and both worked hard in their respective careers (Caroline was a teacher). Alice was just a very nice person, with whom I worked for a number of years in the early part of my career and stayed close to thereafter. We helped each other with advice and guidance. She once told me that she wanted to have choices in her life so that she could do some good with her expertise. She proved you could do business ethically and also ensure that you managed your career to protect your own interests. We were, of course, going to put a strain on t
hese values as we grew more successful.

  We initially met to run through the idea and she got very excited, loving the concept of doing something positive for parents. She was an articulate advocate for non-traditional families. She didn’t mention money, but I knew she would be mulling the possibility of taking a risk to reap a reward.

  The chemistry the following day with Julian was not great. He had met Dimitri a few days previously and was already in love, never having met someone so completely controlled but also unshakeably convinced of his greatness. He told me that I had to handcuff myself to Dimitri and keep him happy with whatever it took: vodka, caviar, fast cars, girlfriends, boyfriends, obedient puppies or a new set of golf clubs.

  The meeting with Alice was different. This was the person I told him we needed; however, it seemed far too pedestrian to warrant his engagement. He was courteous, but distracted by the constant ping of email traffic on his phone. There had been a slightly awkward moment when Alice asked him to explain his vision for PrimaParentand he had talked about investment, revenue and exit. He didn’t acknowledge the mission or vision for making parenting better or children happier, which Alice had articulated in a speculative corporate manifesto she had drafted and brought to the meeting for discussion.

  The conversation descended into Alice passionately explaining how she managed complex projects and difficult people, while Julian nodded sagely, his mind clearly focused elsewhere, fooling no one that he was actually absorbing anything. They both rang me after the meeting.

  “Look, mate, if you think we need someone like her, I trust you. Just don’t make me have to listen to her lecture me on why I can’t fire someone because I don’t like their trainers. I don’t want us to become the Salvation Army of start-ups.”

  I reassured him and was quietly relieved that we were not going to argue. I knew that Alice could calmly organise a global evacuation to Mars, unfazed by complexity or scale. Moreover, she could do everything I couldn’t, which was rather a lot. When we spoke, she was still unconvinced, latching on to the public-school urbanity that Julian exuded as a sign of ‘casual amorality’. She was curious about how well I knew him.

  In a slight rewriting of historical truth, I told her we had known each other socially for years and had actually worked on a project together for a shared client. I was slightly astounded how simple it was to invent such a porky at a moment of crisis. Indeed, I noted this would be a useful skill in times of stress moving forward. If I’d told her we met at a sandpit in a park a couple of months previously, she would have hung up. My well-intentioned veracity-stretching did the trick. I convinced her that we would be working closely together, and Julian’s role, securing our commercial viability, would be separate from her crucial task of doing everything needed to make us function. I shamelessly pandered to her idealism.

  “You’ll make a difference to families’ lives. And you can make a difference to your family’s life at the same time.”

  “You are frighteningly slick, Alex. Have you already sold your soul to the devil?”

  “Alice, shame on you. I’m a nice Jewish boy. We don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  She rang me the next day to tell me that she was in. She had discussed it long into the night with Caroline and they were prepared to remortgage their house and for Caroline to do an extra day of teaching if necessary.

  “This is real, Alex, isn’t it?”

  “It is now,” I replied, slightly nervously. We now had a grown-up on the team.

  ***

  And what about Julian?

  You have a sense of the tensions in my upbringing: a successful grandpa who made me want to build a business, tempered by academic non-materialistic parents who made me feel guilty for such ignoble aspirations. Emotionally, I am also a bit of an open book. If you ask me how I am, be prepared for a lengthy response.

  Julian was much more guarded about what drove him, and while his desire for us to prosper was incontestable, he was unwilling to disclose his feelings. During our lengthy planning conversations, I would badger him to give me some context and colour about his life and occasionally he would assuage my inquisitiveness with a few details about his upbringing. In time, I managed to extricate an explanatory narrative.

  He was the younger of two children and his older sister was the recipient of his father’s intense love and affection. Stella was showered with gifts when times were good – a pony, a tree house and a beautiful room. She was an idealised version of her mother, a quiet submissive woman subjected to the philandering and financially frivolous behaviour of an indifferent husband. You don’t have to be Freud to work your way round this one. Julian was his mother’s relief in an unhappy house. She resented her husband’s devotion to his daughter and his indifference to his son. Nothing Julian could do was enough for him.

  He was shipped off to boarding school at seven while his sister was allowed to stay at home. His father was distant and critical and Julian had to be the best at every endeavour to get noticed. As it happens, he became a county-level tennis player of great promise. However, his father’s aloofness created an unquenchable frustration and a temper that he couldn’t control, and in the competitive fray of a match, it would overcome him at inopportune times. With a glint of satisfaction, Julian recalled how he was banned from competing for a while when, mired in a black fog, he went to the umpire’s chair, called him a very nasty name and then proved how good at volleying he was by hitting a deliberate full-blooded shot into the unlucky man’s testicles.

  I have pieced this portrait together from various anecdotes, but I think it’s accurate. Julian had several mantras that would emerge during different conversations, revealing his innate competitiveness and belief in self-reliance. His favourite was: ‘Remember chaps, second place is first loser.’ I thought it was impressive until Sarah told me one day it was what her primary school PE teacher used to say to them before a netball match. He was also very fond of reminding me to ‘trust no one and you won’t be disappointed’. There was a grittiness when dealing with Julian. He was charming until he didn’t want to be. His demeanour would suddenly change to suggest he was in no mood for discussion or opinion-sharing.

  Julian was impressively bright, and I was seduced by his professional allure. Like us all, however, he emerged as a complex intersection of behaviours and experiences. His drive was inspirational but his motivation more ambiguous. Not something you can always find out when you meet on a park bench.

  4. The Idea

  My head hurt.

  All I could do was think, all day and every day, about my nascent business. I imagined its progress and visualised its success. I jotted ideas down wherever I was and irrespective of what I was doing. When I spent time with friends and family, my sentences were rarely completed as my flibbertigibbet mind moved on to the next thought. I was a complete pain to be around.

  I was obsessed with getting all the detail right. Julian and I had assembled a team, but we had to have a credible story to tell and the investment opportunity had to be rooted in its relevance to consumers. Not only that, we needed spreadsheets, a logo, a tagline and some beautifully designed documents to make us look really professional.

  Online marketplaces can quickly create unprecedented demand. There are some basic factors that engender success or create unmitigated failure. First of all, if you are thinking of starting something yourself, you need to ask how your market will grow. Liquidity is the term used to describe the effective viability of any prospective exchange: will there be a growing supply of customers actively searching your site? In turn, will there be a sufficiency of sellers to meet all of their needs and ensure they come back, tell their friends and evangelise your brilliance?

  Once I have visited your site, has the experience been good enough to make me want to come back? Did I find what I was looking for? How was the customer service? Was the experience easy and convenient? Did you take my money without any effort? Has the enormous inflatable giraffe I ordered been d
elivered on time and without a hole in its neck? Will I come back again?

  Finally, there is a basic economic consideration of how the marketplace is going to make money based on the transactions it facilitates. Are you going to sell high-value items infrequently or low-value items regularly? Nirvana is selling something hugely expensive every week, for example an online cocaine store (clickandsniff.com).

  Of course, I was not thinking about the huge margins of a drug business but better parenting for all. The business model for the transactional exchange was going to be based on a number of criteria. A proposed marketplace revenue of 4 per cent on every transaction would be applied. Further revenues would come from what are called seller services, things like promoted listings or processing payments on behalf of the seller. Any third-party processor would also be charged. As we grew and drove more traffic to the site, we could start to sell advertising and inventory too. We also needed to create a sense of perceived value that a subscription would necessitate. This relied on the basic principle of a subscription – keep it low and make it monthly and no one will remember to cancel if dissatisfied. We were banking (literally) on some healthy levels of inertia.

  The next question was even more important. What were we going to sell and how were we going to ensure that we had enough of a breadth of products to make us an everyday indispensable service? My thinking was based on the key milestones in parenting.

  Birthdays are, of course, crucial. Parties, presents and experiences. A piece of cake in a napkin, a sorry balloon and a book token just won’t do these days. Little Tommy’s seventh birthday requires the precision planning of a royal wedding or the election of the next pope. Distinct presents that are limited edition, celebratory bespoke decorations, cakes that are multilayered and themed, personalised invitations, elaborate bunting, party bags, thank-you cards, vats of Calpol to ensure they stay healthy throughout the day, single malt and Pinot Grigio for Mum and Dad. The possibilities are endless.