Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  Ever since its first famous superbowl ad in 1984 (directed by Ridley Scott), Apple had always positioned itself as the computer for those who dared to be different. The idea was that by all means you could run your budget on a PC, but you should write your symphony on a Mac. In the nineties, as part of this continuing campaign, Kanwal Sharma, Apple’s inspired marketing man, had devised and managed a “great minds” scheme whereby about one hundred high profile celebrities (Apple dislikes the word celebrity and prefers “visionaries”) let their names be published as Apple users. Douglas was delighted to join.

  What the “macophiles” in this scheme had in common was that they were leaders in their fields who worked creatively with their computers and found that they were liberated by them rather than (as is often the case with PCs) driven to rage and intemperate effing and blinding. The celebrities did not get paid, but they did get some of the latest equipment and software. From time to time they were brought together at Apple’s expense for extraordinary conferences where they could talk about anything to each other, and indulge in what the management books call “out of the box” thinking. In return they were expected to sit down occasionally and talk with the Apple team. The generic title for the scheme was the Apple Masters. Apple got input from some of the brightest people around and reinforced their role as the creative person’s computer company. The celebrities were flattered to be on a list of the charismatically brainy and interesting, and they saved a lot of money on equipment and got to go to some stimulating meetings. Douglas adored being an Apple Master. There is no doubt, however, that he preferred their kit and would have used it regardless.

  The Apple Masters were a wonderfully eclectic collection of people. Mountaineers (Sir Chris Bonnington) could rub shoulders with actors like James Woods or Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Dawkins could chat with Richard Dreyfus, Peter Cochrane (the futurologist employed by BT) could swap ideas with Nobel Prize-winners Murray Gell-Mann or Donald Glaser (the physicist who invented the bubble chamber). Douglas was thrilled—where else could he encounter Harrison Ford or Muhammad Ali? It’s hard to imagine other circumstances in which a British comic SF writer would meet Sinbad, the African American stand-up comedian, and discover they had a rapport.

  Douglas thought highly of Kanwal Sharma and they struck up a friendship. In Kanwal’s opinion, Douglas was one of the most creative people he had ever come across, able to juggle around many multidisciplinary subjects with enthusiasm and knowledge. He’d toy with ideas, said Kanwal, in a way that was quite childlike: “What would happen if I did this?” Kanwal recalls that Douglas had extraordinary presentational skills, and was brilliant with the Silicon Valley crowd. He remembers him on spectacular form in 1998 giving an address at a conference in San Jose about convergent technologies and the next generation of PDAs. Stop thinking in terms of tweaking existing gadgets, urged Douglas. Think instead of your P.E.T.—your Personal Electronic Thing—and what you would like it to do for you. Why would you want to use an ancient keyboard design to talk to it? Why not just talk? The audience of software engineers and technologists was delighted.

  Though their relationship was largely telephonic, Douglas and Kanwal were close. Douglas’s phone bill—especially when he should have been chipping away at the word face of his current book—must have been considerable, for he had a circle of pals whom he would call frequently, sometimes every day, especially when he was in California for that last frustrating pass at the Hitchhiker’s movie. The phone was how he maintained his many friendships. If he and Douglas were both feeling low, Kanwal recalls, they would cheer themselves up by competing over just how miserable they were. Once Douglas called Kanwal in Hong Kong. After they compared notes about angst and jet lag, Douglas asked Kanwal how he had enjoyed life in seat 3A. Through his contacts, Douglas had wangled Kanwal an upgrade and continued to do so whenever he could.

  Kanwal cited the Joni Mitchell song “You never realise what you’ve got until it’s gone” in connection with Douglas’s death. “I was as upset as at the death of my own father,” he said.

  Douglas’s role in Silicon Valley and the whole IT revolution is more subtle and important than it may at first appear. His sales in the USA were always huge, especially among high school kids and college students, and with a readership almost certainly more male than female.* 194 Some of those teenagers grew up to be the technologists and engineers of the IT revolution. Certainly Douglas commanded enormous respect among the techies. When he was with The Digital Village, Robbie Stamp, a decent family man who can talk to an Olympic standard, recalls the awe that Douglas could evoke:

  Douglas was a big star. There was part of him that took pleasure in it, but would get embarrassed if you told him. I remember going to meetings at Microsoft and being with junior programmers who were simply overwhelmed, especially if they hadn’t been expecting to see him. In one set of meetings, with a woman called Linda Stone who works at Microsoft, we were wandering around the offices in Seattle and went into one. There was this guy who was so excited he literally could not speak.

  When it came to inventing gadgets, Douglas burst through the barriers of the conventional by positing the fantastic. Why add a cosine key to a calculator when you could be developing an interactive, constantly updated talking encyclopaedia with attitude? It is not too far-fetched to say that a generation of clever American techies grew up with their imaginations fired by the guide itself in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Palm Pilot and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) might never have been developed without the seed planted by Douglas a decade and a half before they first came onto the market.

  In fact the New York Times* 195 quotes Bob Stein as crediting Apple with unintentionally creating the first electronic book in 1991 (Sony’s Discman had failed, possibly because the screen was too small). Apple, with their new generation of snazzy portables, seemed to be the business, “complete with animation, drawings and hypertext links.” The early titles were, of course, the Hitchhiker’s trilogy plus Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in Wonderland. Years later Douglas was peeved when Stephen King was the first major author to publish a novel on-line. “I should have done that,” he told me.* 196 But, despite some brilliant technology and all the benefits of search engines, the book market has by and large remained stubbornly wedded to blocks of laminated wood-pulp.

  When the idea of joining a new media/technology company reached Douglas, it was not a bolt from the blue. The ground had been long prepared for him to be receptive to such a suggestion. Robbie Stamp, Managing Director of The Digital Village, was working as a producer for Central Television in 1991. He takes up the story:

  The way it happened was this chap, Paul Springer, who was a would-be film producer, had managed to get a meeting with Douglas. He was hoping Douglas would help him to write a feature film of an idea he had. So he and I went to see Douglas in his house in Islington with those great big, huge sofas in that upper room in Duncan Terrace. He was charming, and played Bach to us because there was a point he wanted to make about music and mathematics. I just thought: “What a fascinating man,” and we stayed in touch.

  We had lunch periodically, and I think that one of the projects he was looking to do was a big series about evolution. He’d been looking for a producer to work with, and that was another reason why we were talking because with my TV producer’s hat on, maybe I could have been that person . . . He would have been a superb live storyteller, and a really good presenter because he had that fantastic capacity to find the image, the metaphor, the way of describing something even if it’s quite complex. He had a number of TV ideas though, frankly, in the end he got fed up with having to go through the “pitch.” He felt that he had established himself by then, and that TV producers could approach him with projects.

  At that stage I was going to be leaving Central [TV] for a variety of reasons, and I’d decided it was time to set up a company. I’d been looking at cable opportunities at Central and I h
ad an idea for a company called Cable City. I’d been examining the economics and had felt that they did not work unless you could do two or three low-cost channels from the same base technically—satellite sharing and so on—so you had the opportunity of building cable channels and of using the material you were creating to distribute through other media.

  So I was talking about this idea to Douglas, and he said “How much would it cost to invest in this company?” And I plucked a figure out of the air and said “£25,000,” and he said, “Well, I’m in.” And that was that, really. That was how The Digital Village [TDV] started.

  Of course, there were hurdles to overcome. It took some years before the company was funded and running, or jogging a bit. Douglas still had a book to write (destined to be published nearly ten years later as The Salmon of Doubt) and his publishers around the world were getting cheesed off with being kept waiting.

  In fact, he took a bruising blow to his morale when his long-term publisher, Sue Freestone (whom he had followed from Heinemann to Cape) suggested that his non-delivery was hanging over them like some terrible illness that neither wanted to mention, and that it would be a lot easier for their friendship if it were not. Through a rococo process of corporate assimilation that characterized publishing in the eighties and nineties, she was then in the huge Random House complex. It happened that Random also owned the assets of Heinemann, following their acquisition of the Reed Trade Publishing Group. Simon Master, who had been at Pan when Douglas began his career there as a writer, was also at Random as Group Deputy Chairman. The contractual complexities are too boring to recount, but what happened essentially was that Random decided to get out from under its obligation to publish Douglas’s next book by selling its interest to Pan, its co-venture partner and Douglas’s faithful paperback house. This was prompted by Random’s decision to say no to the Starship Titanic novelization; evidently at a senior level (for Sue would not have been able to initiate this on her own) their commitment to their wayward author was wavering. In fairness, Douglas was already over half a decade past his deadline.

  Random was not exposed by having a huge amount of money out on signature. On the other hand, they did have a substantial liability if and when Douglas delivered his next novel, as they would be obliged to pay him a large delivery advance. In the circumstances it seemed to make sense to consolidate all his work with one publisher, Pan, and its hardcover imprint, Macmillan. Douglas, insecure as ever, felt that Random’s decision was hardly a vote of confidence in him. They clearly did not believe that he would deliver or, if he did, that it would be a worthwhile commercial bet to hang on.

  The argument that followed was exacerbated by the fact that Heinemann had the rights to an attractive hardcover omnibus of the Hitchhiker’s novels which was still selling over ten thousand copies a year. OK, said Ed Victor, if the rationale for this assignment of the whole contract to Pan is to publish Douglas under one roof, please could we have the hardcover omnibus rights back too? Ian Chapman at Pan then offered £50,000 to buy the rights in the omnibus from Random. In fairness the loss to Random would have been the entire margin on the sales so £50,000, though a decent offer, did not represent the profit on those sales for much more than a year. Publishers hate giving up copyrights for these are all they possess, and there is a certain intangible loss of credibility in the trade when the booksellers notice the change of publisher. Simon Master said no. Ed and Simon argued. Battle lines ebbed and flowed. Douglas himself wrote a plaintive letter (unusual in itself, for he was not a frequent correspondent) to the formidable Gail Rebuck, the boss of Random UK, asking for the omnibus to be released. The answer was still no. Random House was within its rights, of course, but this decision was exceedingly hard-nosed.

  Part of Random’s icy calculation to reassign their contract may have been based on the market’s notorious amnesia. Although Douglas’s body of work was more than respectable, it’s damaging if there are too many years between each book. The momentum is lost. Commercially he was still big, but not quite as hot as he had been. Besides, Douglas no longer had the genre to himself. Terry Pratchett’s humorous Discworld novels were deservedly selling by the truckload.* 197 What’s more, they were being written at exactly the right rate of one per year.

  It was important that Douglas not stall completely, and, after the agony of Mostly Harmless, it looked very much as if he might. Ed Victor was so concerned that he had rented Douglas the top floor of his office in Bedford Square in the vain hope that having a place to write would make the whole process seem more like a routine, just a job where you did your stuff without too much anguish. There Ed and his sympathetic colleagues, particularly Maggie Phillips and Sophie Hicks (now joint Managing Directors), could keep a kindly, well-focused eye upon him.

  For a while Douglas kept quiet about his interest in The Digital Village, but then Ed was approached by Weidenfeld & Nicolson to see if Douglas would create—or at least present—a series of non-fiction science CD-ROMs. Publishers at the time were twitchy about the new media and anxious lest their book sales evaporate while they were still struggling to understand the new ways of distributing what everybody learned to call content (a hateful word that seemed to homogenize everything). Publishers owned a lot of “content” and hoped that the CD-ROM would offer a supplementary market for it. There is now a market that exploits the huge storage capacity of the CD-ROM. However, for most general applications, it turned out that there was already a well-established technology that got the vote of the general trade—a portable, cheap, searchable, user-friendly, large-capacity information module requiring no power by hours of daylight, and with an indefinite storage life. It was called a book.

  Douglas had to come clean about his interest in TDV, and a meeting was arranged with him, Robbie, Ed Victor and Douglas’s lawyer, Leon Morgan, in Bedford Square. Ed was not thrilled, and confessed to Robbie later that his intention had been to squash the idea. But he was won over and became a supporter with a place on the board. Besides, he could see that Douglas was not in the writing vein and that this new venture gave him an interest and stimulating company.

  With Douglas as the resident genius and brand name, and Apple likely to come in as strategic partners (which they did in 1996), plus some serious TV experience and general management nous from Robbie, TDV looked a good bet. At this time investment in Internet-related companies in the UK was still gathering momentum. It was a couple of years before stories were appearing in the press that a company worth sixpence on Thursday had floated on the market on Saturday, thereby making two speccy sixteen-year-olds and a venture capitalist obscene wads of money. Nevertheless, feverish rumblings had started. Retrospect lends a spurious clarity to one’s view, but in the mid-nineties the atmosphere was heady. The possibilities of the new technology, and the uneasy sensation that the ground was shifting beneath one’s feet, were enormously exciting. The feeling that the technological tide might go out leaving a few dying species of commercial dinosaur dehydrating on the beach added to the urgent sense that this was a technology that had to be embraced.

  Robbie began to pull all the strands together. Douglas, Robbie, and Robbie’s former boss at Central, Richard Creasey, were the three original partners. Robbie recalls:

  We took our first offices on top of Ed’s in Bedford Square, and wrote a business plan and found other partners. Then Ian Charles Stewart joined us as the business brains [a smart ex-Pearson’s venture capitalist]. He had a lot more fund-raising experience than I had. Richard Harris joined us on the technical side because I knew we had need of technical expertise. And we had Ed on board, and Mary Glanville [a lively, clever TV executive] joined us to help with the TV deal-making and so on . . .

  So that’s how we got going. There was a huge amount of excitement. We raised seed capital relatively easily from [venture capitalist] Alex Catto to whom we had been introduced by John Lloyd. Alex came in at an early stage, buying 10% of the company for £400,000. I think it was 19 December 1995 when we closed that
deal—and what a wonderful feeling it was. I really felt that we had a shot at building something very special.

  With the initial investment and with the expert help of Ian Stewart, Robbie finalized a professional business plan complete with spreadsheets that looked set to march confidently into the future. Those nasty figures in brackets were soon to be replaced by positives. Now it’s too easy to say that some of the assumptions were founded on false premises. Nobody at the time knew how quickly the fundamentals were changing. The best advice about on-line advertising revenue, for instance, predicted some remarkable growth, and it was by no means clear then that the access providers, the ISPs, would hog so much of that income. New technologies like nano-billing were also coming on stream that would make it possible to receive tiny amounts of money from multitudes of people in such a way that the cost of collection was low enough for the exercise to be worthwhile. The problem with nano-billing was that the availability of the means did not create the market; people tend to go straight to the source if they are buying on-line rather than paying a fee, however minuscule, to be linked to it. All this, however, is post-hoc wisdom. At the time the potential looked exhilarating.

  TDV’s original executive team looked something like this: Robbie Stamp, Chief Executive; Douglas Adams, Chief Fantasist; Ian Charles Stewart, Director, Dollars and Sense; Richard Creasey, Creative Director; Mary Glanville, Director, International Television and Marketing; Richard Harris, Chief Technology Officer; and Ed Victor and the Hon. Alex Catto, Non-Executive Directors. In addition, Robbie had lined up a very high-powered board of technology advisors, each of whom was a key figure in his field. For communications there was Bob Lucky of Bellcore Research Labs; Alan Kay, whom many regard as the father of the personal computer, was their advisor for computer science; Kai Krause, head of MetaTools, the ground-breaking graphics software company, was on the board for technology and design; and David Nagel, the President of AT&T Labs, was there for research. In the IT world, these men were royalty. With KPMG as auditors, and media-establishment Olswang as the company lawyers, all the credentials were in place for a sensible round of fund-raising with the hard-eyed men in stripy shirts and spotted ties in London, and the even tougher men with hard eyes and open shirts in California.