Fishbowl (12 page)

Eventually, Andrei spoke to Ben alone. Talking with him helped Andrei develop his thoughts and he had got into the habit
of having long, open-ended conversations with Ben in a way that he never did with Kevin.

‘You know everything Kevin said to you was post-hoc rationalization,' said Ben. ‘He wants to act out these fantasies and he's looking for some kind of respectable-sounding argument to justify it.'

Andrei nodded. ‘Maybe.'

‘He shouldn't be doing this stuff.'

‘That's a different question,' said Andrei. ‘His motivation may be personal, but that doesn't mean his principle isn't right. Look, my first response was the same as yours. Instinctively, I thought, no, he shouldn't be doing this. But I've been trying to find the fault in his argument. Who are we to say what guise a person can and can't adopt? You're the psychologist, Ben. We all use masks, right?'

‘Andrei, come on. This isn't Psychology 101.'

‘If other people are doing it, why shouldn't Kevin, just because he's an officer of the company? So to me, this isn't about Kevin. It's a question of whether we should allow it in general. We've said from the very beginning that we don't police the Schools, they police themselves. And, overall, from what you tell me, they're pretty effective at it. We give them the tools to exclude or moderate and they're doing that pretty well. And if they don't want to, that's their choice. We give them the space, they can build whatever kind of house they want. Right? That's the principle we agreed on.' He paused. ‘Kevin's right. We have to assume there's lots of people operating under pseudonyms right now. And if that's the case, then we accept it. Or else, like he said, we fight a battle that we're never going to win. And, like he said, we probably shouldn't even be trying to win it.'

‘I'm not saying we can stop it. I'm saying we shouldn't encourage it.'

‘But let's pretend we could stop it. Say we could prevent people using pseudonyms. Should we? To me, that's the question here, Ben.'

‘Andrei, Kevin used the pseudonym to manipulate someone.'

‘Would it make a difference if he did it as Kevin instead of Tonya? Would that make it better? If manipulation is the issue, the pseudonymity is irrelevant. People tell lies all the time online to manipulate people even if they're not using a pseudonym. Should we try to stop them lying as well?'

‘They're more likely to lie if they're using a pseudonym.'

‘How do you know? They may be more likely to tell the truth.'

Ben sighed. ‘Look, this isn't just a lie. This about who you are.'

Andrei shrugged. ‘A matter of degree.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘It comes down to, what are we trying to dictate?
Why
are we trying to dictate? That was never my intention with Fishbowll. Fishbowll is, “Here's the functionality to give you Deep Connectedness. Go use it.” That's enough. That's our job.'

‘I'm not arguing with that.'

‘Well, in that case,' said Andrei, ‘surely it's a matter for people to find their own way to express what they are in this space. Like I say, I reacted like you, but as I've thought about it I've begun to kind of like it. I kind of like the thought that people can find different ways. If you want to be who you are, sure, go ahead – the majority of people will do that. But if there's some reason that you can express yourself better and find connectedness better under the guise of someone else, then why not? It's kind of liberating.'

‘What about the person on the other end of that connection?'

‘That person may be a pseudonym as well.'

‘What if they're not?'

Andrei shrugged. ‘As long as they're aware this might be happening … Ben, you think this is a distortion of Deep Connectedness. I did as well. But now I'm thinking, maybe it's a stronger form of Deep Connectedness, a deeper one. That's why this is really important. As a matter of principle, I think we need to conceptualize Deep Connectedness broadly, not narrowly. A narrow conceptualization will leave us always where we are, and I don't think we've explored the bounds yet. I don't think we've
explored anywhere near the bounds. I kind of feel like … this thing is taking us on a journey. When I launched it last November, did I have any idea that it would look like it looks today? Did I have any idea I was about to flunk my exams because of it? And in another six months … I've got no idea what it's going to look like then. I've got no idea where we're going, Ben. All I can say is there'll be things that'll challenge us. There'll be things that make us uncomfortable. But if we're going to take this journey, then I believe we have to be open to that. To have a broad conceptualization of Deep Connectedness means that we have to be willing – even wanting – to be challenged by new forms for it, and to be willing to accept them. That's what this thing has really taught me. It's challenged the narrowness of my conceptualization and dared me to broaden it.'

‘But nothing we do should make the world a worse place.'

‘Absolutely. So let's ask the question. Does having pseudonymous people on the site make the world a worse place? I don't think it does.'

‘I do. What if having pseudonymous people makes some people not want to use the site?'

‘What if it makes others more likely to use it?'

‘What if those who don't want to use it because of pseudonymity outnumber those who do? That would reduce the level of connectedness, wouldn't it? And that would make the world worse.'

‘That's an unknown. We can't quantify that and, anyway, the reverse might be the case. So then the point is, we can't prevent it – which mean we have to accept it. You're the one who told me that sometimes we can only do the least worst thing.'

‘But we can at least not encourage it.'

‘I agree with that. I don't think we should take a position on anything, either for or against, except on the freedom to connect. But let's look at what that means. We shouldn't encourage people to use pseudonyms, but we shouldn't encourage people
not
to use them, either. It's their choice. To be consistent, we have to be neutral.'

‘Doesn't having an officer of the company using pseudonyms encourage it?'

‘No more than having an officer of the company not using a pseudonym. And each of us has an account, right?'

Ben buried his face in his hands, shaking his head. He couldn't fight the logic. This was Andrei all over: cool, rational, ruthlessly consistent.

Andrei watched him. Between them was the unspoken recognition that Andrei owned a majority of the company, and whatever he decided was the final word.

‘It's not personal,' said Andrei. ‘You're not going to leave over this, right?'

Ben looked up in surprise. He hadn't even thought of leaving.

‘I need you, Ben. But I need Kevin too. He's a Stakhanovite. Ben, I'm going to say yes on this. We've got to be consistent. But no hard feelings, right? All of us, we argue for what we believe is right. That's really important. We have to be able to do that and then make a decision and keep going.'

‘What if the decision is one that one of us can't accept?'

‘I hope it never comes to that.'

There was silence.

‘No hard feelings?' said Andrei.

‘There's a little hard feeling.' Ben shrugged, then forced a smile. ‘I guess it'll go.'

Ben was a natural listener and conciliator. Whereas Kevin, having been thwarted, would have marched off in a huff, Ben's instinct was always to find a means of accommodation.

‘Well,' he said eventually, ‘I think if we're going to have this pseudonymity, we should be transparent about it.'

‘I agree,' said Andrei.

‘People need to know when they're seeing a pseudonym.'

‘No. That defeats the purpose. And how would we enforce that? But people do need to know that they might come across pseudonymous people. We have to acknowledge that. Then it's their choice. If you don't want to deal with that, don't come to Fishbowll.'

‘So what are you going to do? Do you want to post a statement in the Grotto?'

‘I'm not sure yet.'

‘I don't think we should come out and say one of the founders of the company has been posing as a South African shark swimmer.'

‘I wasn't thinking of that. I'm still thinking about how to do it.'

Andrei took some more time to decide. Kevin continued his life of multiple personalities, although Tonya came to an end – Ian of the Xcel wetsuit and the large packet started pestering her for a video call and suddenly it was all too complicated. Tonya posted a farewell note to the School and quietly disappeared.

A few days later Andrei said, ‘Guys, have a look at the new home page.'

At first they didn't notice anything. Then they saw a line in small font at the bottom of the screen.

In the Fishbowll, you may encounter avatars, pseudonyms and even real people
.

‘What do you think?' said Andrei.

‘Cool,' said Kevin.

Ben let out a sigh. ‘Is this live?'

Andrei nodded.

‘We're going to get a shitstorm in the Grotto.'

‘They won't even notice it.'

‘They notice everything.'

Outside the Grotto, other people noticed as well.

15

IN JANUARY OF
that year, around the time that Kevin and Ben were joining Andrei with shares in Fishbowll and putting the first investment into the business, Chris Hamer set off on a trip into the Australian Outback.

Tall, gangly, with a shock of blond hair, Hamer, then twenty-eight, was already a veteran of three internet start-ups, one of which he and his co-founders had sold for $120 million, netting him a fortune of $18 million. While waiting for his next big idea to hit him, he lived in LA and spent his time as a professional investor funding other internet start-ups.

Hamer was the son of a successful Los Angeles lawyer and had attended the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School, and then Princeton. He had emerged from the experience a curious, widely read, highly intelligent and strangely cynical character. The website from which he had made his money, FriendTracker, was an application that piggybacked on social networks to follow the activities of your friends and give other friends the ability to rank them as being positive or negative for you, using an algorithm to provide an overall score for friendliness or antagonism – or betrayal, as FriendTracker characterized it. It was like
National Enquirer
come to life. Bust-ups as a result of FriendTracker became common, loudly trumpeted on a FriendSmash! page specifically dedicated to fights and garnering huge publicity. The page was Chris's invention, as was the idea for the site itself. He thought the whole thing was hilarious and demoralizing in equal measure, confirming him in his jaded view of modern society.

In theory, there was as much potential for FriendTracker to highlight the depth of genuine friendships and the selflessness at the heart of them, but all anyone cared about was conflict and deceit. Duplicitous or jealous friends found ways to use the tool to manipulate their rivals and stab other friends in the back. Chris found even more hilarious and demoralizing the eagerness of advertisers to get on the site, and of a syndicate of Ukrainian investors to take it off his hands when he was getting bored with it.

He couldn't believe the site had lasted as long as it had. He had thought it was more of a gimmick than a long-staying business and had been proven right by its subsequent decline. Chris felt no guilt about that. The group of investors who had bought FriendTracker thought there was additional value to be had, which meant, in a way, they were trying to screw him. He thought it was overvalued as a result of the publicity over the fights it generated, which meant that he, in the same way, was trying to screw them. Turned out he won and they lost.

The whole thing, in retrospect, was an exercise in cynicism, starting from the idea at the heart of it – exposing the shallowness of apparent friendships – through the hype it engendered, to the ludicrous price he extracted for it.

But while Chris's cynicism was about the nature of people in modern life, their gullibility and hypocrisy, the things they did, valued and believed in, he wasn't remotely cynical about the businesses that served – or as he put it more bluntly, exploited – their needs, a number of which he invested in. He was a sharp and insightful observer of the internet space. To Hamer, the cutting edge of the internet was a scything mass of startling and original ideas, many of which would fail, but some of which would survive to shape the world for decades, if not centuries, to come. Constantly in search of intellectual stimulation, he was obsessed by the incessant invention and newness of what he saw, fascinated by its development. And by the potential to make truly stomach-churning amounts of money, while having what he considered to
be the most fun that it was possible to have. He was always in search of new ideas that would allow him to do that.

The world Chris Hamer inhabited was thus an ever-changing cloud of oddly capitalized cyber names that blew in and then blew away, only rarely sticking. Every week, if not every day, he heard about something that was supposedly the next big thing. Most of those names, he knew, would be forgotten by the time he heard about the next one. But when he did find something that was interesting enough to pursue, when he found that one-in-a-hundred idea that seemed to have a genuine spark of originality and relevance, and when he did hook up with a team of truly capable start-up founders, Chris Hamer had a lot more to offer than mere cash.

Hamer had the priceless experience of having lived through the start-up experience three times over. He had twice seen his creations fail and take significant sums of investors' cash with them, and he had made every mistake it was possible to make. He knew the pitfalls of rapid growth – the difficulties of scaling up, as it was known in internet circles – that could kill a start-up dead or at least hamper its development to such an extent that a copycat site had the chance to get going and overtake it. He knew the ways and means of venture capitalists and the numerous devices by which they could end up controlling the company you thought you owned and showing you the door. Gregarious, inquisitive, energetic, Hamer had a wide network in the internet world and his network in the venture capital community was equally extensive. He knew just about all the major firms on Sand Hill Road and, more crucially, had the ability to get a meeting with a good number of them. His mix of cynicism and intelligence appealed to the venture-capital crowd, many of whom shared those character traits. Chris himself didn't have tens of millions to put in, so he tended to get involved with start-ups at an early stage, when a few hundred thousand dollars could make a difference. When the time came for a bigger cash injection, his connections into the VC world were invaluable.

Chris, however, did have one foible. Like many others made cynical by the contemporary world, Hamer had an almost naive belief in the redeeming power of primitive lifestyles, and had the money to buy his way into tasting those lifestyles for himself, cutting himself off from everything at home in order to immerse himself fully in the experience. Previously he had spent periods living in the Amazon rainforest and with Laplander reindeer herders. During the three months he had just spent travelling, camping and living with Aboriginal communities in the searing heat of a Central Australian summer, he was completely oblivious to events in California. When he returned to Los Angeles that spring, he kept hearing the name of a new website called Fishbowll.

He didn't check it out right away. He had a backlog of stuff to catch up on and there were other names people were mentioning to him as well. For some reason it kept slipping his mind. He thought the spelling was silly, too, kind of kitsch and try-hard, and he didn't think he'd want to get involved with people who thought that was cool. It was only when he was asked what he thought of Fishbowll for the third or fourth time by people whose judgement he respected that he finally sat down and typed the name into his computer.

To his surprise, he liked the home page. Clean, simple, uncluttered. A fish with big, interested eyes staring out from a stylized bowl. Underneath it the tag:
A dating site for the mind
. Chris was intrigued. Then he noticed the line on the bottom of the page.
In the Fishbowll, you may encounter avatars, pseudonyms and even real people
.

His curiosity was piqued. What was that about? Was this a social networking site, a virtual world, or a game?

They met at Mang, a fancy Vietnamese restaurant in Palo Alto where Chris often ate when he was in town. The restaurant specialized in serving small dishes for sharing and Chris ordered for the four of them as Andrei, Kevin and Ben watched.

By now, eight months after Fishbowll had been born, Andrei was receiving calls fairly frequently from people saying they were interested in investing in the site. Since the 4Site deal was sufficient at the moment to fund Fishbowll's growth, he wasn't interested in having anyone invest, so most of the calls were short. He did meet a couple of people out of curiosity but found them not particularly knowledgeable and got the feeling they could have been investing in potato chips as long as the chips were being sold on the internet. He walked out of one lunch even before the cocktails arrived. But when Chris Hamer called, he listened. Hamer wasn't exactly anyone's notion of an internet god, but Andrei knew about FriendTracker. Here was someone who had actually done something in the internet world, not just invested money in the self-interested hope of walking away with a fortune reaped from somebody else's intellectual property. Not that FriendTracker had been the world's most outstanding site. Andrei suspected that the algorithms underlying it had been fairly crude. What he liked about Chris, when they met at the restaurant, was that he admitted it himself.

‘I kept telling them,' said Chris, throwing back one of Mang's signature mango mojitos and looking around for a waitress to order another, ‘the algorithm was primitive. What else do you expect? What was neat was the way we got people to use the site anyway so we could get their feedback to evolve it. To be honest, the whole thing was just a huge Beta all the way through, just a work in progress.' He broke off as a waitress approached. ‘Miss, can I have another? Guys? Yeah? OK, another one all round.' He looked back at Andrei. ‘I was kind of proud of that. You know, I think if we'd kept it going, by today, I think we'd have had a pretty good bunch of algorithms.'

‘So do you regret selling?' asked Kevin.

‘I got a shitload of cash for it.'

‘Maybe you could have got more if you'd got the algorithm right.'

‘Maybe. But what was it? A site where you could see if your friends were shitting on you. Dude, life's too short. I don't want
to be setting myself up here to give you advice but, guys, what you've got to ask yourself is, are you doing the single most important thing you can possibly be doing? I'm not saying there is a one most important thing, objectively, for all people to do. Everyone's going to define that in a different way. To some people, the most important thing is to change the world. To some people, it's to have a good time. To the Aboriginals of Central Australia, it's to honour the Dreamtime. As long as you're not hurting anybody, define it as you will. But you've got to look at yourself, and say, “Me, Andrei Koss, or Kevin Embley, or Ben Marks, does Fishbowll give me the best shot at doing the most important thing that I want to do?” Because if it doesn't – and a site to see if your friends are shitting on you was fun but it absolutely was not the most important thing in the world – so if it doesn't, then sell the hell out of that thing and go do something else. Seriously.' Chris sat back as the next round of mojitos neared. ‘That's what I'm saying.'

Kevin nodded. ‘Cool.'

Chris looked at Andrei. ‘What are they offering you for Fishbowll?'

Kevin and Ben looked at him as well. They would have liked to know.

‘I don't know,' said Andrei.

Chris stared at him for a moment, then laughed.

‘I don't know.'

‘You mean you don't ask?'

Andrei shook his head.

‘Well, shit, that is funny.' Chris shook his head disbelievingly. ‘You don't even ask?'

‘I keep telling him he should find out,' said Kevin.

‘What about you, Ben? Don't you want to know?'

Ben shrugged. ‘Andrei's got seventy-six per cent of the company.'

Chris picked up his glass. ‘Here's to not even wanting to know what your company's worth!'

Andrei looked at him quizzically.

‘I'm not mocking you, Andrei. I'm admiring you. Most guys, the first thing they do when they sniff a little revenue is spend their time talking to VCs. Spend so much time, they usually stop doing what got them that far in the first place, and that's the end of the business. Pick up your glass, Andrei Koss. That's a toast I've never made before.'

Andrei warily picked up his glass.

‘To you guys,' said Chris, glancing in turn at each of them. ‘To not wanting to know what your company's worth.'

Andrei sipped silently from his mojito and put the glass down. Chris glanced at him, then launched into a story about one of his other start-ups.

The food came in a succession of dishes that Chris described and explained. He did most of the talking that night. At twenty-eight, with the things he had done and the places he had travelled, he had so much more to talk about than they did. He told them about the time he had just spent with the Aboriginals in Arnhem Land, and his time two years earlier in the Amazon. And there were stories about the big names in the internet world he knew. He did a little name-dropping for Kevin and Ben's sake. Andrei hardly said a word, just sat there watching and listening.

That evening, Chris didn't ask much else about Fishbowll. He didn't think Andrei was going to tell him anything and he wondered if he might frighten him off. He really didn't know what to make of the pale young man sitting opposite him, who was silently dipping into the dishes arriving at the table. There certainly wasn't anything kitsch and try-hard about him, as Chris had expected from the website name. And the fact that he hadn't bothered to ask what people were prepared to offer for the site was somehow deeply impressive. If anyone else had said that to him, Chris wouldn't have believed it, but for some reason he suspected that in Andrei's case it was true. Chris was intrigued, deeply intrigued, both by Fishbowll and its founder. He wanted to know more about Andrei Koss and his vision for the website.
Yet he had no idea what Andrei was thinking or whether he had any interest at all in prolonging the conversation with him.

He didn't know Andrei well enough yet to realize that if Andrei had had no interest in what he had to say, he would have got up and left.

So it was a genuine surprise to Chris when Andrei called him a couple of days later and asked if he could talk with him again. Although he had no plans to go up to the Bay Area, Chris immediately said he was going to be in Palo Alto for a meeting early the following week and could make time to see him. This time, rather than suggesting a place, he asked where Andrei would like to meet. Andrei named the first place that came into his head.