The soul of a company

by Steve Maller

Steve with his wife Sally and dogs Danny and Poppy

Chapter One The prettiest girls in central London

I sometimes go back to the scene of the crimes. They still recognise me in Joy King Lau, a superb Chinese restaurant just off the square. Things have changed, of course and yet some things are so very much the same. It is still thronging with tourists - and the people who want to relieve them of their money. Amongst these tourists are a few office workers. A typical sign of a local worker is they they walk right through the otherwise respectful circles around the performance artists. Also the Gypsies give up on them as a prospect for lucky heather before they come within 5 yards of each other.

They used to say that if you were lost in central London, the way to find our offices was just to follow the prettiest girl you could see. They all, pretty much, worked for us.

I haven't said who we are yet. Well, just remember, just before I publish, I am going to go through this manuscript and change all the names. Company names, job titles, products, people. This is to protect the guilty.

So our company, MAID, employed young and talented and beautiful people. And me. Like most programmers, I wasn't picked for my looks. Being over thirty, the only one with that affliction in the company at the time, I didn't qualify as young either. Initially then there were just two of us picked for programming skills rather than charisma. Both of us pretty much hired ourselves. To understand this, one has to go back a couple more years.

Chapter Two Selling information

A full decade before any of you had heard of the Internet, before the World Wide Web had been imagined, there was an industry devoted to selling information over public telecommunications links.

What speed is your broadband ? As I type, mine is somewhere between 50 and 100 million bits per second. This computer is attached wirelessly and it all just works. Or if it doesn't you complain and it ruins your day. Everything has to start somewhere, and the precursors of this technology started very modestly indeed. There was a means of transferring data over telephone lines. I'm talking about the equipment used before you could plug a cable in to the modem on your computer. In these prehistoric times, you put the handset of your phone into some rubber cups - an acoustic coupler - and one end of the acoustic coupler attached to your terminal. Which looked more like a typewriter than a computer. I needed one hand to hold the phone close to the coupler and one hand to pull the paper through on the terminal. Which didn't leave many hands free for typing. The speed would be about 300 bits per second, if it worked, interspersed with some line noise.

Despite these hurdles, people built enormous computer rooms full of enormous computers and built tiny little databases for people to dial into so that they could search for bibliographic records, news and financial information.

It was a living. Sort of. I mean, I don't think anyone made a huge amount of money from it. But it was also, in some strange way, clearly THE FUTURE. In the 1980s the ultimate

boss of the empire that owned the little company I worked for, he saw this. He didn't see any way to make money out of it. This didn't seem to matter than much because he was one of the biggest crooks ever. He's dead now, I think I probably wouldn't need to change his name in this manuscript because the dead can't sue. Also because, after he stole from his company's pension funds, there is little more I could say that would make his reputation much worse.

So, yes, I worked for the Maxwell empire. One of the ways we would try and make a little money from this before-the-internet era, when we had air-craft hanger-sized computer rooms with computers almost as powerful as your watch today, was to rent out this ability to other people who thought they might be able to make some money selling data online.

One such was Danny. (Just checking, I must change all the first names as well as all the surnames..yeah, so just remember, I've changed this.) Danny had borrowed some money so that he could sell market research reports online. His set up required that people like us, with huge computer rooms and programmers with unusual skills could provide a service to him.

Unusual skills ? I bet you think that was a boast. A sort of "I may look nerdy but I am clever" sort of remark. Well that's not the idea. The skills were unusual because in those days very few people understood the requirements of information retrieval for online access. Almost every programmer then (and most now) think that a "relational database" is the thing. Well for textual data, it is not. Different tools and different

skills were required. One day soon, mostly in California, such skills would make huge amounts of money for nerds and geeks. Google is a fairly good and fairly huge sort of example. In fact one day soon such skills would make fairly large amounts of money for people I knew. Some of whom deserved it.

Danny's reliance on us hit a bit of a bump. The evil empire fell apart and the evil crook jumped or fell off his yacht. (I'm inclined to the view he jumped. An accountant, some weeks before, had drawn for me a graph with two lines. One line showed how much money Maxwell owed the banks, plotted against time. The other line showed much Maxwell's own shareholding was worth. At a certain point the lines crossed and the banks owned Maxwell's empire and certain skeletons would be discovered. On the day the lines crossed, the boat incident happened.)

So obvious was the falling apart of the empire that both me and my colleague who were working on Danny's project had, separately, approached him and said "what I do for Maxwell I could do for you." This is why I said we sort of recruited ourselves.

We both moved from old empire to new start up and founded the IT department and got to work. My colleague ? Well his name doesn't need to be changed. His name is Parvin and he is completely blameless, well, as far as I know.

Chapter 3 The Dream

Parvin and I had to build a new infrastructure largely from scratch. This was glorious fun. What makes people happy ?

Money and relationships and good health, yes. But also there's that hierarchy of needs thing. Didn't you do that in school ? Nor did I. Hang on, let me look it up on that Google thingy we have nowadays. Here we are, "Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs". Once you have the basics, like food and shelter, you can look for the luxuries. Near the top of that particular pile is deciding one's potential, ones ability to achieve, and then realising that potential. So if you have a computer project that stretches your abilities and that few others could tackle you can get some satisfaction.

Some satisfaction is not the same thing as glorious fun though. Where's the glory in a bit of computer code ? For that you need a wider context for your goals. I bet the people breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley park thought it was a bit more self-actualising than merely doing a puzzle. They had a war to win. Our new boss, who had a few faults, had some major strengths. One of those strengths was that he could stir up enthusiasm, he could get a group of people to buy into a dream. I mean really a full on, charismatic-leader, we are the chosen ones, which way is the war sort of dream. It should have capitals - The Dream.

Some of The Dream was about making money. Danny's ambitions were huge in that regards. Being profitable was not enough. Actually we were rarely profitable and that didn't seem to matter. The Dream required something bigger; Danny merely needed to rule the world. Whatever money we made, however much we might wish to consolidate, one can't rule the world by being a nice little profitable outfit. To rule the world one first has to be big. Ideally the biggest.

A second and important strength of our glorious leader was belief in himself. He did, probably still does, think he was destined to rule the world. This might make him sound a less than enjoyable companion, maybe so, but he was not the worst boss I've had. He knew his market, he inspired his team, he either inspired or fooled his investors, he either inspired or fooled or provoked the press, or perhaps the press merely noticed that he created lots of interesting stories for them.

His character and behaviour generated some extremes of press coverage. They say that no publicity is bad publicity, but those who say that haven't read some of the things they wrote about Danny and his company. Some of that would echo on for years and years and certainly it had an influence during our IPO. More on that soon. A more annoying issue for Parvin and I was that he tended to get carried away making promises to the press. We learned to look in the online information trade journals for our requirements and, worse, for our deadlines. Often quite impossible deadlines.

If you can get a sales force to buy into The Dream, which he certainly did, you sell more, or so it seems to me. Statistics, features, benefits, overcoming objections, identifying needs..yada yada as they say. Sales folk have to take a lot of rejections, a lot of closed doors and hung-up phones. Give them belief and they keep going. If they keep going..some of them will succeed. Danny, as mentioned, not the worst boss, could get his sales team to dream as well.

Danny could also be charming. I think some of the charm was genuine. Genuine as in being a nice person, or at least capable

of being a nice person. Some of it was powered by The Dream. He certainly turned on the charm to help the business and to help recruit talent to the business. His idea of talent was somewhat biased towards beauty. Or maybe he was right, maybe if you want to build The Dream you have to surround yourself with dreamy-good-looks people.

Hence whilst working on interesting stuff, building a computer system and building a dream, Parvin and I were surrounded by a what looked like the cast of Bay Watch. Only younger and prettier. And possibly slightly worse behaved. Plus we eventually employed a few more programmers to help us. Some of which were also good looking (just in case they are reading this.)

Chapter 4 Raising huge amounts of money

Where was this dream taking us and how were we going to rule the world ? This was London, so the direction of the yellow brick road was quite clear. You float the company on the stock exchange. This has many desirable aspects. You get to raise some money. People who give you this money expect you to spend it. (And if you don't have a reason for spending really huge amounts of money, I'm sure you can invent one.) You get exposure, publicity, credibility. You get to play at being a captain of industry. The three letter acronym often used for getting one’s hands on a lot of other people’s money in this way is IPO. Initial Public Offering.

This was probably what Danny was born for. Creating and using publicity. Generating excitement, building a dream, asking for obscene amounts of money so he could rule the

world. Also generating huge programming projects in order to justify raising huge amounts of money. We needed to be programming away on the computer version of the dream, just as soon as we decided, in a bit more detail, what that dream should be.

More than you might expect, more than understood by accountants, the strain of an IPO falls on the programmers. If you speak to finance staff everywhere they will tell you the strain falls on accountants. Hmm. Maybe, some of it. Lots of statements of the company finances, assets, infrastructure, customers, capabilities and prospects are made prior to an IPO. Teams of lawyers will read it and say "you can't say that.". Teams of accountants will read it and say "prove this bit to me". But for every auditing accountant that tells our accountant to prove something, there will be a programmer tasked with generating a report that "proves" stuff. Lots of such reports were requested. Eventually I decided they were just taking the piss.

What happens after you say, not very politely, to the representative of a large accounting company who is going to make your boss very rich, that he should go away and not return ? I was expecting something. Given the amount of money at stake and the pressure that, suddenly we were all under, perhaps a bit of shouting ? Or maybe straight to a bullet in the head. What happened was nothing at all. He went away and did not return. Moral of the story, repeated then and many times later, obediance is much over-rated.

It was not only the boss who was going to make some money from the IPO. We all were. How it worked was that we were sold shares in the company whilst it was still in private hands. These shares were not exactly worth anything, in a sense. Certainly the only people who would buy them back off you were the people who already owned most of the shares. But the "Public" bit of an Initial Public Offering means that afterwards, one can easily buy and sell the shares, at least in theory. And the IPO also puts a value on them, with all that credibility and publicity and hype upping the price beyond anything achievable beforehand.

To be sold shares before the IPO did require some money. I had none. Possibly much less than none if you are going to compare assets and liabilities. More importantly in this context, I couldn't raise very much either. So I think I managed to beg about £750 to invest. Remember that number, it all adds to the excitement of what happened next.

Chapter 5 I was happy to just drink it up

We floated on the London Stock Exchange. We raised about £10 million pounds. We sold about 10% of the company to raise this money so we could claim the company was worth about £100million pounds. Which was not bad for something Parvin and I felt was little more than half a million lines of code thrown together in a mad panic after the latest requirements were read from an article in Information World Review.

Danny I think also noticed this trick and used it in a later life. Many years later he raised a tiny amount of money (or possibly just a promise of some money) and then claimed to have

created a Unicorn. A Unicorn is a technology company that becomes worth $1billion. That didn't end well either....

The press coverage of this was, I have to say, largely hostile. Also, speaking as someone who is himself dishing a little bit of dirt here and there, I'd say the coverage was unfair. One headline was "City Snubs MAID in Disaster Float". Entirely fictional, that disaster. All went pretty well, really. My £750 was now worth, ooh, a few thousand pounds and we had some money for the next stage in the project to rule the world.

What project? Er, yes, we hadn't actually decided what the project was yet.

For some reason we chose to have a meeting in New York. This might have been because we had an office in the city and Danny needed to meet with someone. Or it might have been because we'd raised £10million and it was time to act as if we were captains of industry. Have you ever travelled on business? Did the boss scowl at you for not finding a super-off-peak-virtually-free ticket on the roof of a freight train at midnight? Let me tell you about Concorde...

You didn't have to worry about finding the correct gate at Heathrow. Concorde taxied up to the lounge and you walked straight on. The lounge which was full of the rich and powerful, famous and a few chancers who'd just lucked into an IPO. Yeah, we flew Concorde out and first class back (flying from West to East you get more sleep in a slower plane). In between we discussed the next big project and spent some money in restaurants. I still wince at the thought of $400 for a bottle of wine. But it was all very nice..

That $400 bottle was bought by "Bill". Name changed and all that. Also it wasn't his real name, his real name was too strange and rich-kid for use in the office so he changed it. Bill had the gift of the gab like Danny. He was product development. That means, in some contexts, the guy who decides what the product should be. Also present when that $400 dollar bottle of wine was bought was our Finance Director, David. David was never as keen on spending money as Danny or Bill. Rightly so, he was the bean counter. Somehow Bills' gift of the gab and Danny's new captain of industry persona got round David's money sense. This was to happen many times over the years. Me, I was just happy to drink it up, which perhaps was also metaphorically true for that period of my life.

After our little trip we managed to come up with a plausible way to spend some money and even an outside chance of a way to rule the world.

Chapter 6  Having fun

Our plan was to build a program that ran on personal computers and would enable the masses to be able to access online information in the way they couldn't at the time. Remember it was before the dot-com era, before browsers. It was technically difficult. It was a very niche thing. But if we could get most business people to access their market information, news and financial data online, and pay us for the privilege, well perhaps we could make that dream work.

Even now, looking back, this doesn't seem such a bad plan.

The World Wide Web was not yet happening. (It might, I suppose, have been invented, I'm not sure of the exact dates). We weren't the only people who thought this might work. Bill Gates would soon have the idea of a Microsoft Network. American Online would become ubiquitous for a year or two. Compuserve would have its time in the sun. So this might have worked.

The personal computer program filled the very same role as the apps on your smart phone do. If there is one thing to learn from any aged programmer remembering his years in the business, it is that there's nothing new, ever.

Parvin and I didn't have the right skills for building this PC application so we had to recruit some people who did. The programming team expanded hugely and became two slightly rival teams. There were the people who worked on the back end. Yes, I know, like the pantomime horse. Just as necessary as the front end to handle the user, is the back end to handle the data and the databases. I say "rival teams" but it was mostly pretty friendly. For one thing we were all having fun. For another thing there was money to be made and job security was not even thought about. Programmers could get another job by the end of the day.

To help us with the right setting for this dream we moved into very, very nice offices in Leicester Square. The offices were then filled with several teams of dreamers. There were the accountants, the programmers, the account managers and trainers, the sales force, the editorial department. Most of the people were in their twenties. Almost all were single. More than a few were head-turningly good looking. More than a few were inclined towards partying.

Years later I find it hard to describe how hard people worked. Remember these were young professionals with a dream and mostly without commitments. So the hours were long. Nearby we had the attractions of central London. So the hours in the pub were sometimes also long.

It is slightly easier to describe the excesses that went along side the hard work than the work itself. This might give a misleading impression but is certain to be a more interesting read for most of you. For the avoidance of doubt I was the clean living, normal person surrounded by debauchery. Also remember I've changed all the names to protect the guilty.

Listen to the news now and any story about sex in the work place is about exploitation or unfairness or discrimination. It those days sex in the work place meant consensual sex happening, er, in the work place. The boardroom table was a favourite. Danny once threw a cloth at a guilty party (or half of them) and asked him to clean it up. Speaking of making a mess, the desk (and keyboard) of Russell, the sales manager, was a favoured location for an, um, frolic. The sense of humour of the sales staff was fairly basic. Russell modelled himself on the boss; this seemed like a sensible strategy for career advancement. Also a way to attract some scorn and rivalry. "Drugs?", I heard you ask. Well, since you ask. For example Russell was given a caution by the police for consuming cocaine, in broad daylight, a few yards outside the front door of the office block. Its just as well the police never came inside. Drugs were sufficiently normal that special notice was required if the workforce was expected to abstain. Before one company party Dan sent round an email to everyone begging us to avoid any drug consumption for the duration. Even, he wrote, cannabis. Gosh !

The company parties were very enjoyable. And sometimes educational. There was one evening when we hired a spot that was then in fashion. Central London in-crowd fashionable and expensive. As the Guardian wrote in a lament after it closed, over a decade later, "Bouncers on the door, celebrities at the bar, paparazzi in the street."

We behaved with the usual exuberance. I won't say we trashed the place, that would be an exaggeration. There may have been the odd dropped wine glass, the odd bottle of champagne that fell over, very little food was thrown, in my humble opinion. My mate Parvin - if you know much about India you'll have guessed that his full name had many more syllables than two and that his background included a very much non drinking culture. I think he'd been corrupted long before I met him and I know the circumstances whereby his Mum learnt that he wasn't always, totally aligned with Hindu doctrine on this matter. Well Parvin was even more drunk than I was. One of the pretty young girls there was Sue. This word "pretty" is often used for a flower, a baby, a frock. I'm using it more in the Hollywood film star sense. Sue was wearing something memorable. It covered her up just about enough to avoid being arrested. At around midnight or similar Parvin staggered up to her and offered an honest compliment. "Nice tits Sue !". Then he fell over. And passed out. I missed this incident for some reason, I must have been having a quiet discussion on philosophy somewhere, but not being immediately on hand meant I was spared the chore of dragging (literally) Parvin along to somewhere he could sleep it off for the night.

Eventually the Bar-and-Grill chucked us out. And then banned us.

Next week we promptly paid the bill, in full, including any damages. And they immediately un-banned us. I said the parties were sometimes educational. The lesson from this one is that restaurants value the bill being paid more than they frown on one’s behaviour or less-than-conservative dress sense. I often think of this when I wander into places which might, given my habitual programmer gear of jeans and tee-shirt, seem rather daunting. With a few exceptions, such as the Ritz, they just don't care. They just want you to spend some money.

Chapter 7 Then the Internet happened

Party time over, lets get back to work. The big rule-the-world project reached some sort of finish. The end of a software project can be clear-cut. You can employ one tester for every two programmers, you can have a quality assurance manager who knows how to draw up test plans and model risks and timescales, you can fix all the bugs and then release the finished product to a grateful public. Yeah, right. Or you can try your best against impossible deadlines, fluid requirements and an urgent need to rule the world. I'd say we muddled through.

The product won "Product of the Year" from a major magazine. People started to subscribe and we started along the path to world rulership. Our company signed a deal with Microsoft. There wasn't really much substance to the deal but it was a genuine deal which put our company name in the same financial news articles as Microsoft. This did something to the share price that truly had nothing to do with the substance of the deal.

That £750 pounds that I invested and which had become worth a couple of thousand, in the space of a few hours trading became worth a few tens of thousands of pounds. Most people in the office had even more shares than I did so you can image what this did for staff morale.

Everything has its pinnacle, its peak of world-rule. Google and Facebook may not have reached their zenith yet but the Roman empire has long gone and, dear reader, I bet you've never heard of my little company, even if gave you the proper company name.

We were buzzing. Then the Internet happened. It moved from a few academics sending emails to each other to the biggest thing ever to hit humanity. OK you can quibble, perhaps domesticating wolves helped our species slightly more, but you have to admit the Internet was fairly significant for a company involved in selling information online. Its not that we hadn't seen it coming, we had, if through a beer glass darkly, but you can't really plan for something like that. So our shiny award- winning PC product was rapidly becoming obsolete.

Chapter 8 Double-or-quits

Danny's reaction was double-or-quits. He decided we would buy the market leader in our field, finance this with another floatation and invest even more of other peoples money. The second-Initial Public Offering was done on the NASDAQ, i.e. in the USA and the company we decided to buy was headquartered in Mountain View, in Silicon Valley. The plan involved adding to the money pile by borrowing hugely, dazzling the financial markets with our brilliant idea such that the share price of the new entity would soar and then we would somehow (I was never totally clear on this) use our shares to, maybe, pay back some of the money we'd borrowed.

The echoes of previous bruising battles with other, older-money, big-empire-publishing entities were still around. The financial markets didn't really have time to notice how brilliant we were before the financial press set into us. So plan 'A' never happened. Our share price gently declined. Plan 'B' required us to actually make money on our operations. This would have been a first. We had previously been good at sales and good at "investment". Danny used the term investment in the same way you use the phrase "reckless carefree expenditure". We had never been very good at grinding out a profit.

To make things profitable after a company acquisition it is standard practice to see if you can save some money based on the fact that you are almost certainly spending twice for the same type of services. If the acquiring company had some computers and the acquired company had some computers then, hey presto, you surely can save the costs of half your computers. I don't think many senior captains of industry think about it any more deeply than this. I have more than once heard analysis that is no more sophisticated than "So, your company has some databases. Gee, our company has some databases. I'll get the pointy-heads to find some synergies there". Notice that word "synergies". It sounds all fluffy and clever. In business it almost always means job losses. The Californians had another term for it. They spoke of "riffing". The RIF was an acronym for Reduction in Force.

Plan B was now looking a lot more complicated than Plan A. We had to merge the operations of the Californians with the Londoners. Plus, to add an almost historic impossibility into the mix of requirements, we had to merge in another outfit we'd bought as part of the package and this crowd were based in Switzerland. Not renowned for international cooperation and merging, the Swiss. And we had to get the software and the databases into a rational configuration. And we also decided we would merge the staff and management and cultures of London and Mountain View and Berne. We'd all be a happy team apart from the ones we had to RIF, or their friends, or the ones who didn't like the new boss or the new culture.

How well do London and Silicon Valley mix? It wasn't an instant hit. If you have enough money you can get a consultant with a first class degree from a posh Uni and a Master of Business whatsit from somewhere prestigious and years of experience. He or she will tell you there's two ways to make this organisational plan work. You can let the newly acquired company carry on with their own culture and management or you can completely wipe out the old guard. Make all the old management redundant and dictate the way things will be. There are many case studies about this. There's very few successful examples of our third way of doing it. Our third way was only slightly more successful than Tony Blair's Iraq invasion.

We tried. We merged the management teams and genuinely meant it. For example I was in charge of the techies in London and one of my new colleagues, Graham, was in charge of the techies in California. So we created a merged entity, the office of the Chief Technology Officer. Graham and I did a job share. People who reported to me, reported to him and vice versa. I spent a lot of time flying to California (oh, and Berne) and he spent a lot of time flying to London (oh, and Berne.) Enough flying in fact to earn me a 1K card from United Airlines. This officially (if not factually) meant I'd done 100,000 air miles in a calendar year. I now had my own personal check-in queue at San Francisco airport.

Despite the effort and the jet-lag there were cultural clashes. I may be a bit out of date now but in those days I found the Californians to be both better behaved than Londoners and correspondingly more prim and judgemental about it. For example the first time Danny arrived in the main office in Mountain View he parked in the visitors’ car park. Be fair, I thought, he's travelled six thousand miles, he kind of owns this place and he doesn't know where things are. But the Californians treated this invasion of the visitors’ territorial on a par with Pearl Harbour. Also the Londoners swore. I haven't mentioned this bit of bad behaviour because, in the grand scheme of behaviour, it is a bit like complaining that the Yorkshire Ripper whistled out of tune. And the Londoners drank, even without previously publishing a memo in advance to announce that some fun was allowed on a given day.

Many of the Californians were very welcoming. Lovely. Intelligent. Dedicated, hard working and funny. Most of them were liberals ... but prescriptive, judgemental liberals. Danny probably also wondered where all the pretty girls were. Statistically speaking they were all south of there. There's Northern California, with geeks and start-ups and there's Southern California with film stars in Hollywood. Pretty girls in San Francisco also have a problem that - statistically speaking - many of the good looking men there are gay.

In summary, our plan, never really our first choice plan, of achieving operational excellence, culturally homogeneous offices and grinding out a profit never quite worked. Meanwhile, in order to set in motion our plan to rule the world we had somehow managed to build up some serious debts.

Somewhere along the line I ended up as a proper board director. As proper as it gets really. I was the IT Director of a company quoted on LSE and NASDAQ, with 220 staff reporting to me based on three land-masses. Arriving on the board brought with it professional responsibility for these debts we'd amassed and I must have spent much more time discussing banking covenants than information retrieval strategies. As for my job-share Graham, he left to join a valley start-up. His share options were turned into shares on IPO and his shares turned into more money than he could possibly spend in one lifetime within two years. Then about five years later he died of cancer. I'm not sure there's any lesson or moral in from that sad twist.

I also became a board IT director just before the Y2K panic. This was an entirely self-sustaining problem which wouldn't have mattered if nobody had bothered with it. Somebody, doubtless looking for fame and consultancy fees, came up with the idea that when the year 2000 arrived, many date and time duration calculations would fail because the arithmetic would be done on "00" rather than "2000". I never found a case where this was true and, remember, I was a programmer as well as some sort of executive. But once Y2K concern was considered best practice then software suppliers were forced to bring out new version of their packages which were "Y2K compliant". And this did cause real problems because the compliant packages probably didn't work, or not with the old code anyway, and if they did work they certainly required integration and testing. So to be able to persuade the investing public that us public companies were Y2K compliant, we had to do huge amounts of otherwise totally unnecessary work.

This unnecessary work seemed to have a perverse effect on the IT industry. It seemed to provoke a boom. The Y2K unnecessary work boom was overlaid on the newly discovered Internet-will-change-everything boom. The dot-com boom was already, to use a phrase from my childhood, completely mental. Anything dot-com was judged to be worth more than anything that provided real goods or services. Company valuations were, as I say, mental.

Whilst our company was considered to be on the fringes of this excitement, actually the technology used was right in the mix. To turn one’s Internet skills and knowledge into money during the dot-com boom one needed get one’s hands on other people’s money. How often I have to use that phrase, perhaps it also needs capitals. Other Peoples Money. It is a sad fact of modern capitalism that one sees more people become extremely wealthy on the back of investors than one sees enriched though actual wealth creation.

Some of our staff cashed in. And good luck to them. Our product development guy, Bill, he teamed up with the programmer I had put in charge of our backend development, Carl. Carl was an excellent and very hard working programmer but Bill’s plan was really just to use him to provide credibility rather than code. Or that's my take on it. Bill and Carl came up with a plan that needed investment and built, er, I'm not sure they built anything, but they then sold it and made $40million. Each. Those were the days. Carl and Bill bought yachts - each tried to buy the biggest - and spent some time sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. I must admit it did turn my head a bit but I was feeling the strain - and responsibility - of our little company and its failing dreams of world domination.

Our debts were not going to be paid. Danny's approach to impending doom was mostly to find some outrageously expensive way of moving the goal posts. We "invested" - remember that term can be tricky to define - we invested in Internet systems for hotels. We became interested in e-commerce. E-commerce was probably a good idea and people will have made fortunes in the field one way or another, but it wasn't going to solve our profitability issues. At one point Danny decided to buy a search engine package.

I begged him not to. Of course I knew lots about such things but Danny would always listen to someone with a story about how to rule the world. You might say that some search engines pretty much do rule the world. That's fair but its not sufficient to have some mysterious lines of code. Somewhere in Cambridge some academics wrote some software to create a product that used "probabalistic" information retrieval. If you really wanted I could give you some mathematics as introduction to the "Vector Space Model". I would prefer to describe this package as using the "Mystic Meg" approach. You never really knew what you were going to get or why you got it for any given search. The Cambridge academics, for some reason, split into two rival teams, both using the same code. Our company bought the code and tried use it. The other team found some tens of millions of other peoples money and spent it on marketing. Then they did an IPO. Then they proceeded to create an impression of a world leading company. The only good thing about this was that when Hewlett Packard bought this company - based on the same code we owned, they lost considerably more money than we did. Billions of pounds more, truly. I could have told them, if they'd asked.

That sort of thing takes up lots of management attention that might have been better used looking for some profits. Sadly it became clear that the one little thing our glorious leader didn't have in his arsenal was a way to make a profit. There comes a point, as a director of a publicly quoted company, when you have to look for the least damaging way for your creditors to get some of the money you owe them. The shareholders cease to be your first responsibility, indeed they move to the back of the queue. We reached this point sometime in 1999 and the dream died somewhere around this point.

The dream was gone and we were looking for someone who could buy the company - and given the debts and the commercial failure we didn't expect a top price. We found a buyer and I felt my work there was done.

Chapter 9 Please leave today or tomorrow

Getting out of the company proved a bit more protracted than I expected. First I was told that an IT Director couldn't just leave in 1999 because people would assume the Y2K bug was going to kill us. Then I was told I was needed to help the acquiring company integrate their new assets into their empire.

Then one day I was told I was absolutely not wanted, in fact please leave today or tomorrow.

That sounds humiliating but it wasn't like that. For one thing, in early 2000, the dot-com boom was still going. A senior technologist with Internet skills did not end up on the scrap heap. Also, for various financial and contractual reasons, I got lucky and was able to have the summer off with hardly a care, indeed with a weight lifted off my shoulders.

Chapter 10 Epilogue

Companies rise and fall. Dreams are inspired and then fade away. Investors get out in time or lose their money. The system continues, for good or ill.

Danny was to try and fail again. And again. During each cycle I think he managed to acquire a bit more personal wealth whilst never quite delivering for shareholders. Last I heard his reputation, although controversial, didn't stop people approaching him to offer him more investment if he wanted to try again.

Parvin opened a cafe in Surbiton that specialises in being welcoming to dogs. One of his customers is Sue. Sue married the company lawyer. They have four children. They might or might not get tired of remarks about her looks and his brains.

Carl got bored of yachting and went back to programming, as we all knew he would. Last time we met we discussed...programming, like you do.

Russell is a business man now. Maybe not quite a captain of industry but certainly an example of how you can be completely hedonistic for decades and not ruin your life. He's happily married, healthy and wealthy.

I have no idea what happened to Bill. Wherever he is I am sure he is drinking the finest wines.

David the finance director parted company from Danny and returned to property development, where one can make some, er, honest money.

I teamed up with a colleague from the old Maxwell company to operate our own publishing company. We borrowed nothing from anyone. No Other Peoples Money. Because of this we have to grind out a profit.

The Internet seems to be here to stay. The future has arrived, if not evenly distributed. A new generation of ambitious young Londoners strides purposefully past the performance artists.