had already demonstrated abundantly that he was able to do that.
With outside investment came the need, for the first time in the company’s history, to set up a real board. Andrei made it a condition of the deal that he retain control. His lawyer devised a dual class stock arrangement that gave a certain class of shares – the ones Andrei would continue to hold – amplified voting rights, so he would effectively retain control of the company unless his holding fell below 10 per cent of the total stock.
Normally, Robert Leib wouldn’t have stood for a provision that effectively gave indefinite control of the company to the founder of a start-up. But Fishbowl was no ordinary start-up and Andrei was no ordinary founder – and the likely returns Leib was going to make on this investment were no ordinary returns. The statutes of the company were changed accordingly, and the new stock structure implemented. The board had six seats. Andrei took one, nominating Chris and Kevin for another one each. Robert Leib, representing the VC syndicate, which now held 4 per cent of the stock and an option for a further 3 per cent in a year’s time, held a fourth seat. The fifth seat went to Pete Muller, an internet entrepreneur whom Andrei had met and respected. He left the sixth seat vacant.
Andrei could still vividly remember the day that the first half-million dollars from 4Site had hit his bank account, back in the days when Fishbowl had still been run out of the suite in Robinson House. It was a measure of how far he had come that the day Leib’s $300 million was wired to the Fishbowl account didn’t stick in his memory at all. It was simply an amount of money he needed in order to do something and, when it arrived, he could forge ahead. His chief financial officer put his head around the door of the office that Andrei now occupied and told him the funds had arrived. Kevin was with him at the time, deep in discussion about the project for which those funds were required. Andrei simply nodded at the CFO and turned back to Kevin.
A team of headhunters was already at work for a multi-million-dollar fee. Their brief over that winter was to lure the world’s best talent in artificial intelligence and linguistics programming. MIT, Stanford, Imperial College in London, and the dozen other top academic software labs in the world were targeted, with the inducement of multi-million-dollar salaries and generous relocation packages to California. It didn’t prove too hard to tempt away brilliant young associate professors earning a fraction of that sum, with the additional prospect of life-changing sums in stock options and the prospect of working alongside the most outstanding brains of their generation. To add to the academic talent, the most creative programmers in Seattle and Silicon Valley were offered a doubling of their existing remuneration package and a bundle of stock options as well. Hollywood and video games developers were raided for the leading talents in visuals. Altogether, a team of sixty-eight of the world’s most gifted researchers and programmers was recruited and relocated to the Bay Area.
The project was to run under strict secrecy. Jenn McGrealy found an office away from the rest of Fishbowl in a nondescript block on Manhattan Avenue in East Palo Alto, just south of Route 101. The people recruited were instructed to tell their spouses that they were working in a private academic research institute, which was strictly true, since a private institute, separate from Fishbowl, had been incorporated under which all salaries and expenses were paid. The institute was owned by a Cayman Islands-based holding company, which in turn was confidentially owned by Fishbowl, so no casual association would link Fishbowl to the work being done there. Non-disclosure clauses in the employment contracts were draconian. Administration and infrastructure was to be run by a small team within the office on Manhattan Avenue that was unconnected with Fishbowl’s support services. Besides Andrei, Chris, Kevin and Jenn McGrealy, no one in the wider Fishbowl organization knew that the project existed.
By March, Fishbowl’s new employees and their families were flying in to Palo Alto at the rate of twenty a week. After six months of recruitment, the team assembled for the first time on Manhattan Avenue. They were greeted by Andrei, Chris and Kevin.
Andrei gave a welcome speech in the atrium of the office, standing in front of the obligatory Fishbowl aquarium.