it was done.
The bulk of the groundbreaking work in the Manhattan project was done in the first two years. Soon after that, as the focus shifted towards developing user applications, a number of the original members of the team left. Some were disgruntled at what they foresaw as the excessive commercialization of their work, although what else they imagined would be done with it, considering that the project was being funded by a private company, was unclear. Most of the leavers were academic linguists whose work was done anyway. Others were replaced by new people. The project’s secrecy held. None of those who left broke their nondisclosure agreements, probably motivated by the thought of stock options that wouldn’t vest for a further two years.
The two external members of the Fishbowl board, Robert Leib and Pete Muller, remained in ignorance throughout the project, just like the rest of the world. As far as they were aware, the escalating spend that they saw in the company accounts to the Caymans holding company, which they were told was being directed to the ‘Institute for Technical Science’, were payments to a Fishbowl-owned incubator which had been set up for tax purposes and was developing Fishbowl’s cutting-edge functionalities. Since neither Leib nor Muller knew enough about the way a meta-network of Fishbowl’s size and stage of development operated its R&D to question the magnitude of the spending, few questions were asked. As far as they were concerned, the spend on the institute could have been $10 million or it could have been $100 million. A year after his first investment, Leib organized a second syndicate to exercise the option of taking another 2 per cent of Fishbowl for a further $300 million dollars, and counted himself lucky.
During this time, Fishbowl established itself as one of the unquestioned giants of the internet world, a feature of the landscape so ubiquitous and influential that it became hard to remember what internet life had been like before it existed. Constant focus on delivery and improvement of functionality was its hallmark. Jenn McGrealy proved herself to be a superb executive and leader, controlling not only the day-to-day operations of the company but also helping Andrei exert a discipline over the programmes run by the two heads of development that he wouldn’t have imposed by himself. Andrei came to rely heavily on her judgement on how to allocate his time outside the Manhattan office.
In Palo Alto, Fishbowl now had over 1,900 employees housed, with the exception of the Manhattanites, in an interconnected pair of buildings on University Avenue, and a further 600 employees worldwide. Its IPO was eagerly awaited and rumours regularly swept the market that Fishbowl was about to announce its public offering, which was expected to be amongst the highest ever to come to the market. Homeplace, once the monster of the social media world, was in steep decline, its user base having largely migrated to Fishbowl after it had been forced to open access for data transfer. The money spent on the political lobbying to force the move, and on developing services to outshine Homeplace’s, had paid off. As a combined network and meta-network, Fishbowl was the second most visited site on the net, its user numbers topping one billion. Its advertising revenues, both from what was regarded as traditional internet advertising and from its high-end Farming, escalated accordingly. Farming was being widely copied by other networks, many of which had lined up to condemn Andrei when Fishbowl had blazed the trail. Now they were scrambling to catch up.
About a year after Andrei moved Kevin off the Manhattan Project and back to Embarcadero, Kevin left Fishbowl in order to purse a new venture of his own. Although nominally still the Vice President for Getting Things Done when he came back to Embarcadero, Kevin had never recovered his previous position at the top of the programming tree. The two heads of development who had been nominated when he had gone off to lead the project, jointly selected by Andrei and Jenn, were able, organized and disciplined. Development ran more smoothly under their command. Although Kevin didn’t formally report to them, they controlled the development programme, and he found himself sidelined, allocated only specific projects with smaller teams. Kevin had his own ideas about what he wanted to do, and they didn’t necessarily fit into the Fishbowl framework. After years in Andrei’s shadow, he had also decided that he didn’t want anyone else controlling them.
Kevin had never lost his