As the plane took off, Andrei felt something inside him take off as well. Maybe it was watching things grow smaller on the ground, but suddenly he felt himself looking at what he had done over the past couple of months as if from a height. Things had been happening so fast and with such intensity that he had had no time to try to understand it all. He had sat the exams for the Fall Quarter on the back of a couple of nights of intense cramming, and he knew his grades weren’t going to be what they should have been. He really needed to think.
He decided that for the next two weeks he wasn’t going to do any work on Fishbowll. He was going to step back and try to understand this thing he had created and which, in a few short weeks, seemed to have taken over his life.
And it wasn’t only time that Fishbowll was taking, it was money. The site was chronically short of server space and there was only so much he could do by streamlining the architecture. He had already put in most of the savings he had in the bank from selling his app. If Fishbowll’s growth continued at anything like the rate it was showing, a significant additional investment in server capacity would be required merely to keep it standing.
Back home, he told his parents about Fishbowll for the first time. His brother and sister were visiting for the holidays as well. He showed them the website. When he opened it, his sister, Dina, who was doing a PhD in chemical engineering at Princeton, started laughing. ‘That’s yours?’ she said.
Andrei bristled a little, wondering what was so funny.
‘I joined up last week.’ Dina grinned. ‘Leo,’ he said to their brother, ‘have you joined yet?’
Leo shook his head.
‘What do you guys at Wharton do all day? Come on, this is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.’ She turned back to Andrei. ‘It’s yours? You really wrote this thing?’
Andrei nodded, still not sure if Dina was pulling his leg.
‘Mom, Dad, this thing’s unbelievable. You’ve got to take a look at it. How many users have you got, Andrei?’
Andrei shrugged. ‘Around half a million. A little more.’
‘Half a million?’ said Leo. ‘In how long?’
Andrei shrugged again. ‘A couple of months.’
‘That’s unbelievable!’ said Leo.
Dina hit him on the arm. ‘See? Join up already!’
Andrei’s parents glanced at each other, wondering what their children were so excited about ‘You’re taking care of your school work, right?’ said Andrei’s father, waggling a finger at him.
‘Sure,’ said Andrei.
Naturally, Andrei couldn’t quite keep his hands off his keyboard over the holiday, and he used the opportunity to fix a few aspects of the site’s functionality that had been bugging him for a while. But he did force himself to step away and think about it as well. Dina and Leo wanted to know more about the site, how he had got the idea, how he had developed it, what plans he had for it. Andrei wished he could have answered the last question. He took long walks along the icy streets around his parents’ house in Brookline and tried to figure out what he had got himself into. Was Fishbowll a figment, a fancy, a programming whim, or, as he was beginning to feel, a revolutionary means of providing a radically deeper level of connection in a way that might change the world? Or was he just turning into a completely deluded fantasist?
As the old year ticked into the new, Fishbowll had 793,000 registered users. Three days later, Andrei was on a plane back to Stanford.
Even if he wanted to walk away from Fishbowll, or set it on the back burner while he concentrated on school, he wasn’t sure that he had the right to. He had offered it to people and they had taken it up. Almost a million of them. They depended on it now.
He could sell it and let someone else – someone with the time and the money that was needed for it – take it to the next level. Even now, with the growth curve it had generated, he might well get something for it, perhaps even a seven-figure sum. Not bad for half a semester’s work. He had school work to do and his future to think of, as his parents had reminded him, and just as a site’s user base could rapidly grow, so it