place. It was not to make the world a worse place, period.’
‘Maybe the least worse is the best you can do right now.’ Ben leaned forward. ‘Andrei, you’ve put this thing into the world. You can’t take it out again. If you try, someone else will put it back there. So it’s a question of us or someone else. And I think, if that’s the question, it’s a no-brainer. Having someone else do this rather than us makes the world worse. So that means we’ve got to go with advertising.’
Andrei didn’t reply.
‘We don’t have to do it like everybody else. Kevin’s right. We don’t have to be like Mike Sweetman and wring every last drop out of the stone. We can do just enough to keep ourselves going, if that’s what you want. And in the future, if Fish Food works, we can stop. This isn’t irreversible, Andrei. Maybe it’s just a temporary thing we need to do. I think if we explain it like that, people will understand. I think even the 300 will understand. Karl Morrow will hit the roof but, then, when doesn’t he?’ Ben grinned. ‘The Dillerman will find a way to make it seem OK.’
‘Even the Dillerman will have trouble on this one,’ murmured Andrei.
‘You might be surprised. People know the reality. It takes money to keep going.’
Andrei sighed. A deep, long, troubled breath. He didn’t have to do it like Sweetman or any of the other net entrepreneurs who had sold their ideals, as he saw it, for a fistful of cash. He could do it any way and to any degree that he chose. But still he felt that something was happening, a line was being crossed, and, once crossed, whatever Ben said, it couldn’t be crossed back.
‘OK,’ he said eventually. He put his head in his hands and nodded a couple of times. ‘OK.’
Ben watched him. ‘We don’t need to sell our souls.’
‘I guess not,’ said Andrei quietly.
‘The thing is,’ said Ben, ‘I don’t know how we even do this. How do we make this happen? You say we’ve got six weeks’ cash left?’
‘Five, to be safe.’
‘Where do we start? Do we go out and hire somebody? How do we start getting the money in, in five weeks? Do you know how to do this stuff?’
Andrei shook his head.
‘Does Kevin?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I don’t think we’ve got the time to make it up as we go along.’
‘I know,’ said Andrei.
Ben looked at him questioningly.
‘There’s a guy who’s been bugging me,’ confessed Andrei. ‘Somehow he got my number. He’s been calling me for weeks.’
12
ED STANDISH FIRST learned of Fishbowll when his nephew, an engineering senior at Duke University, came home for the holidays and raved about the site over Christmas lunch. Standish was a Dallas-based advertising executive for a firm called 4Site, which had developed a lucrative practice helping internet start-ups build and target their advertising offerings. At forty-six, he was accustomed to dealing with twenty-something tech guys and had honed a keen sense of what worked on the net.
That Christmas night, when the kids had gone to bed and his wife had collapsed in front of the TV, he opened Fishbowll, registered, explored the site and found an advertising-free service. When he went back to work two days later, he did some research about the website, took a closer look at it and tried to figure out what income stream they could have. He wasn’t able to come up with anything. Unless he was missing something, or unless they had backing from a deep-pocketed investor who had no interest in getting a return on his money – a mythical creature, as far as Ed Standish was aware – that was an unsustainable situation. Ed then wondered if they had already done a deal with another agency, so he did a search of the trade media to find out if it had been reported. Then he did some calculations about Fishbowll’s revenue potential under various assumptions, and immediately wondered how 4Site could get a piece of it.
He got an assistant to ferret out Andrei Koss’s phone number and started ringing. The first couple of times Koss answered, then he didn’t. Standish kept trying, on average, a couple of times a week. If Koss was ignoring him, he figured, at least he knew who he was. He wanted to keep reminding him. At some point, Koss’s attitude might change, and Standish wanted to be the one he thought of.
He would have kept going for a