the Grotto.’
‘They won’t even notice it.’
‘They notice everything.’
Outside the Grotto, other people noticed as well.
15
IN JANUARY OF that year, around the time that Kevin and Ben were joining Andrei with shares in Fishbowll and putting the first investment into the business, Chris Hamer set off on a trip into the Australian Outback.
Tall, gangly, with a shock of blond hair, Hamer, then twenty-eight, was already a veteran of three internet start-ups, one of which he and his co-founders had sold for $120 million, netting him a fortune of $18 million. While waiting for his next big idea to hit him, he lived in LA and spent his time as a professional investor funding other internet start-ups.
Hamer was the son of a successful Los Angeles lawyer and had attended the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School, and then Princeton. He had emerged from the experience a curious, widely read, highly intelligent and strangely cynical character. The website from which he had made his money, FriendTracker, was an application that piggybacked on social networks to follow the activities of your friends and give other friends the ability to rank them as being positive or negative for you, using an algorithm to provide an overall score for friendliness or antagonism – or betrayal, as FriendTracker characterized it. It was like National Enquirer come to life. Bust-ups as a result of FriendTracker became common, loudly trumpeted on a FriendSmash! page specifically dedicated to fights and garnering huge publicity. The page was Chris’s invention, as was the idea for the site itself. He thought the whole thing was hilarious and demoralizing in equal measure, confirming him in his jaded view of modern society.
In theory, there was as much potential for FriendTracker to highlight the depth of genuine friendships and the selflessness at the heart of them, but all anyone cared about was conflict and deceit. Duplicitous or jealous friends found ways to use the tool to manipulate their rivals and stab other friends in the back. Chris found even more hilarious and demoralizing the eagerness of advertisers to get on the site, and of a syndicate of Ukrainian investors to take it off his hands when he was getting bored with it.
He couldn’t believe the site had lasted as long as it had. He had thought it was more of a gimmick than a long-staying business and had been proven right by its subsequent decline. Chris felt no guilt about that. The group of investors who had bought FriendTracker thought there was additional value to be had, which meant, in a way, they were trying to screw him. He thought it was overvalued as a result of the publicity over the fights it generated, which meant that he, in the same way, was trying to screw them. Turned out he won and they lost.
The whole thing, in retrospect, was an exercise in cynicism, starting from the idea at the heart of it – exposing the shallowness of apparent friendships – through the hype it engendered, to the ludicrous price he extracted for it.
But while Chris’s cynicism was about the nature of people in modern life, their gullibility and hypocrisy, the things they did, valued and believed in, he wasn’t remotely cynical about the businesses that served – or as he put it more bluntly, exploited – their needs, a number of which he invested in. He was a sharp and insightful observer of the internet space. To Hamer, the cutting edge of the internet was a scything mass of startling and original ideas, many of which would fail, but some of which would survive to shape the world for decades, if not centuries, to come. Constantly in search of intellectual stimulation, he was obsessed by the incessant invention and newness of what he saw, fascinated by its development. And by the potential to make truly stomach-churning amounts of money, while having what he considered to be the most fun that it was possible to have. He was always in search of new ideas that would allow him to do that.
The world Chris Hamer inhabited was thus an ever-changing cloud of oddly capitalized cyber names that blew in and then blew away, only rarely sticking. Every week, if not every day, he heard about something that was supposedly the next big thing. Most of those names, he knew, would be forgotten by the time he heard about the next one. But when he did find something that was interesting enough to pursue, when he found that one-in-a-hundred idea that seemed