reputation for that, you may as well turn it upside down and empty the water out right now.’
Andrei stared at him.
‘I’m serious. That’s where you need redundancy. If there’s one thing you should go do this afternoon after we finish, it’s go find yourself more server capacity. Don’t sit down and code. Get on the phone and find yourself server space. Get your infrastructure ready. Now, the second question. Have you got any revenue?’
‘We’ve got a deal with 4Site.’
‘Who are they?’
‘An advertising company.’
‘What are they like?’
‘There’s one guy who’s cool. He’s kind of old but he gets it. The other guys I’ve met think they know it all.’
‘What kind of a deal have you got? This is confidential, I promise.’
‘They get eighteen per cent commission and guarantee one million revenue this year, double next year.’
‘That’s good. Is it exclusive?’
Andrei nodded.
‘This deal runs for how long?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘You’ll have outgrown them by then.’
‘I know,’ said Andrei. ‘But I thought we’d need that long to figure out how the advertising model works. This isn’t about making as much money as we possibly can. If we have to have advertising, then it’s about using it, as far as we can, to enhance the user experience. My aim is to use the contract period to experiment with the approach. And we have a guaranteed income, which was important for us. We were running out of cash. We’d be dead now if we hadn’t done that deal.’
‘I’m not saying it’s a bad deal,’ said Chris. ‘Eighteen per cent is about as low as I’ve ever heard. Who negotiated that?’
‘Me.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘Don’t be. I was lucky. My father knew some oligarchs. He’s Russian. I’m Russian, too. I mean, I was born in Russia. I’m American now, of course.’
Chris looked at him in confusion. ‘And the connection is …?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Andrei.
‘Are you talking about Russian oligarchs? Is there some kind of Russian mafia involvement here?’
Andrei cracked a rare smile.
‘Because I’ve been involved with some unsavoury characters, but if that’s what we’re talking about, Andrei, I’m out of my league.’
‘Nothing. There’s nothing. Forget I said it.’
Chris peered at him for a moment. ‘All right. Tell me about Ben and Kevin. They own part of the company?’
‘Kevin owns fifteen per cent and Ben owns nine.’
‘And you have the rest?’
Andrei nodded.
‘What does Kevin do?’
‘He codes.’
‘You can pay a programmer.’
‘I do. Four. Kevin’s not like that. Kevin keeps it all going. If there’s a problem, he works at it until it’s done. He’s a Stakhanovite.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s an old Soviet term for a hero-worker. Someone of superhuman productivity. Kevin’s a Stakhanovite.’
‘Well, every start-up needs one. And Ben?’
‘He’s a psychology major. He helps … I don’t know, figure stuff out. He also analyses the data.’
‘So that’s it. You three guys and the four programmers you pay?’
‘That’s it. Do I need more? I don’t know if I’ve got the money for more, especially if I’ve got to scale up for a hundred million users.’
‘Then you need to find it.’ Chris sat back. ‘You need to find it. I can’t believe you’re still surviving as you are. Andrei, I share the vision. I get it, I totally get it, and I love it. It’s awesome. The world is on a one-way journey to a global future and it’s only a question of who gets to lay the road. It may be that when the history of this is written, Fishbowll will have a chapter all to itself. But when I look at it from a business perspective, I think, if you get it right, you also have the most extraordinary thing on your hands. You have a set of users that are walking around with bullseyes on their backs. They’re not just selected for their interests but self-selected, and not just for their interests but for the interests they really, really care about. If advertisers have wet dreams, this is it.’
‘I know,’ said Andrei. ‘We find that we have a little of what we call interest-tourism, where users just type in some crazy thing to see what comes up. Mostly it’s new users and they do it a couple of times and that’s it. But for the others, we’re getting pretty good now at analysing usage patterns – who people talk to, how often, on what topics – to figure out how committed a user is to a particular interest. I think we’re starting to understand that better than our users understand it themselves. Right now, advertisers bid a basic per-click rate at a