dollars on the line in this frat house, but the anarchy and sheer exuberance exhilarated him. He sensed that he was caught up in an exceptional concentration of creativity and one would mess with the magic only at one’s peril. Within the apparent wildness of the whirlpool, things got done. Astonishing, innovative, extraordinary things. When Andrei and Kevin and the other programmers sat at their desks and put on their headphones, it was work. If someone disturbed them, Andrei would throw down his headphones and let out a Russian curse that might have meant nothing, as far as anyone knew, but never failed to quieten the room. It was no way to run a business, but this wasn’t a business – it was Fishbowll. Let it run riot. It would have time to grow up.
Nonetheless, there was one aspect of the operation that Chris couldn’t let run wild. He had found Andrei someone to oversee the infrastructure, an engineer called Eric Baumer who had worked with him at FriendTracker. Chris lured him to the job with a modest salary, options worth 1 per cent of the company and his insistent personal assurances that one day those options would be worth a lot more than anything FriendTracker had ever delivered. Eric was meticulous, methodical and had proven at FriendTracker that he knew how to apply those qualities to keep a service running in the white-hot crucible created by the combination of exponential growth and hastily written software architecture. But not even FriendTracker had featured a place as anarchic as the house on La Calle Court.
While Andrei was deep in the coding of Fishbowll, Chris took it upon himself to make sure Eric was paid and kept the site running. Eric worked out of his home office in Hayward, about fifteen miles away across the San Mateo Bridge. To avoid scaring the hell out of him, Chris kept him as far from the Fishbowll house as he could. Whenever they had to meet, they’d get together over noodles at Yao’s.
Most of the time, however, Chris hung around the house, drinking beers, talking Fishbowll and enjoying the vibe. He hit on most of the girls who came through the door and had occasional success. He hadn’t had this much fun since the early days of FriendTracker, and FriendTracker, he had always felt, had been a fad. Fishbowll was here to stay.
Andrei had decided that he wasn’t going back to Stanford in the fall. He was trying to organize a leave of absence for a year before getting up the courage to tell his parents. They must have suspected what was going on, however, and they arrived one Saturday afternoon, marched through the battlefield of the living room, and locked themselves in a bedroom with Andrei. Everyone stood outside listening to a lot of shouting in Russian. Afterwards, Andrei and his parents came out and only then, it seemed, did his parents take in the state of the house.
Andrei’s father shouted some more.
They stayed in a hotel and Andrei met them the next morning for brunch. By then they were somewhat calmer. They had taken in the points he had made about the revenue Fishbowll was already earning, and the amounts he had been offered for the business had had time to sink in. He brought them back to La Calle Court and introduced them to Kevin and Ben and Chris and the two programmers who lived at the house. By this time, his parents had sufficiently relaxed to have a conversation with them. Kevin asked about Moscow in the nineties and Andrei’s father, over a beer, told a few anecdotes that scared the hell out of everyone. Then his mother lined them up, programmers included, and for the rest of the afternoon she had the full half-dozen of them cleaning the house. By the time Andrei’s parents left that evening to go back to Boston, they seemed to have accepted the inevitable. Andrei had assured them he’d get a leave of absence.
Kevin was planning to get a leave of absence as well. Ben, on the other hand, was intending to go back to Stanford for the fall quarter. He sensed that a leave of absence would probably turn into permanent absence, and he wanted his degree. He still wanted to stay involved with Fishbowll and he talked to Andrei about how they could make that work. He would put less time into Fishbowll and then see if he wanted to come back full