Bowblog

I wrote this article for Mark Ellen at The Word¹ fourteen years ago (I hope he won’t mind my putting it up here). The events described – my stupid progress through the stupid dotcom boom (and the stupid crash that followed it) already felt like a long time ago then… What you ought to do is scroll down and read the footnotes – that’s where I’ve put the gags.

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When dotcom fever hit ’90s London, companies led by young chancers like Steve Bowbrick could suddenly attract millions of pounds of investment. These were the days of indoor lawns, beautiful people floating around with orchids, endless PowerPoint presentations, boundless optimism and illusory profits. It couldn’t last. It didn’t².

Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11. I was getting drunk – oblivious to the world-changing calamity unfolding in New York City – in a gastropub in Kentish Town³. I was with the finance guys. Our business, a web-based email service called another.com⁴, was in trouble. It was over a year since the NASDAQ⁵ – the hi-tech stock market – had crashed and two years since we had raised well over £6 million from investors for the business. That money, plus more we’d raised in the meantime, was running out fast, and we were a long way from making a profit. We weren’t ready to acknowledge it yet, but our party was well and truly over. The lunches were getting longer and the amount of booze consumed increasing. When we returned to the office that day, the TV screens were all tuned to the news from New York and I’m pretty sure that’s when we knew it was finished. How could the whole vain, febrile dotcom nonsense survive what we were seeing on our TV screens? It couldn’t, of course. But it was another year before we finally gave up the ghost and sold the business for a fraction of a fraction of its fantasy dotcom value.

And so ended my decade in the dotcom business⁶: a story that began in the early ’90s and consumed essentially the whole of my thirties.

In 1993, my friend Ivan Pope⁷ began publishing a magazine about the World Wide Web called 3W⁸. The magazine morphed⁹ into a company we called Webmedia later that year. It seemed obvious that writing about the web couldn’t possibly be as cool as building actual websites. We beetled off to Companies House¹⁰ and paid over the fee to start a limited company. We called it Webmedia because we suspected that the fragile bundle of protocols and standards emerging from under a mountain in Switzerland was going to turn into a medium. The fate of the web wasn’t at all obvious back then. I remember typing a 3W subhead that read “there are already hundreds of web sites.” There were many more, of course, by the time we got started¹¹ but it was still far from clear that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web¹² of academic papers and research data and Cambridge coffee pots¹³ would evolve into a useful new publishing platform, let alone a new field of human expression.

I was the sales guy. Ivan was the techie. We were, of course, not qualified for either role. Both of us had spent our twenties slacking – acquiring degrees in subjects providing no obvious route to employment. Of the two of us, Ivan was the more energetic – a kind of artistic Tigger¹⁴, a Goldsmiths graduate with an anarchic streak and an enormous, shambolic, multi- floor “studio” in Hackney that I hugely envied. I was barely making a living, teaching a bit, creating a substantial body of unexhibited art and working up a detailed knowledge of the quality of the Guinness on offer in every pub between Whitechapel and the Royal Docks¹⁵. Along the way, though, we’d both, independently, bumped into computers – I met my first Mac in 1985¹⁶ – and developed a passionate belief in their potential to rewrite human culture, to liberate us all¹⁷. My undergraduate thesis, from 1988, described in detail an internet I had never met¹⁸. The web was clearly my destiny. Webmedia’s business was designing websites for businesses. Ivan knew roughly where to put the angle brackets in the HTML (the web’s language) and I had a winning smile. How could we lose? On the World Wide Web, things were still very ragged and anarchic. When we got started, pictures weren’t possible. I repeat: PICTURES WEREN’T POSSIBLE. The celebrations in our office when HTML was extended to allow pictures were long and loud. We built early sites for forward-thinkers like Time Out magazine¹⁹ and The Body Shop and moved into the offices of a bankrupt wine-tasting school underneath the just-opened Cyberia²⁰ cafe in London’s glamorous West End. Cyberia was a cybercafe²¹, a hangout for speedy kids who fancied themselves characters from William Gibson stories, for geeks seeking a fast connection fix (in the days of dial-up²², remember), for credulous journos and for men in suits who’d been asked to find out about this internet thing. Cyberia became our meeting room. We schmoozed there, cooked up nutty plans, devised manifestos. It wasn’t Les Deux Magots or the Algonquin but maybe it was our World’s End. There was an impatient, creative, punk feel about the whole thing. We were like a movement. We thought Cyberia was the emerging web world’s dead centre and we were lucky to be there.

Our landlords and friends upstairs – they ran the cafe and an upstart internet service provider that went on to be a very big business – provided us with internet access. They had a cowboy streak too and an unlikely background in revolutionary politics²³. Keith the techie (now a Silicon Valley luminary) stood at the top of the stairs and threw down a cable: “Plug that into your network but do it quick because all our dial-up customers²⁴ will be offline while you’re doing it.”²⁵ We rented a water cooler because we’d seen them in movies and we spent the last of our own money on champagne we drank from those little conical paper cups. Parties were held and the first in a long line of sparky kids²⁶ arrived – hipsters and geeks who knew just enough about the advancing technology to get through the door and down the dingy stairs. The studio was loud and chaotic; later a pair of Technics decks arrived – from where I never knew.

At the beginning of 1995 we were already on a kind of conveyor belt, touring the offices of ad agencies and IT companies in cheap suits purchased for the purpose. We needed money for rent and wages and server hosting and one of these august institutions was going to give us some for a share in our company. We were sure of it. And it didn’t seem unlikely. Everybody wanted in. A publisher wanted to “add us to its portfolio”. IT consultancies wanted to “tap into our vision”. There were, hilariously, extended discussions with noodle empire Wagamama (I kid you not) about a merger of some kind. This was my favourite mainly because I wanted to call the merged company WebaWagaMamaMedia. I think they fired the guy²⁷.

A closer call came in the offices of a monster global ad agency in a glass office by the Thames. We were shown into a room – just the two of us – and sat on one side of a shiny boardroom table opposite five men. One was the executive who wanted to buy our company and the other four were highly groomed 20-something clones – like the agents in The Matrix. They handed us business cards. Every one of them read “Company Secretary”. It was Kafkaesque and the atmosphere was chilly. The executive – I can remember his name; I’m just not telling you in case saying it summons him from the dark place he inhabits – made us a complicated, multi-clause offer that, even to our untrained minds, seemed to require that we gave him quite a lot of our money. Which wasn’t what we had in mind at all. We literally ran from the office and the sense of escape, outside in the fountained plaza, was enormous, joyful – like something from a movie. There should have been a spiralling helicopter shot. We laughed and laughed.

I used to win web-design business by phoning the people I read about in magazines. I was green: I bought a magazine called Media Week²⁸ because it sounded like it was about the media. It was weeks before I figured out it was about advertising. But the people I phoned had all read about the web in the Sunday supplements and would often invite us in to meet them out of pure curiosity. Sometimes they’d come to our damp basement office. We were short of furniture: I remember seating a bank’s marketing director on a bag of cement.

In the early days, Ivan the anarchist would come with me to these meetings (we learnt to call them “pitches”). We’d sit in the lobby waiting for our slot and we’d argue about how much we could plausibly charge. We’d practise saying large numbers without laughing. “Thirty-five thousand pounds plus ten thousand annually for maintenance” (giggles)… “Forty-five thousand pounds” (more giggles).

The people we were pitching were a forbidding crowd: this isn’t even 20 years ago but marketing directors were still grey-haired men in handmade suits who had their hair cut in Jermyn Street²⁹. They’d been in the business since the ’50s, drove Astons and quite often smoked cigars while we pitched. They ran meetings like military briefings.

I had to stop taking Ivan after a while because he couldn’t, ultimately, contain his disapproval of the whole grim process³⁰ and that our idealistic club seemed to have been annexed by the advertising business. He was an awkward presence at the best of times – fidgety and impatient – but he’d often reduce the room to silence, usually mumbling but sometimes actually interrupting my presentation, thumping the table and shouting, “But that’s bollocks! It’s all bollocks!” The trigger was usually some marketing buzzword I’d read in one of the magazines. You’re not usually heckled by your own side in these things. It was unhelpful.

Wired magazine³¹, the digital revolution’s paper of record, had a London outpost³² during Webmedia’s rise and fall. They sent a journalist to cover London’s mini-Silicon Valley. He brought with him a photographer whose will it was that we all leap in the air for a cover photo. I look at the photo now³³ (that’s me at the front and Ivan right behind me) and see the barely contained hysteria and stiffnecked angst of that crazy period. Or maybe we were just happy³⁴.

We were bold and stupid enough to attempt an early US adventure for Webmedia. We chose New York, principally because we’d never been there and we loved the music. The two of us stayed – wide-eyed, scanning the corridors for legendary faces – at the Chelsea Hotel³⁵. We imagined a life spent jetting back and forth and living – like beat poets or rock stars – at The Chelsea. I diligently “networked” in NYC, visiting many times and getting to know the city’s money guys. This was easy enough. Americans were surprisingly ready to entertain me – web people were still tattooed with dollar signs in those days and we were exotic, like The Beatles.

I was taken for dinner in midtown skyscrapers and cocktails in downtown bars. My last visit to the twin towers was for drinks at Windows On The World, the 101st-storey bar, with a venture capitalist who was so young he was ID’d for drinks. Lunch by the lake in Central Park was memorable, not least because the music industry legend paying for my lunch kept writing very large numbers on napkins with a fountain pen the size of my lower arm. Jetlag and several bucket-sized glasses of pinot noir reduced me to incoherence. “Is that where John Lennon lived?” I remember asking, pointing at the Chrysler Building.

A New Yorker told me to get down to one of Burt Alimansky’s breakfasts. Alimansky³⁶ was a mid-town investment legend and back then he ran a monthly breakfast – introducing the money to the money-hungry. I bought a $100 ticket and showed up at the fantastically New York time of 6.30am in the glittering 1930s splendour of the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Centre. It was a ballroom with a revolving dancefloor and an appropriately surreal setting for the torment that followed. I was seated with other supplicants, seekers-after-funds. This was a different crowd – hardly a hi-tech visionary among them. These guys had copy shops in Queens, small chains of rib restaurants, dog groomers.

After breakfast began the brutal capitalist cabaret. This was a different world, a David Mamet play. Everyone was expected to make a two-minute pitch, standing on a wobbly banqueting chair positioned in the middle of the ballroom. I joined a line, snaking back from the chair. My turn came, I grabbed the mic and sweated my way through my two minutes, scattering my notes on the floor below me (I remember they seemed such a long way down). All I could think of was the revolving dance floor. Was it revolving? Or was it all those blank faces? My accent and my undisguised terror can’t have helped but, when I got down from the chair, the only person to approach me was an immigration lawyer: “Do you have papers? I can get you papers.”³⁷ No investment was forthcoming.

Webmedia’s New York adventure was short-lived but my address book³⁸ (which preserves the period like a geological stratum) still contains the names of the hundreds of New Yorkers I met and schmoozed during our time there – and informs me that Webmedia did live, albeit not for long, for a few months during 1996, at an address on 8th Avenue, NY NY³⁹. I used to call the office to hear the name of the company pronounced by our Brooklyn receptionist.

And we did ultimately sell some of our business. We sold it to adland genius Maurice Saatchi.⁴⁰ I have, to this day, met Maurice once, at the dinner he threw to celebrate the investment, upstairs at The Ivy. We ploughed on, hiring dozens of staff – mostly eager, unjaded young people. But more expensive adventures like the one in New York and a heartbreaking and protracted split with Ivan (the money guys called it a “demerger”⁴¹), set the company on to what now seems like an obvious downward spiral and Webmedia was, by late 1998, bust. The most miserable meeting of my short business career, with our creditors in an airless Baker Street basement, provided a grim full stop for the whole thing. A book about the period said: “Webmedia: such pioneers they went bust before the boom.”⁴²

There was more. My next web adventure was called another.com. It was an all together more serious enterprise. I started it, with new partners and new investors (no anarchists this time), in 1998. The business, originally called Funmail, was based on a clever idea from another web entrepreneur, Jeremy Kerner. We were going to provide personalised email addresses to digital teens⁴³. Funmail was a dumb name for an email service, so we changed it to another.com.

Coming up with a new name was a pretty dumb process in its own right. We hired a branding consultancy who’d named TV channels and high-tech products. How could we fail? They spent weeks researching and brainstorming names, emailing us long lists of hopeless candidates every day. We tore them all up and came up with our own: another.com – it was meant to be flippant and funny, very now.

Of course, even then, acquiring a name wasn’t straightforward. We needed the internet domain name too. We learnt that the owner of another.com had already made millions by being among the first few dozen employees of Amazon.com. He didn’t really need our money, so couldn’t muster much interest in selling the domain. We hit upon a plan – we’d give a medium-sized wad of cash to a charity of his choice. Amazon man accepted and I’m still rather proud to say, ten years later, that there’s a WWII Spitfire that’s still airworthy because of our substantial donation⁴⁴.

Meanwhile, we were raising money for our new business in the midst of the dotcom boom. Preposterous businesses, one after the other, were securing epic sums of money from investors and then going public at eye-watering valuations. We felt sure we could be one of them, so a board of directors was chosen⁴⁵, we appointed brokers and advisers and set about floating the company – which was then only a few months old and hadn’t traded at all – on the stock exchange⁴⁶. Our brokers were of the old school. Meetings took place in the oyster restaurant round the corner from their City offices and would always begin with an initial order of four bottles of Chablis. We were being prepared to join a bizarre club, the club of listed companies.

But I didn’t like any of it. Early on, I’d had the privilege of visiting the bizarre Carnaby Street offices of the web’s most preposterous flight of fancy to date: hip online fashion company Boo.com⁴⁷. My visit functioned as a kind of inoculation, putting me off the whole weird and decadent game. Boo.com was like something from a Richard Lester movie – beautiful people, male and female, floated around the office, some carrying orchids, some apparently sketching in watercolour. I spoke to a group of a dozen, most of whom appeared to be essentially ornamental. I became convinced that I didn’t want another.com to be on the same list as Boo.com. I wanted us to raise some money privately, from a respectable source, and spend it quietly in the old-fashioned way, without the attention of shareholders.

So I took this idea to my partners and, with considerable impatience, they agreed we should have a go. They gave me licence to try to get another.com’s seed money from a private investor but there was a condition: I had to raise at least as much money as we’d have got from the stock market and I had to get it quick because we were about to “press the button” on the flotation, which had already cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds.

So off I went, on my own, unsupported by my sceptical partners – to the Mayfair offices of a blue-blood private investment firm⁴⁸. There and then, in wing-backed armchairs around a marble coffee table and on the strength of a frankly lacklustre Powerpoint, I was offered a no-strings six million quid. Stumbling into Mount Street, hyperventilating, I called my partners from the minicab on the way back to the office but they were impatient. “Ask for more!”⁴⁹ they said. I called my brand-new investor and asked for more. “OK,” he said… This is what it had come to. Enormous sums of money were being handed out on the merest suggestion of a dotcom payday. It couldn’t end well⁵⁰.

Once funded we needed to staff up – and staff up quickly. We needed techies, designers, marketing and sales people, a customer service team. Securing staff for a dotcom in those fevered times wasn’t done in the normal way. A recruitment agency identified candidates and funnelled them into a bar in Soho where I was waiting with a laptop⁵¹. On the screen a spreadsheet that illustrated the improbable wealth that would result from signing up with another.com⁵². The candidate was invited to specify their own unfeasible rate of growth for the company and this was fed into the spreadsheet, which then calculated the ridiculous amount of money that our lavish share option scheme would produce. I did this dozens of times: “Look, if our userbase grows at this rate you’ll make a million pounds!” And it worked. The thought still makes me cringe.

And then, nearly three years later, in the dog days of the crash, and a year after the twin towers had fallen, I was still grafting away, still trying to translate all that energy into a big payout, but the money was gone, the business model screwed, the market collapsed. Almost everybody knew we were finished but our escape depended on the credulousness of the shrinking band of people who didn’t. So we invited a high-class investment bank to value our company⁵³. Their valuation would help us to sell the business. Our new bankers charged us £35,000 for the valuation and they sent a fleet of young men to perform the intricate calculations required. After about a week they emailed their final valuation: a number so long and so comically out of touch with our reality that we used practically a ream of paper printing it out with one digit on each sheet so that we could stick it to the wall as a kind of morbid encouragement. Investment bankers don’t seem to have got much better at this sort of thing in the decade since.

Another.com was ultimately sold but there was no enormous payout for anyone. It did continue to trade, as a rather small email service attached to an ISP⁵⁴. And I did, I’m happy to say, escape and find a new way to make a living.

Bubbles are hardly a good thing. In fact, they’re hugely destructive, often wiping out more value than they create. But they’re entirely human creations, and since the only way to suppress them would be to snuff out the quite natural enthusiasm and belief that accompanies new ideas, I suspect we’re going to have to live with them. When the bubble I’ve described here burst it hurt many people and it took me a long time to recover personally but, writing all this stuff down, I realise I’m rather happy to have lived through it all and would quite probably have another go if the chance came along⁵⁵.

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Footnotes. Yes, footnotes. In the article I was obliged to try to cram ten years of ridiculuous, exhilarating, maddening, often quite terrifying activity into 3,000 words. So what I’ve decided to do is to annotate the story, adding some context that might be interesting… maybe to that one historian who will one day want to write the history of the British dotcom experience…

1. The Word was a splendid noughties eructation of grown-up writing about pop culture, literature, music and so on, from the men who brought you Smash Hits (and all that other golden-age stuff) – Mark Ellen (editor) and David Hepworth (publisher). Looking back it’s obvious that the magazine belonged to the last happy flowering of print and that such a thing couldn’t possibly exist today. I’m very happy to have written a few things for them (and also to have appeared on their podcast!). ↩︎
2. Mark wrote this standfirst, of course, and I can’t honestly argue with ‘chancer’. ↩︎
3. It was The Vine. It’s still there, over the road from Highgate Studios, the huge converted Victorian wallpaper factory that housed our office. Highgate Studios was itself very much a creature of the boom. A self-consciously funky spec office development aimed at the late-nineties boom-era crowd: Blair’s babies: startups, mobile phone entrepreneurs, designers, PR agencies, online businesses and all the services they needed in one place. It too is still there, prominent as I whizz past on the Thameslink into St Pancras. ↩︎
4. another.com has left no trace. Even the domain name is not currently in use. Buy it, why don’t you? ↩︎
5. The NASDAQ did crash but its irrational exuberance really could not be suppressed and it’s now the second-biggest stock market in the world, bigger than every national market except its parent the New York Stock Exchange. It was originally designed as a ‘junior’ market, more lightly regulated, with automated trades (so no trading floor) and focused on tech and startup listings. It’s now home to all of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks. Stock markets around the world have copied the idea of a secondary market for newer, high-growth stocks and startups. One of the most successful is London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the market another.com would have been listed on if I hadn’t got my oar in. ↩︎
6. In the end it was a bit more than a decade and, in fact, after over thirty years of web nonsense, I’m still essentially in the business – now doing social media and stuff for a big broadcaster. ↩︎
7. I first met Ivan in The Angel, St Giles’s Circus, in the shadow of Centrepoint in the West End. It was a meetup for the listserv that he ran – an email mailing list for the Internet-curious (must have been 1992? Early 93?) I was a nervous attendee, having only acquired my first modem a few weeks earlier (it was a US Robotics Sportster, a breakthrough device that was cheap enough to persuade ordinary people to try this Internet thing. It looked a bit like a Stylophone), but the evening was lovely and I felt immediately at home amongst these oddballs and, of course, a partnership was born. By the end of this story, Ivan had also escaped from the dotcom nonsense, having thrived in various important sectors, including the domain name business – the plumbing of the Internet. He’s now working as an artist again and renovating a farmhouse in France. Of the two of us he’s the only one with a Wikipedia entry (although his does have a photo of me in it so I guess I am on Wikipedia, right?) Ivan recently obtained a diagnosis of ADHD and, of course, this made perfect sense to all his friends. Looking back, I think I was, several times, a beneficiary of Ivan’s ADHD. On two or three occasions I wound up sole proprietor of one of our joint enterprises and it was sometimes a puzzle how this had actually happened but, now that we know, it’s obvious. He’d lost interest and it was causing him actual pain to stick around. Ivan’s neurodiversity made me the man I am. ↩︎
8. 3W began life at Goldsmith’s as Ivan’s ‘World Wide Web Newsletter’. I was editor from issue three and this may have had something to do with the fact that issue four was our last. Ouch. (we used to joke that what actually killed us off was the four-colour cover, which was very expensive). 3W was, without question, the first magazine about the web anywhere in the world and became a vital reference to the emerging medium. You have to remember that, in this period before the web, people who wanted to find out about new phenomena had to go and ask someone, usually a librarian – public, corporate or academic. So this was a big factor in 3W’s success. Librarians who’d been asked to acquire information about this new WWW thing would find 3W – on some kind of librarians’ grapevine or BBS, presumably – and get in touch. As a consequence we had subscribers on five continents and dozens of countries (Ivan continued to receive subscription cheques for years after we’d shut it down). ↩︎
9. The magazine was attracting the attention of proper publishers. We met with curious executives from several of the biggest magazine firms: IPC, EMAP and The Guardian. I seem to remember that Tony Ageh, the Guardian’s irritatingly clever head of development (and now a sodding OBE), who was at the time also talking to Jefferson Hack and Rankin from Dazed & Confused, considered some kind of Frankenstein merger of 3W and Dazed, which would have been hilarious and, well, actually just hilarious. Before we gave up on print and started Webmedia we’d considered a big relaunch, in a self-consciously cool tabloid format (we were both hideous magazine wankers – you know, the kind of blokes who’d hang out in those Soho newsagents where you could buy Ray Gun and Mondo 2000). But I remember meeting with a magazine design veteran who explained to me the horrors of ‘the plinth’, the deep shelf near the floor at the bottom of the magazine display at the newsagent’s. “Tabloid?” he said, “you don’t want to be tabloid. You’ll be down on the plinth with the Exchange & Mart.” I’ve never forgotten this advice ↩︎
10. You had to beetle off in those days. There was no web site, obviously. You had to look up your business name and idea at a microfiche terminal on an upper floor in a brilliantly Dickensian Chancery Lane office, then fill in a paper form and push a cheque across the counter to a cashier. ↩︎
11. Keeping track of the number of web sites was pretty easy when there were only a few hundred of them. It was the kind of fact you’d see in a box-out on an inside page. This list says there were 2,738 in 1994. There were technical limitations on the number of web sites that could exist in those days. Only one domain name could be associated with an IP address and only one IP address with a server. So a rack of a dozen servers could host only a dozen web sites. One of the brilliant innovations of Webmedia’s first techie Steve Hebditch, was a tweak to the networking software allowing multiple IP addresses to be attached to a single server network card. This permitted an explosion in the number of possible web sites. ↩︎
12. I met Tim Berners-Lee once or twice back then and I even booked him to come to a conference in London to explain himself to a lot of curious suits in a shitty room behind a hotel in Shepherd’s Bush (was this 1995?). I’ve also got a very dumb story that might or might not be about him which you can read right here on this blog. ↩︎
13. Old-timers will remember the excitement of looking up the current status of the ‘Trojan Room Coffee Pot‘ in the Cambridge University computer lab. Everyone else will probably just shrug. ↩︎
14. See note 5 above. ↩︎
15. The answer, of course, was The White Hart, which we used to call Murphy’s, on Whitechapel High Street, although the absolutely best pub in the East End was the Grave Maurice, sadly departed, which was the fancy hangout of the Kray twins (in contrast to their more murdery hangout, The Blind Beggar, which was a couple of hundred yards further east). The Grave Maurice was a cosy pub on the Whitechapel Waste where the twins would conduct their business meetings. The legend was that they insisted the only music on the jukebox was opera – and in the eighties and nineties it still was. They had antimacassars too. ↩︎
16. A nice man by the name of Steve Whaley, an influential London politician and also, at the time, head of the degree course I was doing at the Polytechnic of Central London, introduced me to a roomful of Macs, all of which – I vividly remember – were still in the cardboard boxes they’d come in. ↩︎
17. How’s that going then, Steve? ↩︎
18. This dissertation, thankfully now lost, referenced two critical texts: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – an impenetrable work of philosophy from 1980 that I definitely, definitely (I mean definitely) didn’t understand but which had a cool concept they called the ‘rhizome‘ which I concluded was in some way analogous to this Internet thing – and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which had just been published and also had a kind of Internet in it – and was unbelievably cool, right? ↩︎
19. Should I feel in some way responsible, as one of those predatory web guys, for the the fact that Time Out – London’s Village Voice and, for decades, the primary source of yoga classes, awkward first dates and pretty much everything organic or countercultural in the capital city – became a free-sheet in 2012 and finally dematerialised all together, going online-only in 2022? I suppose I should. In its early years Time Out was a paragon of worker-control and democratic management but that all came to an end when somewhat autocratic founder Tony Elliott (RIP) scrapped the equal pay scheme. There was a long and nasty strike and a competitor – City Limits – was born. All right-thinking people switched to the new weekly, which looked great and was more radical, very often standing arm-in-arm with the Ken Livingstone-era GLC (and actually outliving it by a few years). Tony Ageh (see note 9) was one of the prime movers in the new workers’ coop. ↩︎
20. I could dwell at length on Cyberia’s wonders, on the thrilling row of PCs with big screens that lined the windows at the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street in London’s Fitzrovia; on the Neuromancer-style artwork on the walls; on the excellent chocolate brownies and cappucino (and the fact that we hardly ever paid for ours – sorry); on the many lovely people I met there and the huge numbers of puzzled and sometimes frankly frightened people I brought through the place to show them this new web thing. Founders Eva Pascoe and Gené Teare are still influential figures in Internet business and culture. ↩︎
21. “cybercafe n. An establishment (originally and esp. one serving food and drink) with multiple computer terminals providing access to the internet, usually for a fee” – OED. Ivan claims he was the first to use the term but the dictionary disagrees! ↩︎
22. In 1994, the very latest thing in modems was a V.34 device capable of warbling up to 28Kbps. Most of us were still using V.32 models, which would screech their way to a max of 19.2Kbps. In those days 28K was just about enough for a phone call, so streaming or even downloading much was off the agenda. Streaming audio and video over IP networks wasn’t a total fantasy but was very much for the people in lab coats at this point. Absolute Internet Gods would shell out for a second phone line so they could ‘surf’ the web while family members made phone calls. A couple of years after this I would outfit my London flat with an unbelievably cool digital ISDN line for Internet access, providing a stunning 128Kbps. It took a bit of setting up and because it still essentially depended on making a phone call to reach the Internet, when I received my first ISDN bill it came in several large cardboard boxes: I’d misconfigured the thing and run up a £7,000 bill by triggering thousands of one- and two-second calls per day. The nice people at BT zero’d it for me when I started crying. And for reference, according to Ofcom, the median broadband connection in the UK today is 72Mbps, roughly 2,500 times faster than the 1994 state of the art. ↩︎
23. It was the Revolutionary Communist Party, the apostate Trotskyite sect that would later make an outsized contribution to the emerging ‘post-liberal’ thing and produce Spiked!, Claire Fox, Frank Furedi. ↩︎
24. Upstream from Keith’s dial-up customers was a ‘leased line‘ from an outfit called Pipex, Britain’s first commercial ISP, founded in a period when the Internet was still very much an academic and scientific network. In 1991, when Pipex leased a 64Kbps line across the Atlantic to provide connections for UK businesses, the only commercial customers for Internet access were tech giants with big research departments like IBM and DEC. Pipex quietly became the wholesaler behind pretty much all of the first generation of UK ISPs, scrappy outfits like Demon who were busy getting the great unwashed online. The company’s policy guru at the time, adviser to founder CEO Peter Dawe, was one Bill Thompson, now one of the UK Internet’s éminences grises and a bigwig at the BBC. ↩︎
25. I suspect this isn’t a thing any more but back in the day you needed to turn and click a chunky metal terminator onto the end of your coaxial ethernet otherwise the signal would drop off for everyone on the network. This is the wild west period of Internet access, with ISPs popping up all over the place. Our upstairs neighbours Easynet, led by Dave Rowe and the man with the ethernet cable Keith Teare, managed to survive the brutal period of consolidation and bankruptcies that came in the 2000s and became a huge firm, quietly hooking businesses up to the Internet. Dave now runs an investment firm. ↩︎
26. The sparky kids are now everywhere, of course, some of them, preposterously, running famous opera companies and Internet safety companies. ↩︎
27. Founded in 1992, Wagamama was one of the big hits of the nineties ‘casual dining’ boom (can you remember a time before ‘casual dining’? When you used to have to put on a shirt and tie or a nice dress to go out to eat and the only alternative was a greasy spoon?). Wagamama persists but, in 2018, was sold to a huge casual dining chain called The Restaurant Group for £559M. A few years later, after Covid-19 had done its worst, Restaurant Group itself was sold for £701M to a private equity firm with a casual dining focus. It’s casual dining all the way down. ↩︎
28. The advertising business was divided, as it still approximately is, into ‘media’ and ‘creative’ and the two realms were chalk and cheese; wildly different businesses held together by the exigencies of selling stuff. The creatives were the glamorous ones – aristocratic, often extravagently-dressed figures who occupied gorgeous premises in fancy districts of London and produced all the award-winning TV ads and billboards we so admired. The eighties and nineties were probably absolutely peak creative – a period during which respect for the genius of advertising creatives went all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office. The media crowd, on the other hand, had less glamorous offices and tended to wear suits. They planned and bought advertising space – filling the pages of the newspapers and the ad breaks on TV with the fabulous product of the creatives. They were much more aggressive, pugnacious even – but they weren’t chippy because they secretly knew that they were the important ones, the ones concerned with value for money and effectiveness and accountability – the bottom line. Consequently, when it arrived, the media teams were much more at home than the creatives were on the web, which was, after all, a two-way medium that was infinitely quantifiable and measurable – right up their streets, in fact (I used to say that the Internet was really a huge expansion of ‘below the line‘ advertising). In the early days the creatives actively disdained the web – ‘glorified small-ads’ they thought – a ‘below the line‘, ‘B2B’ medium that could never displace the glories of TV and outdoor in the influence business. But the media people knew that the web would change everything: it was simultaneously an unimaginably vast (effectivly infinite) new source of advertising inventory for them to buy, a straightforward challenge to the psychobabble and poetic mumbo-jumbo of the creatives and a threat to profits that would pretty soon rip through the whole industry and turn it upside-down. Advertising has been brutally commodified and parasitised by ad-tech that originated on the Internet. Media Week still exists but has long been online-only and is obviously a shadow of its former, pugnacious self. ↩︎
29. At places like Geo. F. Trumper. ↩︎
30. Actually, a lot of people hated the arrival of advertising on the Internet and you can obviously make a pretty solid argument that it’s the advertising that’s fucked it all up; commodified our precious, delicate tracery of connections, meeting places, stores of knowledge… In the very early days even suggesting the idea of advertising on the Internet would produce a riot or at least a flame-war. A well-known early book on the subject was the subject of enormous, culture wars-style controversy and the author (an academic whose name I’ve forgotten) was practically driven off of Usenet. Now, of course, the tables have fully turned and it’s the Internet that’s eating advertising – over half of all worldwide advertising revenue now goes to Google and Meta. ↩︎
31. Wired Magazine came to Britain twice: the first time with The Guardian (it’s that Tony Ageh again) and then later with Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Wired – in all its versions – was evidence of the ridiculously inflated sense of itself that the young web had – the elite founders, publishers, academics and authors in its pages really did think it was Plato’s Academy for the 21st Century. Wired documented the whole digital revolution – not just the web but the human genome, green energy, cellphones, AI, VR and the rest – but also became an important incubator for what we now recognise to be a poisonous, militantly anti-humanist worldview: rationalists, libertarians, transhumanists, sovereign individuals – also some unhinged monarchists, seasteaders and crypto-fascists. Grimly, the magazine also happily accommodated the amoral claque of Epstein panderers and enablers. ↩︎
32. Here’s a great story from Danny O’Brien, shared with the influential British tech-insider mailing list Haddock, about the first UK Wired (this is a long way from all that dark American sci-fi paedo-Nazi stuff, to be clear). Danny and Dave Green – two Brits: a kind of geek-jester figure who’s now deeply embedded in the California tech scene and a UK gaming journalist respectively – were, for a remarkably long time, essentially court chroniclers for the UK Internet, in their sarcastic weekly newsletter Need To Know (NTK), a vital industry publication that was 100% wedded to ascii for maybe a decade longer than it needed to be. ↩︎
33. It was the December 1996 issue of Wired. I’ve got the cover framed on the wall on the stairs. My kids think it’s hilarious. ↩︎
34. I always felt kind of painfully left-out of the clever geek scene: the club of geniuses and evangelists and oddballs at the centre of the web revolution but now, looking back on it, it kind of makes sense. I couldn’t code, hadn’t encountered a computer until well into adulthood, owned none of the geek passions and manic hobbies of my nerd friends. I’ve always had an admiring observer’s interest in the tech and the culture but could never really have joined it. ↩︎
35. It wasn’t quite the Chelsea Hotel of Warhol and Kerouac and Patti Smith but we were thrilled to learn that it wasn’t far off. Legendary proprietor-manager Stanley Bard was still behind the counter and patrolling the lobby greeting and laughing and the place was still populated by artists and eccentrics, some of whom had lived there for decades – I spent an hour or two drinking tea with an elderly ceramicist in his beautifully-decorated room during that stay. Sadly the plan to make it our New York pied-à-terre didn’t work out. Instead we used to stay at the eccentric Gramercy Park Hotel and did, on a couple of occasions, borrow a fabulous block-wide loft on East 13th Street. The whole building, I learnt later, belonged to Allen Ginsberg, who lived upstairs ffs. I’m happy, as a consequence, to have been able to add Ginsberg to the list of ‘people I’ve stood next to in lifts’. ↩︎
36. Alimansky was right at the centre of the New York business scene for decades. In addition to his terrifying breakfast beauty contests he also ran workshops for wannabe entrepreneurs (this NY Times story is about a 1984 session that honestly sounds like it was scripted by Arthur Miller) Sadly, it looks like he died a few months ago. ↩︎
37. I did not have papers. Nor did I ever aquire them. ↩︎
38. It’s still my current address book, encrusted with the names of people I’ve not met in 30 years, including the extraordinary Lenny Barshack, a poker player and Wall Street rocket scientist whose email business Bigfoot.com we partnered with for some reason back then. On my first trip to New York Lenny picked me up at the airport and took me to Carnegie Deli in midtown and played the same prank he’d obviously been playing on new visitors for decades – a prank that involved my unknowingly ordering the largest quantity of food I had ever seen, including a pastrami sandwich the size of my head (the place is closed now but you can buy the ingredients for the epic sandwich online). A few years later, while I was getting drunk in that pub in North London, Lenny was taking photographs of the twin towers catastrophe from the roof of his downtown apartment (they used to be online but I can’t find them now). ↩︎
39. Our office was all the way down in the Village and, of course, there was no receptionist, just an answering service that happened to be in Brooklyn. I’m not 100% sure I even had a mobile phone for those first trips. I did have a beeper, though, bought from one of those shops on 42nd Street. People had beepers because in the USA in those days you paid for incoming calls to your cellphone so it was considered rude to call someone on their mobile, since they’d have to pay for the call. Everyone had a beeper and if someone wanted to speak to you they’d start by paging you so you could call them back. ↩︎
40. Saatchi had an investment vehicle he called Megalomedia, obvs. He invested £400,000, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. ↩︎
41. The demerger was news in itself. Slow news day? ↩︎
42. It’s this book, written by Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley for think tank Demos, an outfit that was closely associated with the Blair Labour Party – which was not yet in government – and invested a lot in the idea of an ‘entrepreneurial Britain’; startup culture, tech-literate policy-making; capacity building and all those buzzwords. I was an ‘associate’ of the think-tank for a while, which meant I was invited to panels and conferences occasionally. ↩︎
43. The breakthrough here, the enabler that permitted another.com to exist, was the liberalisation of the domain name system in the UK. A quasi-public organisation called Nominet had been set up to manage the supply of domains and they had decided to drop the wholesale cost of a domain name from over £100 to £15. We piled in and bought 15,000 domain names! ↩︎
44. We didn’t publicise the purchase of the domain or the gift to the Spitfire people because our Amazon friend didn’t want us to but I can’t think of a good reason not to tell you now that we gave £10,000. I’m sad to say, though, that I don’t know which of these aeroplanes we helped to restore. ↩︎
45. Our board included Robin Klein, a retail millionaire who famously invented the Innovations Catalogue (I’m quite sure you remember the Innovations Catalogue, finally closed in 2003, having been absorbed by Argos). I hugely admired Robin. Wise and humane. ↩︎
46. As a tiny company with literally zero trading history we wouldn’t have been allowed to list on the London Stock Exchange. Our only option was the junior market, AIM. Until very recently the AIM had been considered far too small and shabby for the major City institutions to show any interest in – they thought of it as a kind of jumble sale where Scottish pub groups and copper wire manufacturers could get a listing – but the rush of money into the dotcom sector at the end of the nineties had changed all that and when we began to shop around we found a decent-sized queue of proper, square-mile brokers and advisers ready to take on our listing. We eventually settled on Panmure Gordon, a blue-blooded, top-tier boutique firm founded in 1876 (and more recently absorbed first by an American bank, then by a German one, then by more Americans. As I write this, Panmure Gordon is part of a Qatari institution called QInvest). It was Panmure’s who introduced us to the joys of four bottles of Chablis with lunch (see note 3). ↩︎
47. One thing we had in common with Boo.com, of course, was that we had a domain name for a brand name – still pretty unusual at the time. Alongside Boo.com, though, our various idiocies seem pretty inoffensive. They got through twenty times as much capital and in about half the time. Losers. The Wikipedia entry is entertaining: “Boo.com was a short-lived British e-commerce business, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarded as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe^{[citation needed]} by the investors…” ↩︎
48. They were called Eden Capital, although not, I think, this one. The company employed – am I remembering this right? – a total of two people – very posh brothers, honestly like something out of Made in Chelsea – and one Bloomberg terminal. I shouldn’t be mean about them: they were very free with their money and they’re almost certainly much, much richer than me. ↩︎
49. To be more specific (Mark cut this bit out of the article as printed – too boring), I asked for £6M because that was the exact sum we were planning to raise on the AIM. When my fellow directors asked me to get more, what they meant was “get the £250K we’ve already spent – and thus wasted – on preparing for the listing.” Our friends in Mayfair complied, so the total raised was £6.25M. What was really cool about this was that the convention said you had to list to get access to the big money; that private capital raisings were always smaller than public ones. But we defied convention: this was, at the time, one of the largest sums ever raised by a privately-owned Internet company in Britain. We grinned stupidly for weeks. ↩︎
50. The other really big UK dotcom funding that I remember from that period was for an ISP spun out of Dixons called Freeserve; ‘Free’ because the idea was you’d get Internet access for nothing from Freeserve if you bought a PC from Dixons. It was a pretty clever idea and the firm grew very quickly – soon becoming the first proper Internet business to list on the FTSE index. It wasn’t there for long, though, and it was later bought by France Telecom and, strictly speaking, lives on in fossilised form buried inside EE. ↩︎
51. A Macintosh Powerbook G3 obviously. ↩︎
52. I’m tentatively crediting this spreadsheet to a certain brilliant young Cambridge graduate – a journalist who was in this moment advising our investors (the boys with the Bloomberg terminal). I’m going to leave his name out, though, especially as the spreadsheet did, I seem to remember, have one or two circular references. ↩︎
53. I’m pretty sure this fleet of highly-groomed investment bankers was from Credit Suisse First Boston (I don’t think they’re likely to sue since they literally ceased to exist quite soon after this). They must have been desperate. CSFB were the masters of the universe who had floated Amazon, Cisco and Netscape. I think the logic of bringing in these very expensive, very lofty experts to value our by-then rather small firm was that they might be just too expensive and too lofty to have fully acknowledged the disaster that had unfolded in our market. We were right: although I’ve remembed how much we paid them, I’ve blocked out the valuation they ultimately provided. I know that it was arrived at by essentially the crudest of dotcom-era mechanics, though: they multiplied the number of users we had by the potential revenue that each might yield (ARPU). It amounted to north of £100M. We knew how stupid and unrealisable this valuation was. It became a kind of comic signifier for the stupidity of the whole weird period. A bloody big bronze statue erected in the courtyard to commemorate our innocence and our hubris. ↩︎
54. When the firm was put up for sale we certainly weren’t seeking £100M. In fact, when a sale was agreed and I was asked by my shareholders to meet with the buyer and confirm that he was good for the money, he did so by walking me down to the ATM in the High Street and printing out a balance inquiry. His company was an ISP called T-Speak, based in Skipton, North Yorkshire. I can’t find a single news report about the sale, though, although there are dozens from when we put the company up for sale and from every other dumb moment in our dumb history. I’m not sure I can explain this, although it may just be because I had by then completely lost interest in the business and could not be bothered to organise even a token press effort (or maybe it’s about the natural modesty of Yorskshire people). ↩︎
55. Mark asked me to write the final paragraph because he thought my ending was too downbeat. Even then I don’t think I’d have considered ‘having another go’. ↩︎