I wrote this article for Mark Ellen at The Word Magazine fourteen years ago (I hope he won’t mind my putting it up here). The events described – my awkward progress through the dotcom boom (and the crash that followed it) already felt like a long time ago then… You can download a PDF that preserves the magazine layout if you’d prefer.
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’t.
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 Town1. I was with the finance guys. Our business, a web-based email service called another.com2, was in trouble. It was over a year since the NASDAQ3 – 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 business4: a story that began in the early ’90s and consumed essentially the whole of my thirties.
In 1993, my friend Ivan Pope5 began publishing a magazine about the World Wide Web called 3W6. The magazine morphed 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 House7 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 started but it was still far from clear that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web8 of academic papers and research data and Cambridge coffee pots9 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 Tigger10, 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 Docks11. Along the way, though, we’d both, independently, bumped into computers – I met my first Mac in 198512 – and developed a passionate belief in their potential to rewrite human culture, to liberate us all13. My undergraduate thesis, from 1988, described in detail an internet I had never met. 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 magazine and The Body Shop and moved into the offices of a bankrupt wine-tasting school underneath the just-opened Cyberia14 cafe in London’s glamorous West End. Cyberia was a cybercafe, 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-up, 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 politics15. 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 customers will be offline while you’re doing it.”16 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 kids 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 guy17.
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 Week18 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 Street. 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 process 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 magazine, the digital revolution’s paper of record, had a London outpost 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 now (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 happy.
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 Hotel. 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. Alimansky 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.” No investment was forthcoming.
Webmedia’s New York adventure was short-lived but my address book (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 NY. 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. 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”), 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.”
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 teens. 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 donation.
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 chosen, 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 exchange. 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.com. 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 firm. 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!” 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 well.
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 laptop. On the screen a spreadsheet that illustrated the improbable wealth that would result from signing up with another.com. 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 company. 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 ISP. 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 along.
- The Word was a splendid noughties eructation of excellent writing about pop culture, literature, music and so on, from the men who brought you Smash Hits (and much more) – 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 be done today. I’m very happy to have written a few things for them (and also to have appeared on their podcast!).
- What I ought to do is annotate this article. I remember trying to cram far too much into it and obviously leaving a huge amount out. I guess it might make a useful contribution to a history of the period if I added a bit of explanation and context.
- Mark asked me to write the final paragraph because he thought my ending was too downbeat. Even then I don’t think I’d even have considered ‘having another go’.
Footnotes
- The Vine. It’s still there, over the road from Highgate Studios, the huge converted 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 generation: Blair’s babies – startups, mobile phone entrepreneurs, designers, online businesses and all the services they needed in one place. It too is still there. ↩︎
- another.com has left no trace. Even the domain name is not currently in use. Buy it if you feel like it. ↩︎
- The NASDAQ did crash but the irrational exuberance of the market really could not be suppressed and it is now the second-biggest stock market in the world, bigger than any national market except its parent the NYSE. It was originally designed as a junior market, more lightly regulated, with automated trades (no trading floor) and focused on tech and startup listings. It’s home to all of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks. Stock markets around the world have copied the idea of a secondary, startup market for newer, high-growth stocks. One of the most successful is London’s AIM, the market another.com would have been listed on if I hadn’t got my oar in. ↩︎
- It turned out to be 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 for a big broadcaster. ↩︎
- Ivan also escaped from the dotcom nonsense, having thrived in various important sectors, including the domain name business – basically 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!) Ivan obtained a diagnosis of ADHD quite recently and, of course, this made perfect sense to all his friends. Looking back, I think I was, on several occasions, 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 happened but, now that we know, it’s obvious. He’d lost interest and couldn’t bear to be involved any more. ↩︎
- 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 (we used to joke that what killed us off was the four-colour cover). The magazine was, without question, the first magazine about the web anywhere in the world and became a vital reference to the emerging medium. Librarians – corporate and academic – asked to find information about this new WWW thing would gravitate to 3W. As a consequence we had subscribers on five continents and dozens of countries. The magazine also attracted the attention of proper publishers. We met with curious executives from several of the biggest magazine publishers: IPC, EMAP and The Guardian. I seem to remember that Tony Ageh, the paper’s enterprising head of development (and now an OBE), who was at the time also talking to Jefferson Hack and Rankin from Dazed & Confused, even considered some kind of Frankenstein merger of 3W and Dazed, which would have been hilarious and, well, impossible. Before we gave up on print and started Webmedia we’d considered a big relaunch, in a self-consciously cool tabloid format. I remember meeting with a magazine design veteran who introduced me to the horrors of ‘the plinth’, the deep shelf 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. ↩︎
- 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 terminal on an upper floor in the Chancery Lane office, then fill in a paper form and write a cheque. ↩︎
- 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 businesspeople in maybe 1994? I’ve also got a very dumb story that might or might not be about him which you can read on this blog. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- See note 5 above. ↩︎
- The answer, of course, was The White Hart, which we used to call Murphy’s, on Whitechapel High Street. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- How’s that going then, Steve? ↩︎
- I could dwell at length of Cyberia’s chipboard wonders, on the thrilling row of PCs with big screens that lined the windows at the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street; on the excellent chocolate brownies and cappucino (and the fact that we were hardly ever charged for ours), 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. ↩︎
- The Revolutionary Communist Party to be specific. The Trotskyite party that turned apostate during the 1990s and adopted a post-capital, anti-woke worldview that seemed kind of ahead of its time but has now been rather overtaken by the ‘post-liberal’ turn in wider politics. Luminaries of the party include Frank Furedi, who is now something important in Hungary and Claire Fox, a Reform peer. ↩︎
- I suspect this isn’t a thing any more but back in the day you needed to click a terminator on the end of your coaxial ethernet otherwise the signal would drop away 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 Keith Teare, managed to survive the brutal period of consolidation and bankruptcies that came in the 2000s and became a huge firm. Dave now runs an investment firm. ↩︎
- Founded in 1992, Wagamama, one of the big hits of the nineties ‘casual dining’ explosion, persists and, in 2018 was sold to The Restaurant Group for £559M. A few years later, after Covid-19 had done its worst, Restaurant Group itself was sold for £701M. ↩︎
- The advertising business was divided, as it still approximately is, into ‘media’ and ‘creative’ and the two realms were chalk and cheese. The creatives were obviously the glamorous ones – extravagently-dressed figures who occupied gorgeous Charlotte Street premises and produced all the award-winning TV ads and billboards we so admired. The media crowd had less glamorous offices and tended to wear suits – but they weren’t particularly chippy because they knew they were really the important ones, the ones concerned with value for money and effectiveness and accountability. The media crowd were much more at home than the creatives on the web, a two-way medium that was infinitely quantifiable and measurable – right up their streets. They knew that the web would change everything – simultaneously an unimaginably vast (effectivly infinite) new source of inventory and a challenge to profits that would pretty soon rip through the whole industry and turn it upside down. Advertising now has been brutally commodified and basically belongs to Google and Meta. Media Week still exists but has long been online-only and is obviously a shadow of its former self. ↩︎