The Alexandria Project: A Tale of Treachery and Technology (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 1)

by Andrew Updegrove

  So that explained the language issue. Frank recalled that Alexander the Great was Greek, well Macedonian, but close enough – so he would have spoken Greek. The Alexandria entry also confirmed that the tall building on the screen probably was a lighthouse, as he had suspected. Now Frank was getting somewhere – assuming that he wasn’t being led down the garden path just the way the intruder intended.

  Frank kept reading, learning that the king that built the library wasn’t just another Egyptian pharaoh, but the founder of the Greek lineage of monarchs that took control of Egypt after Alexander died. Apparently, Frank read, it hadn’t taken long for his generals to start fighting over the late conqueror’s empire. Ptolemy, one of his most trusted generals, had been content to vie for less than the entire known world, and lucky enough to secure Egypt as his own. Unlike some of the other generals, he also lived long enough – another forty years – to consolidate his position, and pass his new kingdom on to his descendants. They ruled until Rome eventually moved in and took over the neighborhood.

  Frank reflected for awhile on what he had just learned. He could be pretty sure now that it was the Library of Alexandria that was being alluded to on the contribution screen. But how to make use of that knowledge? Were the clues meant to lead him on, or astray? If the latter, he hoped the intruder might have been too clever by half. After all, Frank now knew a little bit about how the hacker’s mind worked, and what kinds of things interested him. Maybe more, if Frank set his mind to it.

  He drummed his fingers for awhile. Well. Clearly he wasn’t going to solve a mystery like this all in one morning. Time to think about getting some work done. He started to turn off his computer, and then stopped himself, calling up first the translated, and then the original images of the Project’s calling card. He saved both to a thumb drive, dropped it into his pocket, and then deleted both images from his laptop. Then he set his hard drive up to defragment. Over the next couple of hours most of his hard drive should overwrite itself. A real pro would still be able to reconstruct the image, but any less skillful person tampering with his computer would never know it had ever been there.

  To his surprise, Frank realized that half the morning had already passed while he was noodling around the Web. When he opened his email, he found that George had sent another message to all staff. Once again, the subject line was, “What is the Alexandria Project?” (this time, with only initial capital letters). It read as follows:

  Everybody,

  I’ve received some interesting guesses in response to my weekend email question, but none of you got it right. So here it is: the Alexandria Project is what I’ve decided to call the security project we’re undertaking between now and the end of February.

  As you may know, the Library of Alexandria was the greatest library of the ancient world – until it was destroyed by fire. Today, the LoC is the greatest library of the modern world, and we’re increasingly moving towards a digital, rather than a paper world. We can’t any more allow the LoC’s digital holdings to be compromised by hackers than we can allow the books in our stacks to be destroyed by fire.

  Our new code name captures the importance of this project, and I’m expecting all of you to cooperate fully with Rick and his team as we push forward.

  George

  Nice cover, thought Frank. With one message, George had explained away the weekend email trap that Frank had blundered into. If more files disappeared and others saw the same “contribution” screen, George could pass it off as some kind of test without people becoming concerned. George had probably sold that line to Rick already.

  Not for nothing, you’re the boss, Frank thought appreciatively. Tom West would be proud.

  * * *

  5

  So How do Ya like them iBalls?

  Frank fidgeted next to the cheese and crackers, looking helplessly for his daughter in the crowd. He hated social events with a passion, and especially having to speak to people he didn’t know. He was sure that every sentence he uttered came across as a brainless non-sequitur.

  But fair was fair. Marla was finishing up an internship with a local high tech company, and at the last minute, her date had come down with the flu. She had kept him company at the Library of Congress holiday party the weekend before, and this time it was his turn.

  “Please, Dad,” she’d said over the cellphone, “There’s this guy at work that’s been hitting on me all week. It’ll do you good to get out of your crummy apartment, and how can you turn down a request to protect your little girl?”

  How could he indeed, he had thought at the time. But now, all he wanted to say was, “Where the hell are you?” But be fair, he told himself as he nursed his Dos Equis. Marla had started looking pretty green around the gills on the way over and had disappeared into the Ladies’ Room almost immediately after they arrived. Likely enough she was coming down with the flu, too. Wasn’t everyone?

  Frank sighed again. He held his beer in one hand and drummed his fingers quietly against the wall behind his back with the other. Across the room, someone was making an entrance. Oh joy, Frank thought. That must be iBalls.com’s CEO.

  Frank snorted. iBalls! What a lame concept! He thought he’d seen everything during the madness of the Internet bubble years – companies formed to sell dog food over the Internet; year-old start-ups raising $100 million investment rounds; companies going public without a dollar in sales. He had assumed it would be decades before the high tech industry saw that type of insanity again.

  But no – things seemed to be heating up all over again, and maybe worse. Now that Twitter had re-legitimated the no-revenues business model, the venture capitalists were charging back in, hoping to raise mega-funds once again that were far too big to invest intelligently. Too big, that is, unless they started fire-hosing money down the gullets of companies with nonsensical business plans again, just like before.

  Frank gave a short, humorless laugh. That was just the right metaphor, wasn’t it? VCs were like French farmers – force-feeding the goose until its liver turns to pure fat, then selling off the bird before it dies of the farmer’s own absurd excess. Pâté de foie gras start-ups! Frank felt pleased with himself. The metaphor summarized the inanity of venture capital just perfectly.

  Of course, it had been pretty bloody for everybody who’d had their face in the trough after the bubble burst in 2000. Somehow, though, the VCs got away scot-free, in public, at least. As Enron flamed out and Arthur Anderson collapsed, and even as Congressional subcommittees were humiliating Wall Street bankers before CSPAN-TV cameras, the VCs simply melted back into the shadows and rode it out. Everyone seemed to forget that it was the VCs that had tied these laughably inappropriate companies up with shiny red bows to begin with.

  Of course, no one spoke up who really knew what a huge part VCs had played in the pump-and-dump charade that had driven the NASDAQ index to such absurd heights. Say you were an investor. You’d made money with VCs in the past, hadn’t you? And the best funds were hard to get into, right? So if you wanted to get into the next fund, best to keep mum, so as not to offend.

  Well, how about if you were a high tech lawyer or accountant? You still needed the VCs’ business, didn’t you? And if you were an entrepreneur, well, it’s not like you wanted to go back to work for IBM. So everyone just kept their mouth shut while the ugliness unwound behind the scenes.

  The VC funding scene should have gotten back on a healthy foundation after that, Frank thought. But that could only happen if the VCs had returned to the rules of the old days, when a $200 million fund was a big one, and there were plenty of deals to go around.

  But that wasn’t good enough now, and the reason was obvious. If you could get 2% a year of a $100 million fund as a management fee, why not get 2% of a $400 million fund? Or how about 2% of $800 million? Hell, why not make it 2% of an even $1 billion? Some VCs did.

  Maybe things never would have gotten so crazy if Netscape Communications Corporation hadn’t been such a big hit, Frank thought.
But only seventeen months after being founded in April of 1994, Netscape went public in one of the most successful IPOs of all time. There was just one problem: unlike Apple Computer, which had raised more money in its IPO than any company since Ford Motors, Netscape was only just starting to produce revenues. Still, the stock ran up from $28 to $75 on the opening day. After that, everyone wanted to play the VC game. That’s what allowed the funds to balloon in size.

  Soon it wasn’t unusual for a fund targeted at start-up companies to raise $600 million, $900 million, even a billion dollars – and then even more. In a rational universe, these new megafunds would have hired more people and made more investments. But what sense would that make? Then the VCs would have to split the profits with more partners. And gosh knows, they were too smart for that. Better to stick with twenty-five investments per fund and drive their portfolio companies to hire one hundred employees the first year – even buy Super Bowl ads if they couldn’t spend their VC money fast enough to justify an IPO before the bubble burst, just as everyone knew it eventually must.

  And now we’ve got “iBalls!” Frank thought in disgust. By now, his no-longer covert finger drumming was beginning to turn heads.

  Just then, someone tapped a glass held high in the air. It was iBalls.com’s twenty-something CEO, Chad Derwent.

  “Quiet, everybody, quiet!” Chad called. “Welcome to the iBalls.com holiday party – I’m delighted you could all make it. It’s been a great year for the Company, and next year we’re going to knock the old iBall right out of the park!” People began to quiet down.

  “I’ve got two really big pieces of news for you tonight,” Chad continued. That made everyone shut up, because a rumor had been circulating that everyone wanted to be true.

  “The first is that we filed our S-1 Registration Statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission today! That’s right, everybody, we’re going public!” A collective cheer erupted among the lower level employees. Senior management, already in on the good news, smiled smugly. Chad waited for the hoots to die down, and when they didn’t he started tapping his glass once more, but to no avail. Every employee in the room had stock options, from the senior members of management all the way down to the receptionist. Frank groaned at the utter, recurring absurdity of it all.

  Finally, Chad succeeded in shushing the crowd. “And now for my second announcement: we’ve got a very special guest tonight. I’m sure all of you have heard of Josh Peabody – one of the founders of TrashTalk LP – the very coolest VC fund in Silicon Valley. No one’s got a better nose for a hot company than Josh – without him, there’d be no MyPuppies.com site to help you find names for pets that go great with the names of your kids (or, hey, even the other way around!) Or any MyFace.com, where you can find a future spouse who looks as much like you as possible (how can you help but fall in love?) Who else do you know that thinks like that?” Frank’s blood pressure was rising dangerously.

  “Anyway, when Josh offered us a term sheet, we knew the rest was going to be easy. It took us a long time to convince him to let us keep the name ‘iBalls’ instead of, ‘My…,’ well, you can guess ‘My What,’ but....” Laughter drowned him out.

  Frank already knew the rest through Marla. Josh’s fund persuaded iBalls.com to take $50 million in exchange for 60% of the company’s stock, but who cared how much stock the Company had to give up? It would be smooth sailing with a Triple-A tier fund like TrashTalk backing the Company.

  “And here he is now! Let’s give a big, warm iBalls.com welcome to Josh Peabody!”

  The crowd began to split like the Red Sea to let Peabody stride through, shaking his clasped hands over his head like a victorious boxer. This being the Beltway, everyone was dressed fairly conservatively, but Josh was resplendently Silicon Valley, wearing a tailored sports jacket, black shirt, pressed jeans, hand-tooled boots and a haircut that John Edwards would have envied.

  After he shook hands with Chad, it became clear that the great VC would grace the crowd with a few words of his boundless wisdom. Josh wasn’t very tall, so he hopped up on a chair so everyone could see and hear him.

  “Let’s hear it for you, iBallers!” he shouted, and everybody cheered happily; those that had taken greatest advantage of the open bar pumped the air with their fists.

  “Settle down, settle down,” Josh laughed, but he was happy to wait them out. “You know, I just can’t tell you how psyched we all are back on Sand Hill Road about iBalls.com. iBalls! It’s got to be the greatest, purest concept I’ve ever seen. Within one minute of Chad and Sanjay starting their pitch, I turned and whispered to my partner, ‘We’ve got to get this deal!’”

  Everyone cheered again. “No really, people, I mean it! I mean, in the early days of the Web, it was all about eyeballs – getting people to visit your site. The hell with revenues – if you could get the eyeballs, you knew – you just knew – that somehow the dollars would follow. And they did! Netscape ended up having to give their browser away, but how much did AOL pay to snap them up? $4.2 billion, that’s how much! How about Google? Sergey and Larry didn’t have a clue how they’d make any money for years, and now their stock is over the moon! And hey, how many of you use Twitter?” The response indicated that a great many indulged in the occasional tweet.

  Josh paused for effect, and the crowd grew quiet. “So just how do you beat that? Where do you go after Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter? None of them had revenues until they’d blown through a fortune, and look at them now. How do you top that?”

  “With iBalls, that’s how!” he shouted. “It took a couple of geniuses like Chad and Sanjay here to get that Web 3.0 isn’t going to be about traffic at all – it’s not going to be about getting potential customers to you – it’s going to be about you going to them! We’ve all heard the phrase ‘virtual company’ before, but no one had ever thought of making a virtual company nonexistent! How can you be more ‘all about your customer’ than to exist only at their websites? Now that’s true genius!”

  “So no surprise where iBalls can be found today: as of this morning, there were over 1.5 billion iBalls out there! By this time next year, Chad tells me there should be an iBall on over 10% of the Web pages in the entire world! And every day, it costs the Company less and less to put an iBall on a Web page. That’s because our unique, patented reverse auction process drives our price down farther and farther as more and more website owners reverse-bid their way in.”

  “So it’s no wonder that today it’s almost impossible to surf the Web without seeing one of our iBalls winking back at you, no matter where you go. In just one year, the iBall has become the single most recognizable new brand in the on-line world. One day soon, we’ll come up with a way to monetize this amazing, amazing asset. So let’s hear it for Chad and Sanjay – and, of course, for TrashTalk!” The crowd obediently gave it up.

  Marla had told Frank that paying tens of millions of dollars to people all over the world to put a stupid logo on their sites hadn’t been what Chad and Sanjay had originally had in mind at all. Instead, they intended to offer an array of free, fun animations and other “widgets” that people would want to put up at their websites for visitors to enjoy; the iBall was just one of hundreds of animated graphics they had in mind. Anyone could download them and do whatever they wanted with them – even delete them any time they chose. All Chad and Sanjay wanted in return was the ability to pull back a modest amount of anonymized click information from as wide an array of websites as possible, using their widgets to gather the data. With that kind of information in hand, they could spot usage trends and sell Web analysis to customers for a profit.

  Of course, that would have been far too tame for Josh Peabody and the other cowboys at TrashTalk. And then there was the problem that Chad and Sanjay only wanted to raise $500,000 – after all, getting your programming done in India was cheap. After that, their business plan called for relying on viral, word of mouth marketing to spread the news. If all went as planned, they could then raise
a million dollars or so to build on the buzz and move out into the broader marketplace. With any luck, they’d still own most of the stock and be able to sell the Company before the competition moved in. Making $20 or $30 million wouldn’t get their faces on the cover of Wired magazine, but it wasn’t an unreasonable target. And it would be enough to produce a great return for all concerned within a few years’ time.

  Indeed, until they connected with TrashTalk, everything had been going according to plan, only better. They got the first $500,000 from a local angel group for about 15% of the Company’s stock, and completed the programming off shore on time and within budget. They had a real stroke of luck when a buddy of Sanjay’s came out with a killer iPhone app, and as a favor, included a feature that automatically added an iBall to the phone of everyone the app downloader called. Soon, iBall’s were popping up and winking at mobile phone users everywhere, and everyone wanted to know just what those iBalls were all about.

  That was when the guys at TrashTalk noticed. They invited Chad and Sanjay out to Menlo Park to present their business plan. They even sent a charter jet back East to pick them up at a private airstrip outside Washington. Chad and Sanjay were understandably impressed, and almost before they knew what hit them, their company had $50 million in its bank account, and TrashTalk had 60% of its stock. Oh – and the Company had a new business plan, too.