The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus

by Adam Leigh

  Moshe Shalon learnt fortitude, entrepreneurial innovation, bravery and determination from his kibbutz upbringing. Egalitarianism, however, was most definitely not for him. He had a decorated army career as a front-line paratrooper and then decided after four terms at university that he didn’t need to be a mechanical engineer to start his own business. Rather, he would surround himself with technical expertise to grow a commercial enterprise with the same tenacity his grandparents had shown in creating fertile land from swamp, but with untold riches that he would not have to share.

  Moshe launched SmickSmack in 1997 in the nascent days of the internet, when online shopping was still a distant, scarcely believable promise. He had met Avi Ram, a twenty-six-year-old computer programmer, in a rare class he had attended during his fleeting university career, where he had overheard the professor tell Avi that he’d never met a student like him and that he was destined for greatness. Those words galvanised Moshe to befriend the innocent and unworldly Avi Ram for purposes of future financial gain. He also thought it was hysterical that his surname was a measurement of data storage, which had to be God’s way of saying ‘use this chap for all he’s worth’.

  Under Moshe’s rigid and ruthless control, Avi developed an evolutionary suite of data encryption software. These products were sold with unrelenting determination by a team of salespeople trained with the paratrooper-inspired adherence to duty that Moshe had learnt in the army. His genius was twofold. He understood technology trends and could shape products to meet them. The other aspect was his thirst for acquisition, quenched by an endless absorption of smaller businesses to ensure that the threat of competition was eliminated. When the dot-com crash rattled the industry in the early part of the noughties, Moshe had insulated his empire from collapse by concentrating on unaffected growth areas. He became crucial to the financial services industry and was also awarded contracts by the Israeli Ministry of Defence, about which very little was known.

  Moshe Shalon’s profile in Forbes magazine in 2006 estimated that he was worth $600m, which irked him because he felt that success was not real unless you earned the ‘billionaire’ moniker. Life was pretty good, especially when he married Ilana Hamdi, a former Miss Israel, swimsuit model and now an aspiring singer. He had supported her in the production of an album, Kol Kushti, which had enjoyed modest success in a few smaller European pop charts. A media commentator and well-known figure in Tel Aviv nightlife, Moshe was respected by the business community, and famous for having a cruel sense of humour and not being very kind to those he didn’t respect.

  I knew a little bit about Moshe Shalon before I met him and was aware that SmickSmack was one of Israel’s most respected tech companies. His brutal reputation didn’t scare me. I had run large digital transformation projects for entrepreneurial founders, who at best were mercurial in temperament but were often ranting despots. I was actually quite calm under pressure. A particularly unhinged client, furious at a delay in an app launch, had phoned me recently at home at 1 a.m. to shout incessantly at me for an hour. It included the rather memorable insult: ‘You are a dimwit, so dim-witted you are too dim-witted to even win “Dimwit of the Year”.’ How much more challenging could Moshe Shalon be?

  ***

  We visited Lord Dobson first.

  It was a bitterly cold late-November day. The Houses of Parliament looked Gothically imposing against a slate-grey sky as we got out of a cab. I glanced at the crenelations and made a mental note that it was impressive I remembered the word ‘crenelation’ from lessons on Norman architecture at school. A gargoyle on one of the battlements looked down at me with contempt. It seemed to be saying: You’re never going to get funding for that idea, mate.

  We had left Dimitri behind, believing the austerity of our surroundings and the formality of our host may not be the perfect environment for him. Julian had reminded me to be smartly attired, so I’d had my Boss suit dry-cleaned and had polished my rather ancient black leather Italian shoes. I decided against a tie as I had not worn one for several years and felt it unnecessary. Julian, as you would expect, achieved sartorial one-upmanship that day. He took off his navy cashmere coat to reveal an impeccable bespoke three-piece suit that made me feel like a scarecrow. His tie was brightly emblazoned with a crest that suggested an elite club membership from which I was excluded. It wasn’t quite the vibe of a digital maven, but he looked like he was born to rule over lesser mortals like me.

  We were shown into the guest dining room and the maître d’ whispered in my ear, “I am afraid, sir, you will need to wear a tie.” Flushed with embarrassment, I selected one quickly from his station and started to tie it as quickly as I could. At that precise moment, I heard Julian greet George Dobson with enthusiasm. I turned to see a look of enormous disdain on our host’s handsome face as he watched me fumble with the knot.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” I stammered.

  “Call me George, young man, and might I suggest you find out a little bit more about our dress code next time you visit.” As a prelude to asking a very influential man for millions, it was inauspicious.

  Julian came to my rescue quickly and deflected him with family gossip. They talked with warmth about Julian’s father, who, despite his dodgy financial dealings, was clearly someone Lord Dobson adored. He told several anecdotes about their schooldays, which were neither funny nor legal, but I suppose they were different times and you could get away with keeping an air rifle in your bedroom if you were a boarder.

  We ordered lunch and Julian and our host embarked on a vigorous debate about the clarets on offer in the House of Lords’ cellar. I smiled nervously, worried that I would say something facile about the 2006 Pomerol he ordered that would make him hate me more. When my glass was filled, I thought of proffering that I felt the blackcurrant acidity beautifully offset the caramel and buttery top notes.

  Fortunately, my silence allowed his indifference to abate and after the small talk stopped, he turned to me with a faint trace of a smile and said: “So, Alex, Julian tells me you have an ambitious plan for world domination, but you need my money to feed your armies. Why don’t you tell me why I should listen to you?”

  I drew breath and prepared to deliver my well-rehearsed pitch, at which point we were interrupted by the leisurely ladling of an ancient waiter who had arrived with a tureen of soup. You should know my table manners are not that good. I can’t help it, but when I eat I am accused by my family of having an open food-filled mouth. My lack of fine motor skills means that at least half of the food I eat normally ends up on my shirt or trousers. I was not sure of protocol and after the debacle of ‘no-tie-gate’, I did not want to commit another affront to civilised society. I was torn between the fear of eating, knowing soup would be congealing on my designer stubble below my lips, and not eating, thereby delaying the flow of lunch. Should I slurp quickly between sentences or should I wait until I had finished my informal presentation and then down the bowl in one? All the contingency planning we had done as a team had not prepared me for this practical challenge, and in truth my performance was decidedly sub-par.

  When I finished, there was temporary silence, punctuated by my frantic spooning of soup as I had decided to wait to the end to try to empty my bowl. Julian was unflappable, which was perhaps why he had chosen the prawn cocktail. One fork, five mouthfuls, thank you and goodnight. He rushed to my rescue, adding a couple of points I had omitted, and qualified some of my explanations. He concluded as the plates were cleared away.

  “George, I know this is unfamiliar territory for you, but you’ve known me all my life and I think you have a sense of what I can achieve. The start-up world has changed now because of the invention of the smartphone. There are riches that can be accrued faster than any property development can be built. Investors are seeing that good ideas can go global in a matter of months. Tech companies reach a certain scale and then they invest in the innovation of others in case they can’t develop the next innovation themselves. This is an idea
that has it all, but what will make it successful is the skill and ambition of the people behind it. I know you believe in me. You need to believe in Alex. He’s brimming with ideas and he knows how to build this venture. Take this plan and show it to one of your advisors. Check the numbers. You’ll get excited too.”

  It was quite a speech. Lord Dobson swirled the dregs of his wine and stared at me with a look that was completely inscrutable. I had no sense of what was coming.

  “Alex, you clearly have a fan in my godson. Tell me about yourself. Would I know your father?”

  Hmmm. Stuart Lazarus, intellectual scourge of the Establishment, darling of the Left, happy to appear on any platform for the promotion of his latest work chronicling the iniquities of the capitalist hegemony. Not quite the calling card I needed right now.

  “I don’t think so, George. He’s a teacher and my mother is a clinical psychologist.” His brow furrowed, frowned and tightened. It was quite a talented brow.

  “Where do you hail from?” he asked pointedly.

  “Willesden,” I replied, thinking that would close the conversation down.

  “The Cricklewood or Kilburn end?” A tad specific, I felt, and wondered which was the better answer. “I have many apartment blocks on Willesden Lane,” he added with a smile. I had inadvertently reminded him of his fortune, which I assumed was a good thing.

  “And Alex, tell me, do you want to be famous or do you want to be rich?”

  “I want to be successful, George. I want to create something that will make me feel proud that the effort has been worthwhile. I don’t want to change the world, but I do want to make my presence felt.” Good answer, I thought, and sensed that Julian was vigorously nodding alongside me.

  Lord Dobson smiled and licked his lips, clearing the invisible remnants of his main course. He sat upright, shoulders pinned back, unruffled and superior. An enormous smile spread across his face and he clapped his hands like an overexcited football fan.

  “Julian my boy, I like this fellow. A little graceless, of course, but full of enthusiasm and ideas. Precious commodities. We will review your numbers and get back to you within forty-eight hours with our decision and our conditions.”

  It was as easy as that. No difficult questions on the size of the market or the complexity of guaranteeing a sufficiency of sellers. The business was over, and the lunch became most agreeable, with a lot of indiscreet gossip from naughty Lord Dobson. He pointed out a Labour peer in the corner of the dining room, currently sleeping in his office because of a ‘harmless clinch’ with a twenty-two-year-old intern, which his provincial wife had needlessly seen as something serious. He dropped in nonchalantly over coffee that he had a meeting in the afternoon with the prime minister himself. He intended to tell him that the ‘right-wing bastards’ in the party must not push him to have a referendum on Europe in the next few years, no matter how strong the clamour. For God’s sake, you can’t let the hoi polloi decide something that important for the country.

  ***

  Two days later, we had a very different meeting.

  Still cold, the sky was a Mediterranean blue and London positively glistened. Julian, Dimitri and I marched purposefully from the street into the lobby of the uber-modern, gleaming St Martins Lane Hotel. We all wore jeans, and while Julian and I had smart open-necked shirts, Dimitri had his doctored Sex Pistols tee shirt, which had been adapted to read ‘Anarchy in the Ukraine’. We took the lift to the penthouse and were greeted by two dark-suited security operatives with hybrid Israeli-Russian accents, who had, without doubt, killed many people in previous lives for sport. After frisking us with a vigour that seemed unnecessarily thorough, the door was opened, and we were brusquely shown in.

  The suite was drenched in bright sunlight from the floor-toceiling windows overlooking Trafalgar Square. An iridescent gleam radiated from the strips of modern lighting concealed beneath various nooks in the wall. The room was set up to create a sense of discomfort and we were greeted by a wave of frantic chatter. Four or five people were walking around in tiny circles, shouting into their iPhones. Some were remonstrating in Hebrew and others fluently cajoling the poor person at the end of the line in aggressively accented English.

  Moshe was sitting on a sofa with his feet on a glass table. He was all in black, wearing jeans and a tee shirt, and had matching cowboy boots with enormous heels. I hadn’t seen boots like that for many years and thought they were impossible to buy outside of Kansas these days, but I appreciated he may well have liked a trip to the rodeo in his spare time. On the table, there were two empty and one full espresso cups. He held a lit cigarette, ash drooping towards the pristine cream carpet. I didn’t feel it was my place to remind him that this was probably a non-smoking penthouse.

  He was, of course, also on the phone, talking with aggressive animation in Hebrew. He beckoned half-heartedly for us to sit down by him, which we did in polite silence. I tried to eavesdrop on his call, but my knowledge of Hebrew was largely synagogue-biblically based. He did not seem to be invoking that the children of Israel should leave Egypt, but I definitely made out the English phrase ‘machine learning’.

  After ten minutes in which we were ignored by everyone, Moshe abruptly ended his call and turned to us with a look of abstraction, asking indifferently: “Tell me, friends. Who are you and why are you here?”

  I was about to reply when the door to the bedroom opened and out strode the tallest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen in the flesh. She was flawless and, to make concentration more complicated, she was wearing a swimming costume and a sarong, which seemed odd for late November in London. Moshe stood up and the need for cowboy boots with enormous heels became evident. He was still significantly shorter than her and, as he took her hand tenderly, I thought she was going to pat him affectionately on the head. They spoke in Hebrew. She was clearly modelling some new purchase and he was enraptured by his wife’s beauty, which turned him into a fawning and distracted teenager.

  Eventually the domestic sideshow came to an end and he ushered her back into the adjacent room, smirking with the smugness of someone for whom wealth had created opportunities that might not naturally have arisen.

  He then turned to us without a trace of warmth and said simply, “Well, you haven’t answered my question.” Julian, snapping out of the reverie that a glimpse of an unexpected swimsuit model can create, started to talk rapidly.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Moshe. I’m Julian Lloyd-Mason. I was your lawyer when you bought Capital Studios last year. You are apparently looking for investment in consumer brands with a global reach and we are going to create one.”

  Moshe looked at us as if we had threatened to kidnap his wife. He lit another cigarette, then turned to me and said, “You have three minutes. Go.”

  Adrenaline is a strange chemical when released. Fear can precipitate its creation, but as it starts to arrive, it then provides a temporary but impervious barrier to anxiety. This might be rubbish, but when I was given this narrow window to talk by a man of such superficial iciness, something kicked in and, if I say so myself, I was rather magnificent. In three minutes, I outlined the proposition, discussed the revenue model, told him why it would be successful. Finally, I asked him for a few million dollars he might have lying around.

  Julian nodded so much in agreement that it must have looked like he was praying fervently. The thought did cross my mind that perhaps this was a test of our character, not our business idea. We had submitted the business plan to his lawyer in advance of the meeting, so we had assumed he had a scintilla of interest, otherwise he would have cancelled.

  When I finished my declamation, he looked at the wall for a while and then spoke over his shoulder to one of the flunkies who had come off a call. This lasted another two or three minutes as we waited for some further acknowledgement. Finally, he looked at Julian and said in a staccato voice, like the rattle of a machine gun, “OK, Julian. Why would anyone listen to a lawyer?”

  I suppose it was a good
question to give someone in an entrance exam for law school, but not that relevant right now, as well as gratuitously rude. Julian was always calm. His upright posture remained militarily rigid and he smiled for an instant and then rather brazenly leant forward and put his hand on Moshe’s shoulder. Neither of them flinched.

  “Good question, Moshe. Here is my answer. Read our business plan and think of what we are trying to do. Parenting is the most important skill that comes with adulthood. We are going to make the world better at it. Too ambitious? Well then, half the civilised world, if we’re being precise. Anywhere that people have a bit of money to buy a solution to a child’s need. Yes, I’m a lawyer, but today you’re meeting me as a businessman with a crackerjack idea that I’m willing to share with someone who hasn’t the manners to shake our hands or offer us a drink. You can be as macho-wealthy as you like. It’ll be your loss.”

  Julian sat back in his chair and smiled sweetly at Moshe. I felt very uncomfortable and shifted from one clenched buttock to the other. I was rather impressed by Julian’s speech. We had too good an idea to be bullied by a little man dressed like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy.

  Moshe stood up and motioned to one of the security guys, who moved his hand to his breast pocket and reached inside. That he had a gun, I had no doubt. That he was going to wave it at us seemed ridiculous. Instead, he and his boss started to giggle like idiots. Moshe beckoned me and Julian to stand up and he gave us big hugs, overpowering us with the fumes of his noxiously sweet and generously applied cologne.

  “I am joking. I am sorry, I couldn’t resist. People say Moshe Shalon has no sense of humour. You tell them differently, OK?”