by Adam Leigh
“Alex. I hear you. I’m just not in the mood to listen to you.”
I am a calm person. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. My blood pressure and heart rate are comparable to that of an elite athlete, a chess champion or a nuclear submarine commander. But my taciturn and truculent business partner pushed me to a point of anger that I had not experienced for many years. I don’t know how to describe the cloud of fury that enveloped me, but it was certainly transformative.
Not normally one for grand gestures, I began with a theatrical flourish as I swept the papers, biscuits and several cups to the floor. A strangulated scream turned into a simple invocation to Julian to ‘put that fucking phone down’. Julian turned in what seemed like slow motion towards me and, in disdainful challenge, elaborately placed the phone next to him.
“Alex, I really do hope that you’re going to clear that up.”
My anger-turn subsided quickly. I felt slightly ridiculous, which is inevitably a by-product of a loss of control. I was certainly glad that the room itself had thickish walls, so that hopefully my tantrum had gone unnoticed in the open-plan office outside.
“I’m sorry, Julian, but you should engage more respectfully when we have something important to discuss.”
He remained unmoved and unrepentant.
“OK, I know Simon has to go. I’ve noticed the mistakes too,” he eventually conceded after moments of spiky silence. “But you are going to fire him and you are going to do it well.”
You must surely now have a clear sense that despite our joint billing as founders and CEOs in the business, Julian had a tendency to assume that I was his vassal and inferior subject. It drove me mad as in reality the ideas and vision were all mine, and while he had proved adept at oiling the wheels, he was not really driving the car.
“I will do it now, and I’m going to find a replacement. Alice will keep us going until then. I’m delighted he’s not going to get anything.”
I had acted on good advice when we set up the business and made sure the shares we had allocated to our three lieutenants were only in the form of options. Simon was going to get 0 per cent of zero. Even he could do that sum. He was contractually due three months’ salary and I had no intention of giving him a penny more. The conversation was over. Julian had conceded without ever acknowledging the error of his recommendation. I tidied up the mess a bit while Julian returned to his phone. As I opened the door, I was confronted by an eerily silent office and many pairs of eyes trained in my direction. Perhaps the walls weren’t that thick after all?
***
Firing people is a test of conscience and character. Whether you are letting someone go due to cost cutting or for reasons of incompetence, you are severing people’s livelihood with a disregard for the consequences. Some poor bugger, loyal and hard-working, may just have had a mortgage application accepted predicated on a steady salary, only to find their lives overturned by your need to give them their marching orders.
I had let quite a lot of people go during my time working for others. Most of the time I was instructed when and how to do it by bosses, and I was just the unfortunate messenger stammering through a scripted speech. I hated it, because invariably it was someone in head office telling me to do it and I was watching decent people crumple before me. I never slept the night before a redundancy round as I contemplated the unintended misery that I was about to unleash on innocent families reliant on mum or dad’s gainful employment.
Sentiment evaporated when it was my own business and I had felt from the moment we started that we could carry no idle slackers deficient in the necessary skills to make my venture successful. In the case of Simon’s dismissal, I felt a frisson of excitement when he joined me an hour later in the now tidy Bored Room. While I was up for a scrap with Simon, he looked resigned to his fate when he sat down and his normal swagger and bravado were absent. The conversation was mercifully short and artificially cordial. Even when a stroppy letter arrived two days later accusing us of breaching several aspects of his contract and me in particular of being a bully, I did not flinch or feel any undue emotion, other than the irritation of having to accept some hefty legal costs to refute his nonsense.
We settled a few weeks later and I had to give him a little bit more money to go away quietly. In the end, it is always better to get a resolution, even if it costs a bit. Argument and disputes can be so detrimental to the focused running of a business. I didn’t discuss the negotiation with Julian, nor did he ask me about its progress. And I started to look for a new finance director with the added ingredients of probity and competence.
It was the start, however, of a distance between me and Julian that manifested itself in me making more decisions with Alice and Dimitri on the operation of the business without always soliciting his sanction. Eighteen months in and we really were doing very well, even if Julian and I were not. We carried on regardless – after all, we were on the cusp of greatness.
12. Serendipity
Starting our business was the hardest thing I had ever experienced. There were so many contrasting pressures to deal with and each very long day had a vagueness to its structure that was not conducive to preserving calm. While we had timings and deadlines to deliver, I sometimes felt that I was triaging crises and problems, unforeseen and unfamiliar, like a naive junior A&E doctor. Digital businesses, moreover, bring with them a barrage of real-time data that supposedly deepens knowledge but can also unleash a compulsion to evaluate performance every five minutes. I soon could not control my urge to check if we had new registrations or sellers, how many people were searching on the site and how long they were spending visiting us. Necessary, of course, to run the business, but an intrusion nevertheless on my regular trips to the loo.
My relentlessness ultimately made my brain ache and my muscles feel weak as I was unable to avert my gaze from the business, which I felt might disintegrate or disappear if I did not worry about its most arcane details. The consequence of this rigid focus was that I felt exhausted all the time. Particularly mid-afternoon, when the caffeine was wearing off, I would often fall asleep at my computer. Once, I awoke to the suppressed muffle of naughty giggles as Julian had taken the opportunity to write ‘Ladyboy’ on my forehead in red marker.
I took very little time off in that period, working every day, too scared to not be involved in the big decisions and frequently the unnecessary minutiae. I loved the speed and instinctiveness of it all. You liked something or you didn’t. There wasn’t time for nuanced debate and the spontaneity was liberating.
Our growth increased my appetite for risk. The whole venture was of course risky, but I was now in a world measured by how quickly you went through the cash you had assiduously raised. There is a ridiculous term called ‘burn rate’ used by start-ups, which measures how quickly you will run out of money as you invest in your growth. We had just over two years from the outset until we predicted we would need some more. Rather than worrying about financial oblivion, I took pride in the speed with which we metaphorically set fire to all that lolly.
It stemmed from the intangible impetus of my evolving ambition. I wanted more all the time: subscribers, sellers, reviews, praise, money and glory. I recognised in myself, as I pursued the growth of the business, an absence of fear or restraint. I saw a distant horizon with any obstacles along the way increasingly out of focus.
***
But in the end, it came down to more luck. An enormous serving of it poured from the biggest ladle you can imagine. All the planning, strategy sessions and late-night angst would probably have been for nothing if it hadn’t been for a series of events that precipitated the dramatic acceleration of our growth.
It was mid-September and I left the office at 9.30 p.m. on a rainy, squally evening. The moon was a watery sliver in the starless night; it probably wasn’t, but let’s spice up the narrative. More importantly, on this chilly Wednesday evening Spurs were playing in the cup against Hull and it had gone to penalties after extra time as I slo
uched towards the Tube station, watching the drama unfold as best I could on Twitter. I couldn’t begin the journey home until I knew we had won. As I meandered indecisively, praying for victory, I bumped hard into someone who was clearly moving with pace, causing me to almost drop my iPhone.
“Pay attention, you myopic moron,” shouted the dark figure I had shoulder-charged.
I looked up and saw a dishevelled man with an enormous unkempt beard staring at me with contempt and simmering aggression. Rather than going on his way, he squared up, enjoying a clear height-weight-penchant-for-violence advantage. In the event of physical threat I am a bona fide coward, and I immediately went into a submissive and timid state that they don’t teach you in self-defence classes. I stammered an apology, noticing at the same time that my voice was unimpressively squeaky.
“I’m so sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“No, but I am thinking that some pugnacious pugilism against someone so pusillanimously puny might placate my pain.”
I was a bit confused now. Aggressive and alliteratively verbose at the same time – an unusual combination. I must have grown brave, as I drew back and stared at him with surprise, and he seemed to calm down as his eyes focused on me with puzzlement. Suddenly he emitted a stagey baritone laugh, which defused any threat of being beaten up.
“By the Helmet of Odin! It’s little Alex Lazarus.”
I was confused, because I could not make out his face beneath a beard so wild it probably had its own ecosystem.
“I’m sorry, do we know each other?”
“Oh Alex, how cruel can you be? It is I, your erstwhile companion through the vicissitudes of scholastic learning. You will remember, I believe, my long-forgotten moniker, Nigel O’Connor.”
“My word, it’s you, Nigel. I can’t believe I didn’t recognise you.”
“Well, Alex, you were always slightly backward. It’s why I took pity on you. I must say, though, you are a tonic for my misery tonight. Your Hebrew God has brought us together for a reason.”
“What is that?” I asked, struggling to work out what he was saying through the affectation.
“We must imbibe some alcohol together immediately. Let’s walk back to Shoreditch House. They revere me there.”
He hooked his arm through mine and dragged me back from whence I had come, to join him in what was clearly not his first drink of the night. Who was I to argue? After all, Nigel O’Connor, better known under his writing pseudonym of Clyde Pilestone, was arguably one of the most successful commercial writers in the world.
***
Nigel sat next to me at school when we were thirteen and for several years thereafter. We were not close friends, but we did spend a lot of time together. This was out of necessity, because I was invariably lending him my homework to copy as he had very little interest in doing any himself. He was what you would now call an outlier in our academic community, indifferent to the niceties of pupil obedience and fuelled by sardonic disdain for the rules of the classroom in which he was forced to sit on a daily basis.
He was extremely clever, though. While structured exam-oriented learning seemed beneath him, he excelled at English, Latin and Greek. At our school we had an enigmatic classics teacher, Dr Taylor. We knew little about him, other than that his first name was Hector and he was supposedly a Soviet spy, recruited at Cambridge in the 1950s. Nigel was his acolyte and trotted after him most break-times, hanging on to his faded and tatty academic gown and discussing some obscure classical text.
When not lost in Virgil, Nigel was creating mischief. He would cultivate friendships with vulnerable individuals, but just as they felt secure in the sunshine of his charismatic personality, he would drop them with casual indifference. Teachers showing any weakness would be tortured with sadistic glee. A chemistry teacher, Mr Watts, was reduced to tears one afternoon by Nigel’s refusal to stop asking questions about the difference between sodium and a sodomite.
I got on with Nigel as well as was possible with an adolescent sociopath. He persuaded me to open my exercise books continually to allow him to ignore the ‘bourgeois preoccupation with rote learning’ (not a phrase you forget) and we would occasionally hang around together out of school. At fourteen, he was obsessed with dragging me to obscure films with an ‘18’ certificate that were controversial or shocking. I spent many a school holiday sitting in empty cinemas watching classics like A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris, wishing I wasn’t there.
By the time we started our A levels, Nigel and I had far less to do with each other. We had a different timetable and I felt no need to cultivate a friendship with someone so toxic. Nigel did not last long at the school. He had become the main source of recreational drugs for quite an extensive network of academic institutions. Unfortunately, his trafficking labyrinth got too extensive and he was rumbled by a lethal coalition of an angry parent, our headmaster and a large contingent of local police. After his expulsion, we never met again, and it was something of a relief.
Nigel’s transformation into a global publishing phenomenon seemed unlikely after spending his twenties travelling the world, shrouded in a smoky haze of substance experimentation and dissolute behaviour that would have made Lord Byron blush. His lost years contributed to his allure and the exotic danger he craved made him a more compelling literary figure, but in reality, his image was carefully cultivated by adroit publishers with an eye for a strong marketing narrative.
After a nomadic decade, Nigel decided to return home and seek fame with, ideally, a bit of fortune thrown in. He knew he was a good storyteller – indeed, he had beguiled many unsuspecting women into relationships with apocryphal tales of his swashbuckling adventures at the hands of Somali pirates, Congolese warlords or any other impressive-sounding enemies. His love of classical literature allowed him to cultivate the persona of a heroic poet complete with flowing locks and fast fists for bar-room brawls. But he was also, despite the artifice, very savvy about tastes and commercial appeal and decided that the teen literary world was ready for a contemporary new sci-fi universe written with the kind of sarcastic humour a teenager would love. Working in a bar at night, he sat down to write in the day. Nigel O’Connor, carousing dilettante, became Clyde Pilestone, author of the ‘Resilient Martian’ series.
I suppose I don’t really need to go into enormous detail about the books, as there can only be hermetic monks and Albanians who have not read the novels or seen the films. The story of Xargon 5, the time-travelling survivor of the Galaxy Correction Fleet war on Mars searching the universe for fellow Martians who have also survived the attack, captured the post-digital consciousness of teens and parents alike. The sardonic wit and the incorporation of futuristic social media channels into the stories created a frenzied and unflinchingly loyal fan base.
His tenacity in finding a publisher was unwavering. Rejected consistently and aware that he could not get his manuscript through the gatekeeper’s gatekeeper’s gatekeeper, he decided on direct action. Over a year-long period, Nigel found casual work at three publishers and two major literary agencies. Under the cover of working late, Nigel identified and targeted key editorial directors and agents, leaving a manuscript with a handwritten scrawl on the front page, as if from an imaginary colleague. Comments like ‘Wow, you must read this’, ‘Best thing I’ve read in years’, ‘I think we may have found our golden goose’. In most cases, the ploy was rumbled when people noticed identical manuscripts on more than one desk.
It only needed one person to fall for Nigel’s artifice. Kate Williams was a frustrated young agent ground down by chauvinistic colleagues and formulaic commercial demands for new material. She was desperate for a discovery to announce her as a major force in literary London. When she found the dog-eared copy of the manuscript with the barely legible scrawl ‘Love this more than my children. Must act immediately!’, she started to hyperventilate, and committed to devoting her energies to introducing Martians to a global audience.
She secured a ridiculous fi
rst-time publishing deal, devoting limitless energy to promotion. The experience of bringing his book to life created an active disdain in Nigel for the publishing industry and an indifference to his loyal and obsessive agent. The commercial demands of his success were to be endured rather than celebrated. He was a genius and they were vassals charged with making him look better. It was bad enough to have been born with the name Nigel. To be saddled with the enigmatic pseudonym of Clyde Pile-stone (‘sounds like a cowboy porn star,’ he lamented) to make his books sell better was an insult he would never forgive. The pain of his ascent would be rectified by the subsequent unreasonableness of his behaviour.
Four books, three films and hundreds of merchandising millions later, Nigel bumped into me on the street. Lubricated by an afternoon’s solitary drinking and restless for revenge on the intellectual pygmies who had made his life so difficult, he was ready to do something drastic. How lucky for me.
***
I had never been so close to a global superstar and had no inkling of what it was like to have to contend with the adulation, deference and staring. At Shoreditch House, beautiful staff ushered us to a discreet corner table and brought a bottle of single malt, two tumblers and an ice bucket, without us even placing an order. While it was dark in our corner, Nigel’s distinct hipster-meets-trampy-Viking look made him easily recognisable. I was aware of drinkers pretending not to gawp, while staring intently in our direction and whispering to each other excitedly. How difficult it must be to live with such fame and adulation constantly, and Nigel seemed to be sedating himself with drink to blur the intrusion of others.
We clinked glasses and sat in momentary silence. I had the sense that Nigel was waiting for a cue to address me, but I wasn’t sure how to initiate the conversation. Eventually he leant forward and grabbed my hand in drunken camaraderie, asking: “Alex, it has been a lifetime since we spoke. Precis the intervening years for me without losing my interest.”
