The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus

by Adam Leigh

  There was a logic to the madness of giving us this publishing exclusive. The core theme of the book was the depletion of the universe’s mineral reserves through the folly of its civilisations as the earth quite literally crumbled beneath the feet of our hero. Nigel had realised that there was something satisfyingly apposite in removing the destruction of trees from the book’s publication. It was therefore only to be available as a digital download from our site, readable on a variety of standard e-readers.

  As the weeks wore on, we did reach a mutually beneficial agreement with Kate. We would enjoy an enormous increase in subscriptions and would keep the massive hike in fees that would generate. The download revenue would ostensibly go to Nigel. If sales globally reached certain levels, we would get tiered bonuses. Julian adroitly negotiated that we would also get rights to the next book. It was quite frankly unprecedented and shrouded in rigorous confidentiality agreements, which afforded us some protection to prepare for launch without the global scrutiny. Kate’s tenacity at unpicking these publishing agreements without subsequent litigation was impressive and intimidating.

  Meanwhile, back at our HQ, the frenetic activity was akin to the Allied preparation for the D-Day landings. Dimitri was dealing with the challenge of the world suddenly coming to our site all at once. This required a massive increase in servers and infrastructure, and he embarked on a quest to beef up our operation to handle the demand. He was in his element and like a military commander barking orders at an ever-expanding army of foot soldiers. We left him to get on with whatever he needed to do and turned a blind eye to the fact that reports kept surfacing that Supreme Leader Kharkachov was keeping himself sane through a series of successive relationships with colleagues who somehow found his enigmatic genius enticing. While proximity and hard work were the catalysts for many an office tryst, Dimitri was oblivious to the danger and inappropriateness. Alice pushed me to intercede and make him aware of the perils of his office-centred libido.

  “He is a lawsuit or grievance claim waiting to happen,” she bemoaned. “Please do something.”

  “I will, I promise.” I had no such intention as we were so out of our depth, and I was reluctant to risk upsetting this mercurial if uncontrollable force so crucial to future success.

  We needed to recruit like crazy and continually look at how we were structured. The core business was doing well; we were bringing in new sellers steadily and the number of subscriptions was on plan. But we realised we needed to be much bigger before we embarked on our imminent adventure, so we had to beef up our sales and customer service teams. More importantly, we also had to bring in people who understood the world of publishing and entertainment. Oh yes, and we had to think about building an international presence pretty quickly.

  Kate had insisted that we have a robust office in the US or, in her words, ‘I will withdraw all conjugal affection from Nigel until he decides to publish with grown-ups.’ To prevent her dismantling the tracks of our future gravy train, I acted quickly. We luckily had a bright graduate marketing exec, Jamie, with both a UK and US passport, making her the automatic (and only) choice for our New York office. She and I nipped out there to find some premises, and within a couple of weeks she was packing her bags and jettisoning a distraught boyfriend to become general manager of our first overseas office. She couldn’t believe our desperation.

  By the end of our second year of trading, we were a very fast-growing business with one hundred and twenty staff crammed into an overflowing office in London and a team of five completely out-of-their-depth youngsters in New York. In six months, we were going to be publishing The Galaxy Slayer’s Last Stand, the fifth ‘Resilient Martian’ novel, which was going to cause a sensation. There was only one slight snag.

  We were running out of money.

  14. Cap in Hand

  As soon as we signed the deal to publish Clyde Pilestone, we knew we needed to fund massive expansion. The nature of our agreement was predicated on a global footprint that we didn’t have. Time for the sun to rise on our empire.

  George Dobson and Moshe had reacted quite differently. The former, indifferent to teen literature, was ambivalent to our coup and failed to grasp the enormity of our success. In a series of curt emails, he suggested forcibly that this was not where he thought we should be focusing our efforts. He also made it clear there was likely to be no more money forthcoming. Julian was unbothered and told me that George was distracted by business interests in China, so had little energy to divert elsewhere.

  Fortunately, Moshe had already called by the time I received George Dobson’s last email, hyperventilating down the phone with excitement.

  “Alex… Alex. What have you done? How is this possible? You are a little boy. Could it be you have become a man?”

  “Moshe. You are the first person to believe I could persuade someone famous to do a deal with us.”

  “I didn’t believe you could do this. No way. But when Julian rang, he managed to persuade me you weren’t a complete fool.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “I think it is time for me to increase my investment in your business. You need to do a lot very quickly. And I want you to make sure that this time, I get more than Dobson.”

  “You needn’t worry. He seems to respect me even less than you and thinks we’re wasting his time. But we are going to need a lot more money, unless you want to fund our entire international expansion.”

  “I have an idea for that, little boy.”

  “Please stop calling me that, Moshe.” He seemed unable to have a positive conversation without the need to assert his mastery by always unsettling me. It was not intimidating, simply very irritating. “So, what is your idea, or am I too young to understand your wisdom?”

  “There is no need to be rude to a major investor. That does not impress me, habibi.” He accentuated the colloquial Arab term for ‘darling’ with a sneer and a long silence in which he expected me to apologise, genuflect or weep with shame. I felt required to break first and acknowledge some gratitude for his financial generosity.

  “OK, Moshe, I’m sorry. I won’t be disrespectful to you any more, even if you can’t return the compliment. What’s your great idea?”

  He was smug in victory. “You are going to go over with Julian to meet Cole and Brooke Johnson and they are going to give you the Series A funding you need. I’ll top up too, if they come on board.”

  “Wow. I’ve always wanted to meet them, they’re fascinating. But I’ve read they no longer invest in start-ups?”

  “You must not believe the PR statements of super-successful people. We like to control the narrative. Surely you have realised that by now?”

  “Why would they want to see a little boy like me, Moshe?’

  “Because I have just called them and told them to meet you in forty-eight hours. You had better ask your mummy if you can go on a small trip.”

  He had the last word, and inevitably it was a put-down.

  ***

  Cole and Brooke Johnson were the supreme power couple of Silicon Valley and their home in Woodside, five minutes out of town, was the most spectacular house I had ever visited. Cradled in a forest clearing, surrounded by lush vegetation and a resplendent rose garden, it was a curious architectural melange – part Pablo Escobar Hacienda, part Palace of Versailles. Julian and I were shown by a maid into a vast living room with a floor-to-ceiling window running the length of one side, overlooking an infinity pool the size of a lake. The sofas were truly enormous and despite, neither of us being particularly short, we struggled to lean back and touch the floor with our feet at the same time.

  “Do you think this thing is intended to intimidate us?” Julian bemoaned.

  “Maybe we’ve climbed the beanstalk and now we have to beg the giant for gold?” For good measure, I started intoning, ‘Fee-fi-fofum, no more funding for this English—”

  We were interrupted by an enormous sliding door opening and the emergence of our hosts. There was an iridesc
ent gleam as the sunlight fell on the immaculate straight white teeth of Brooke, whose face was stretched into an enormous, flawless smile. She strode towards us, arms outstretched, with forceful confidence.

  “You must be Alex and Julian. Welcome to Àu bout de souffle.” She shook both of our hands with vigorous enthusiasm.

  “Lovely to meet you,” Julian replied, holding her gaze with equal, if slightly uncalled for, intensity. “It’s a strange name for a house so magnificent, I have to say.”

  Brooke laughed with a manly baritone depth. “It’s French, as you know, for ‘breathless’. I think if you are truly ambitious, you should be out of breath most of the time. Don’t you?”

  As they continued their flirtatious staring at one another, I was aware of another presence in the room. Her husband, Cole, had shuffled in quietly and was observing us with a look of curious detachment.

  Cole is a muscular American name suggestive of a tall, powerful sporting frame with the debonair looks of a movie star. Not this Cole, however. He could at best be described as squat and scruffy, and while his wife was immaculately dressed and radiating health, he had a pockmarked face and a straggly reddish beard. His creased tee shirt was emblazoned with the memorable phrase ‘Cocaine Made Me Rich’, and it looked, as he did, completely unwashed.

  “Hey, guys,” he whispered nonchalantly. “What brings you to our little cottage in the woods?”

  “Money,” ventured Julian boldly. “We need lots of it.”

  “Well, we have plenty of the stuff.” He flopped down into the sofa next to his now seated wife. She completed the sentence. “We are just very fussy who we give it to.”

  ***

  Cole and Brooke were an oddity in Silicon Valley. You’d expect grungy Cole, from the picture I have just described, to be a maths genius who built computers in his garage as a teenager, like his idol Bill Gates, while football jocks slammed his head into the wall at high school and girls shunned him. Actually, Brooke turned out to be the glamorous face of coding. She built a revolutionary publishing software tool, eventually bought by Microsoft, while also being known as something of a party animal. By the time she was twenty-five she was worth $10m, and it was in an LA nightclub that she met out-of-work actor Cole Johnson. Their tumultuous love affair became the most robust business partnership imaginable.

  Cole was not much of an actor, with neither the looks for the romantic lead nor the versatility to carry off quirky characterisation. He did a bit of theatre and TV, but to little acclaim, and once played Macbeth so badly that his only review described his acting as ‘more tragic than the play itself’. What ensured his future salvation was his fascination with technology and the commercial opportunities it offered.

  In Brooke, he realised that he had not simply triumphed finding a beautiful girlfriend; her fearsome ability to write software was going to be much more lucrative than snagging the part of ‘tubby dad’ in a laxative commercial. Very quickly they moved into an apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and an office in Menlo Park, where they built ‘Can-Act Software’ (Cole’s little joke). Several years later, it was sold for over a billion dollars, having revolutionised the basic finance packages available to small companies across the world. Everyone knew the story, but not the truth behind their success.

  As the business flourished, their marriage floundered. Passion dissolved into rancour and disdain. It was quite a dilemma – personal incompatibility versus their collective professional dynamism. Cole was an instinctive CEO and Brooke a software genius with a single-minded relentless focus on product development. They couldn’t stand each other’s company, and behind closed doors co-existed in glacial indifference to one another. Yet they realised that their personas and perceived marital harmony were very good for business. The beautiful geek in love with the energetic performer added a lustre to their business that could be manipulated to great effect. There was no way that their boundless ambition was going to be scuppered by the shortcomings of their marriage.

  So, they agreed to present the image of an engaging couple seen out everywhere together, hand in hand, seemingly inseparable. Once home in their secluded mansion, they lived completely apart, visited by friends, families and lovers, who were entertained in discrete wings of the property. I found this out from Moshe, who somehow knew Brooke well. Before our departure, he confided that their marriage was ‘less real than the tooth fairy’. They were a business partnership, not a family. In an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Brooke admitted: ‘I can’t have children. It’s not gynecological. It’s just I would lose my edge.’ They approached potential deals without sentimentality and were implacably sceptical of most start-up promises. Yet it was worth the pain, as their ability to spot the success was legendary.

  Given their marital facade, they approached investment as an indivisible team made up of contrasting and complementary skills. If the Johnsons invested in your business, you got both of them on your board as a non-negotiable precondition. Brooke would scrutinise your technology platform and Cole would terrorise your marketing and sales team. They wrote a book together called What the Board Can Learn from a Happy Marriage, and their PR machine ensured that they were always interviewed as a double act, doling out wisdom harmoniously.

  “They are going to mess with your head,” Moshe had gleefully concluded. “Brooke will flirt with you to test you. Well, not you, Alex, but I am sure she will like Julian. Good luck.”

  ***

  If you knew the status of their relationship, the nuances of their behaviour towards each other were not hard to pick up on. The conversation was cordial, and although they did not contradict each other, nor did they particularly interact. Brooke maintained an intense, almost uncomfortable focus on Julian, oblivious of my flimsy presence. She twirled her shiny blonde hair distractedly in her fingers, but there was something calculating in the mannerism. To make the atmosphere stranger, Cole sat next to me at a slight angle, so close to my face that I could not only smell his breath but identify all the ingredients of the smoothie he had drunk for breakfast.

  Julian and I had rehearsed a punchy, prop-free explanation of our business and the encouraging results of our first couple of years of trading. We tried to impress them initially with the proposition without playing our ace, in the form of our publishing deal. Julian teed up the story of my chance encounter with Nigel and I tried to be amusing in describing his eccentricities. Cole, inches from my nostrils, did not move, but I heard little mutterings and tuts, suggesting that he was getting bored by a meandering anecdote. Eventually, he moved away from the orbit of my face, leant back in the sofa and, with some irritation, asked, “Is this story going anywhere?”

  “Apologies,” I replied confidently. “It is going to have a humdinger of a Hollywood ending, I promise.”

  “Well, we are not in Hollywood. Learn your California geography before pitching to us, please, Alex,” said Brooke. A pointed insult cloaked with a beatific smile. Julian rolled his eyes, an unsubtle prompt for me to get to the point.

  “All right, let me conclude. Clyde Pilestone has agreed to give us exclusive publishing rights to his next ‘Resilient Martian’ novel.”

  Like psychic twins, they snorted with laughter in unison.

  “Sure, and Pope Francis has asked me to write his next sermon,” Cole chirped.

  “That’s odd, because Barack Obama has asked me to give the next State of the Union,” Brooke replied.

  Julian, enjoying my humiliation, added his own unnecessary insult. “You’re not the first to doubt him.”

  “Except,” I shouted, “as my soon-to-be-ex-partner will attest, it’s absolutely true. Perhaps we’ve come to the wrong obscenely large mansion to ask for money, if this is the level of derision we receive.”

  “Actually, it is true,” added Julian sheepishly. “That’s why we’re here, and you should be very impressed.”

  Brooke and Cole stopped smiling and asked for further details, this time in a more professional tone. I o
utlined the deal and, with Julian chipping in, explained our need to fund rapid expansion to a number of global hubs very quickly. We were bombarded with questions, which we answered adroitly. After about half an hour, Cole clapped his hands to bring our initial interrogation to a close.

  “So, guys, you stand before us asking for our money. Many have fallen at this stage. Brooke and I, as you can see, form a team that is indivisible. Two bodies with one brain, no one can separate our opinion.” He paused and glanced casually over to his lovely wife, who nodded her head vigorously.

  “We are a pretty formidable duo, you’ll find,” she added. It seemed odd that they had to assert their magnificence constantly. Their wealth was on tasteful display and their reputation globally revered, but still they felt compelled to pronounce their greatness. Cole continued to explain what lay ahead.

  “We know you have a detailed business plan and we have more experts than you can imagine, who are going to pick holes to expose your beautiful baby to public scorn. We may even meet again just to publicly humiliate you in front of our team of sycophantic but extremely aggressive lawyers.”

  He was loving his power and nodded to Brooke to continue the performance.

  “We like you, Alex and Julian, we really do. Moshe told us very little other than to meet you and give you lots of money before someone else did. You have gone further than hundreds of start-ups shoved our way every week. When we let you into our beautiful home, we expect you to be worth meeting.”