by Adam Leigh
Nothing was said until a few weeks later when we stood in strained silence making ourselves an early morning coffee. Julian, in a voice brimming with insincerity, started off the conversation by asking me, “How are Sarah and the kids? You haven’t regaled us with a charming anecdote about your domestic happiness for a while.”
“All good, thank you. How’s your divorce going?” I retorted.
“Yup, progressing with the lawyers. These things take time.”
“Well, I hope the money doesn’t run out. I know divorces can be expensive.”
We looked at each other intently. You very rarely stare straight into someone’s eyes and try not to avert your gaze. Embarrassment tends to prevail. But that winter’s morning, with our business about to catapult to global recognition, we stood like boxers at a weigh-in, nose-to-nose and unblinking.
Julian broke first. He smiled, slapped me on the back collegiately and said with a broad grin, “Bring it on, Alex, that’s what I say. Bring it on.”
PART 3
GLOBAL CONFLICT
16. A Kind of Madness
What is ambition?
When I met a stranger in a park and unburdened my career aspirations, how could I have anticipated the successful chaos that would envelop me? It’s hard to unravel the exact emotions that motivated me to sacrifice stability for uncertainty. Perhaps if I’m honest, what rose above the general quest for a lucrative commercial enterprise was the need for massive external recognition. I wanted people who knew me to jealously spit out their cornflakes when they saw my huge profile in the weekend papers.
Ambition has traditionally engendered conflict and suffering. The Old Testament is basically a long prohibition for man not to elevate aspiration above devotion to God. Eve tempted Adam with the apple and look how well that turned out. Jacob stole his brother Esau’s birthright, demonstrating that convention need not stand in the way of getting what you want. His son Joseph, empowered by self-belief, accurately told his brothers that they would one day bow down to him, because he was superior and destined for greater things, which, as you will know if you’ve seen the musical, is what happened.
Look at its Latin root and you will see that ambition is a political aspiration and a lust for power. Ambitio was used in Rome almost exclusively in the context of public life. In its earliest iteration the word had the literal sense of ‘to go around’, and referred to the politician on the make soliciting or canvassing votes.
Ancient learning is steeped in warnings of the dangers of ambition. We were taught to restrain our quest for more because it did not necessarily deliver contentment or inner peace. Somewhere in history, however, this view was submerged and forgotten beneath the advance of an industrialised society and the new opportunities it afforded for prosperity.
The US is the greatest exemplar of this shift. Founded by Puritans who taught ascetic restraint, the post-1776 emergence of an independent country in which every man was equal (except for the slaves) gave rise to the American Dream. No matter where you came from, you were taught to believe in your limitless potential – the very epitome of the equality of ambition. Studies show, however, that for all the advancement and improvement in quality of life in the last fifty years of the twentieth century, people in America were no happier at its end than at its midpoint.
And then finally consider the most famous artists, writers, actors and musicians you can think of and everything you know of their turbulent histories. Greatness and posterity are often intertwined with lives of excess. Infidelity, substance abuse and mental fragility are often indistinguishable from the relentlessness of great talent. Wanting and needing more from creative success can bring with it sustained unhappiness.
Why is all this relevant? In retrospect, there was evidence all round me that proved ambition was no guarantee of future happiness. I was, however, too excited by the adrenaline release of our rapid expansion and too focused on succeeding to realise this.
***
Our expansion was faster than anyone could have anticipated. We received more money from Moshe and from Brooke and Cole, as well as a little bit of additional Silicon Valley support, which the Johnsons had corralled. George, to my surprise, had at the last minute matched Moshe’s contribution, without much explanation. Julian put it down to his paranoia at being outflanked by a rival. Empowered by newly restored cash balances, we were able to spread out across the globe like a conquering army with full bellies and shiny new armour.
In our third year of trading, things got serious. We rapidly grew to over three hundred employees, initially in six locations, and had to bring in all sorts of new skills that we hadn’t anticipated. A robust sales team to carry on securing an endless supply of sellers and retailers to our site was a top priority. We grew our marketing team to include content producers and designers, as well as the best digital marketers around. Our high-profile and rapid progress meant that people wanted to work for us, so recruitment could be done at speed with a willing pool of hungry individuals ready to join our cult.
We had to grow up as an organisation, even if we were still running around in short trousers. Like all visionary digital businesses, we defined success by the breadth of the talent we hired and our ability to persuade people to precipitously leave secure jobs. I was particularly excited that some of these people were even over thirty and remembered vinyl first time round. Of necessity, we also recruited a robust legal team in case they turned nasty and tried to sue us.
I concentrated on building our international teams by finding leaders who we could trust to colonise other markets with speed and efficiency. Each of these appointments was a leap of faith akin to a bungee jump with a cord no one had checked. We did not know when we appointed Manuel Garrido, our Spanish CEO, for example, if he was mucho bueno or mucho crapo. Each time, I would fly in and out of capital cities, meet a couple of people and make a decision on these lieutenants based on finely honed instincts. (Did they speak English? Did they like coffee? When could they start?) They were given a budget, a launch manual, and a welcome bottle of cava, and expected to report back confidently each month on their nascent progress.
The area that required the most scrutiny was Dimitri’s team. Over three years, he had really changed. The naive and endearing optimism had calcified into a charmless focus that made him extremely intimidating and challenging. His rigidity meant that he would only be available for meetings or conversations at fixed times during the week, which we always had to accommodate. It was still worth the effort, because the increasing complexity of the business represented a challenge he was obsessed with overcoming. The more difficult personal interaction became, the greater our confidence in his delivery.
There were lots of practical challenges. His team required nurturing and significant emotional support. We had to confront dangerous levels of stress and anxiety among a talented but bruised cohort, working ridiculous hours while desperately hoping for a crumb of approbation and endorsement from Dimitri, the cruellest taskmaster imaginable. Simmering discontent often festered into complaints, which we had to settle quickly. We threw money at people to make sure they were a bit happier and to dampen any litigious inclinations.
Dimitri had settled into a relationship with one of his team, a developer from Poland called Lena. When the romance became clearly serious to everyone in the office, we hoped that it might soften his robotic interactions with us. Unfortunately, it just created two Dimitris. When Lena was near him, he simpered affectionately with no regard to what this looked like. When she was not there, he morphed back into his chilly totalitarian persona.
The nature of all of our relationships evolved a little as we moved from start-up informality to a business that had to behave with more structure and process. For Julian and me, this rapid scaling-up provided a temporary truce in our frosty relationship. We became more effective co-leaders, spending less time together, relying on the other to ease the burden of a mountainous to-do list. I drove the vision for the business, its prop
osition and external promotion, encouraging values that at least made us an enjoyable place to work. Julian did deals. He loved the negotiation, the intractable posturing and the close. Entertainment, retailing, publishing – Julian tenaciously delivered exciting content to our site and revelled in the elaborate ruses and tactics he employed to ensure favourable terms.
Alice was our backbone. She became the chief operating officer with oversight of everything. With a remarkable ability to know exactly what was going on, she would arrive like a cuddly marine to dispense practical assistance to any ailing individual in need of support. Everyone respected Alice and did what she asked. She didn’t crave recognition, but derived satisfaction from calming the chaos generated by the rest of us. Even Julian, so prickly and dismissive initially, turned to her continually for advice. I would also avoid making the simplest decision without recourse to her opinion. She would tell me when I was behaving badly or insensitively and developed a bespoke ‘twatometer’ that measured my stupidity at any given time. When she rated me six or above, which happened regularly, I was contractually bound to reverse any decision I had made.
We had formal management and board meetings and ensured that agendas, reports and financial overviews were consistently produced to the satisfaction of our backers and investors. With the expectation of much higher levels of governance, we rehearsed our presentations carefully and tried to minimise the spin. We even got ourselves some bright graduate personal assistants to manage our diaries after the time I accidently arrived in Frankfurt to interview a potential country manager who was waiting for me in a bar in Paris. Childish tantrums were replaced by the swagger of success as we strode through the office saying good morning to growing teams of people whose names we did not know.
We naturally outgrew our office too. After a couple of years, we ran out of desk space, quickly realising that short of colonising Starbucks next door, we needed to take drastic action, as apparently shoving four interns in a stationery cupboard was not good practice.
As ever, Julian and I could not agree on a location as we focused on finding somewhere convenient for our own homes. I wanted somewhere en route to North London, and Julian, now an established movie-star appendage, was firmly ensconced in Holland Park and therefore expected my compliance to his needs. In the end, we had a bit of good fortune. George Dobson called in a favour from a fellow property developer, who gave us a deal on space in a new building in King’s Cross. We took two floors with an immediate option on a couple more if needed. It was modern and minimalist, with excellent infrastructure. The lifts glided noiselessly so you could arrive at work without the accompanying metallic symphony.
In 2015, King’s Cross was rapidly becoming a new media hub, buzzing with the excitement of technological advancement. When I was a child, the area was only associated with trains to the North and seedy kerb-crawlers around the back of York Way. Somehow, we were going to become a fixture in this most modern of tech campuses. Corporations were now communities that had everything you needed, so you could work a sixteen-hour day and have all your needs catered for without leaving your hot-desk.
We moved on a muggy summer’s day with military precision orchestrated by Alice, whose favourite term of all time was ‘complicated logistics’. By the afternoon, we had a functioning office, swaying rhythmically as they clicked and clacked on their keyboards to the Ibiza mix being pumped through our invisible speaker network. Julian and I stood by a huge seventh-floor window and surveyed chic London flowing beneath us.
“Did you ever think we would get here so quickly?” he asked contemplatively.
‘Well, the Northern Line is pretty reliable these days,” I replied.
His eyebrows arched slightly in irritation. He pressed on. “We’re at the centre of it all. It’s kind of appropriate that we’re right by the railway that connected the industrial North to London in Victorian times. This place is all about change and the future.”
“You wait until Google move in. We won’t be able to move for badly dressed developers.”
“You’ll fit in very well.”
“Thank you. I’m sure they have some Lord Lucan lookalikes too, so you can feel at home.” My jokes about his aristocratic mien tended not to elicit a response, but this time it unsettled him.
“Alex, Lord Lucan tried to kill his wife. I just want to divorce mine elegantly, without recourse to any violence. Anyway, no point getting philosophical, you’ll just make a crass joke. Put simply, I am very excited about the future.”
“As am I, you old sentimentalist.” Sidling up next to him, I put my arm affectionately around his shoulders. He stiffened instinctively.
***
We now had 10,000 sellers in the UK and over 250,000 subscribers. All our numbers steadily increased each week. More people engaged with the site, spent longer searching, and booked or ordered something as a consequence. The average value of a transaction increased, the number of transactions made by each customer increased and the frequency of these transactions increased, as did the breadth of categories customers would search for. The more you engaged with PrimaParent, the more it learnt about your behaviour and served you offers on things you would like. It was an ever-expanding universe with limitless potential.
We now had banks of fresh-faced graduates selling the site to lots of businesses up and down the country. Some were happy to have a job to pay back mountainous student debt and gave it their all. Others would arrive with an air of bewildered disdain that after an illustrious academic career, they were reduced to persuading a clown in Grimsby (a real, not a metaphorical one) to join our digital community. We gave them all sales training and scripts to follow. I would often hear the refrain ‘Can you risk not being a part of PrimaParent?’ as I walked past, and realised that it was just our version of And do you want fries with that?
Growth. Growth. Growth. The sales team made phone call after phone call and sent email after email in search of new recruits. At the bottom of our social order, we trained and flogged them hard, then let them leave the moment they could find a job more worthy of their under-utilised talents. A few genuinely loved selling and stayed with us. You could tell them easily because they dressed smartly and brushed their hair, half expectant that we would one day send them out to actually meet someone.
Next up the ladder were our digital marketers, bombarding an infinite universe with solicitations for subscriptions. This cohort was filled with individuals of enormous energy and a vocational focus. If Facebook or Google changed an algorithm, it was their role to explain the implications to the senior citizens like me. One of them, a year out of university, looked at me once with a condescending smile and said: “How could you really understand this, Alex? You probably didn’t get your first iPhone until you were thirty.”
At the top of our stratified organisation came Dimitri and his team of coders, developers, data scientists, front-end and back-end designers and engineers. They were the First Estate and as far as they were concerned everyone else could eat cake, although it would have to be gluten-free and vegan. They knew that sales and marketing people simply sold what they created. Anyone could do that, but few could build something from nothing. Under Dimitri’s vicious tutelage, if asked to comply with an inconvenient deadline by an intellectual inferior, they folded their arms and stared defiantly at the pond life who had challenged them until they slunk away sheepishly, preferably in tears.
Our model had evolved since our initial plan and we were about to become a publishing and entertainment hub. While Nigel O’Connor was firing his laser-powered intergalactic blaster at the cowering publishing world, we had to rapidly develop infrastructure to ensure we could deliver his latest masterpiece to an expectant global following. We started by hiring the best publishing talent we could find, from agents to editors, and told them to abandon the stale security of established businesses to join our aggressive band of literary bandits.
Inevitably, the publishing team were a bit different from the rest of t
he crowd. To start with, they could all speak in perfectly constructed sentences. The influence of my academic father has meant a basic respect for the written and spoken word, an antediluvian concept in my own business. (It means ‘before the Flood’ – look it up.) No one bothered with punctuation and spelling on emails, with the exception of a few editorial staff. My puritanical streak was exacerbated by the inability of anyone to speak a sentence that did not have ‘like’ in front of at least every other word. Could they not hear themselves? We are like nearly ready to like launch and are like doing a couple of like checks to see if it like launches. What are you talking about, are we launching or not?
Julian secured some great deals with various authors who were going to develop content for us. We had a very clever idea to create a ‘Brilliant Book of the Month’, which would allow us to deliver a unique reading experience and to generate noise around each launch. Another coup was that we paid £150,000 to secure the rights to the out-of-print ‘The Adventures of the Templar Knights’, a series of nine books written between 1942 and 1967 by retired naval officer Commander T. Wallace. My sister and I had loved these stories about medieval rampaging knights battling against a variety of enemies in pursuit of divine truth. Somehow the publishing world felt that they were inappropriate to a modern sensibility. With judicious editing to remove a few politically incorrect terms for Turks, Jews and the French, we were left with a rollicking set of adventure stories told in a surprisingly modern style. The author’s estate couldn’t believe it when we approached them, and we couldn’t believe how cheaply they gave it away.
***
I marvelled at how we had evolved rapidly from a scrappy start-up into a global operation, making things up as we went along. We decided that prior to the launch of The Galaxy Slayer’s Last Stand, we should get the whole company together for a corporate group hug. We now had nearly fifty international staff and flew them in on a fleet of dodgy cheap flights at unsociable hours. We hired a recently refurbed independent cinema to present our vision to everyone and then planned a massive party.
