Fatal Error

by Michael Ridpath

‘I can get up before noon,’ said Guy. ‘In fact, I’ve been working on this during every waking moment for the last month. I’m going to do it. And I’m going to make it work.’

  I felt a little guilty. Perhaps I had been a touch patronizing. There was no way in hell I was going to work with Guy, but I thought it polite to let him have his say.

  ‘OK. Tell me about it.’

  ‘I’ll give you the elevator pitch.’

  ‘The elevator pitch?’

  ‘Yeah. You have to be able to tell your story in the time it takes to ride an elevator with a venture capitalist. You don’t have more than thirty seconds to catch these guys’ attention.’

  ‘Fine. Give me the elevator pitch,’ I said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  Guy ignored it, if he even noticed. ‘The company is called ninetyminutes.com. It will be the brand for soccer on the web. We’ll start out with the best football website on the Internet. As we become well known, we’ll sell sports clothing off the site, including our own brand. Football is big business and sports clothing is a thirty-billion-dollar market worldwide. We’ll be to soccer what amazon.com is to books.’

  He watched me, a smile of supreme confidence spreading across his face.

  ‘The brand. You mean the number-one brand?’

  ‘The only brand.’

  I composed myself, pretending to take him seriously. ‘That will make it quite a big company.’

  ‘A very big company. An awesome company.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, maintaining my composure. ‘That will also take some money.’

  ‘Fifty million bucks to start. More later.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘That’s why I need you,’ said Guy.

  That was too much. I burst out laughing. ‘You’d be lucky to get five hundred quid out of me.’

  ‘No, stupid. I want you to help me raise the money.’

  ‘You’re the one with the rich friends.’

  Guy’s enthusiasm dropped a notch. ‘I’ll try them, of course,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure how many of them I can count on. Most of them have already financed me in one way or another.’

  ‘Oh, I see. And they didn’t get much of a return?’

  ‘Not much.’

  We both knew what Guy meant. He had led an expensive lifestyle for quite a while with dwindling support from his father and little from his own earnings. He had borrowed from everyone he knew. The lenders had never really expected their money back. You spent money on Guy, you didn’t invest in him.

  ‘So why me?’

  ‘I want someone who understands finance. Someone who’s solid. Someone I trust. Someone I’ve known for a long time and who knows me. You.’

  I watched him. He was sincere. And I was flattered. I couldn’t help it, I was flattered. Ever since school I had wanted Guy to count me as one of his friends and I had never been sure that he did. Now he said he needed me. Only me.

  Then I pulled myself together. ‘You want me to give up a secure job in one of the City’s foremost banks for this? You’ve got to be crazy.’

  Guy smiled. ‘You hate your job, you told me so yourself. And it’s not secure. Everyone gets fired these days. How do you know it won’t be you next time they reorganize everything?’

  I didn’t answer, but shifted in my chair. He had hit a nerve. I glanced at him. He knew it.

  ‘So who else is involved? You know sod all about computers.’

  ‘I know a bit now. But Owen’s over here with me. He’ll help.’

  ‘Owen?’ I remembered Guy’s brother. Whatever his faults, I couldn’t deny his proficiency with computers.

  ‘Yeah. He’s spent the last six years in Silicon Valley. He joined a start-up that went bust, and then became a freelance programmer. He’s worked on half a dozen different internet ventures. He knows his stuff.’

  ‘All right. But what about the soccer angle? I know you’re a Chelsea fan, but you’re hardly an expert. And marketing? And you mentioned your own brand of clothing. Who’s going to design it? Where will it be manufactured?’

  ‘I’ll get the people. That’s my role. I’ll get the people. Good people.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll find them. Don’t forget, I’m starting with you.’

  Flattery again. I had to admit Guy’s confidence was impressive. But my mind had been trained to spot the holes in the most thorough of plans and this idea was full of them. ‘What about the competition? There have to be some soccer websites out there already. And what about the TV companies? The cable companies?’

  ‘We’ll be faster than they are. While they’re still drawing up their marketing budgets or whatever, we’ll be up and running and grabbing eyeballs.’

  I laughed. ‘ “Grabbing eyeballs”? Sounds painful. What is this, gouge.com?’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve been reading too many e-business books.’

  ‘You have. And the fifty million bucks? Where will you get that? Do you even need fifty million?’

  ‘Fifty million was just a guess. That’s why I need you. To tell me how much we need and where we can get it from.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ I said.

  ‘Sure you can.’

  He looked at me steadily. He meant it. Guy really thought that I could find him the money to put this thing together.

  ‘You know what’s really good about this idea?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Americans can’t do it. It’s soccer. The Americans are incapable of understanding soccer. They can dominate everything else on the Internet, but they can’t dominate this. If there is ever going to be a global soccer brand on the Internet, it’s got to come from Europe.’

  ‘That’s true, I suppose.’

  ‘Admit it. It’s a good idea, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I agreed. And it was. I couldn’t deny the Internet was growing exponentially. And football was a huge source of entertainment for people throughout the world. But I couldn’t quite see Guy as the man to take advantage of that.

  ‘Look, you’re dead right,’ Guy went on. ‘For this to work, someone is going to have to persuade a lot of talented people to take big risks for no guaranteed return. And I’m not just talking about employees. We’ll need all kinds of partners: technology, marketing, content, merchandising, financial. That’s where I come in. I can persuade people to do things they don’t really want to do.’

  ‘Can you?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t I?’

  I drained my pint. I could feel myself getting sucked in, and I wanted to escape before it was too late. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Look at it this way, if it works, we’ll make millions. If it fails, we’ll have a lot of fun.’

  ‘Goodbye, Guy.’

  He pulled a brown A4 envelope out of a shoulder bag and thrust it into my hands. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  I left him at the table and fought my way through the crowd of drinkers towards Tower Hill station. I looked for a litter-bin to toss the envelope into, but there weren’t any around, so I stuffed it into my briefcase.

  Me work for Guy? No chance.

  6

  I flopped into the only empty seat in the carriage. A miracle. Normally I didn’t mind standing, but that morning I felt as if the world owed me a little something. Not much. Perhaps one journey a month sitting down for the price of my tube card. Travelling to work was always a nightmare. Travelling back wasn’t so bad: I didn’t usually leave the office until well after the crush had thinned.

  I opened my briefcase to take out the Financial Times and saw the brown envelope Guy had stuffed into my hands the night before. I hesitated. I had planned to throw it away, but I was curious. Curious to see what had Guy so worked up, and curious to see what he was planning to do about it. Guy was certainly no businessman, so I wasn’t expecting much. I pulled out the envelope and opened it. Inside was a neatly bound business plan of about twenty pages or so. I started to read.

  It
began with the two-page Executive Summary, which was much the same as Guy had described in his ‘elevator pitch’. Then there were discussions of the potential market, revenue-generating models, competition, technology, implementation, and some very sketchy sections on management and financial analysis. With the exception of the last two sections, it was good. Very good. Every time a question popped into my mind, the answer appeared on the next page. Like a good novel, it drew me in. It was carefully researched and, apart from a couple of grandiose claims on the first page, it was understated, which made it more powerful. I was surprised by the quality of the work and a little ashamed at my earlier underestimation of its author.

  I was three-quarters of the way through when my train pulled into Bank. I fought my way through London’s most labyrinthine underground station to the surface and headed for my usual coffee shop. Rather than taking the cappuccino away, I decided to drink it at a stool by the window and finish the report.

  Most start-ups failed. I knew that. The Internet was all hype, I knew that too. I was a banker, good at my job, known for my high standards of work. I could enumerate the risks, spot the downside. This wasn’t the kind of business that a bank like Gurney Kroheim, sorry, Leipziger Gurney Kroheim, should get involved in. My considered opinion should be to politely turn the proposal down.

  I put the report to one side and sipped my coffee, watching thickening crowds rushing along the pavements outside. The trouble was, at that moment, I didn’t want to be a banker. Guy was talking about a dream. About a spark of an idea that could become a vision, then a small group of dedicated people, then a real company, and then … who knew?

  There was definitely a market opportunity. During the 1990s English football had transformed itself into a money-spinning machine with the conversion of the First Division into the Premier League, the flotation of a number of clubs on the stock market and above all the heavy investment in TV rights by satellite companies. Everyone knew the Internet was going to change everything, even if they didn’t know exactly how. Guy’s plan to capitalize on this opportunity made a lot of sense. Would I, as a diligent Gurney Kroheim banker, have backed Bill Gates? Or Richard Branson? Or any of the billionaires that were springing up all over Silicon Valley? No. Because David Lane, Vice-President, Project Finance, didn’t have that kind of vision or imagination.

  At Broadhill I had caught a glimpse of a wide variety of exciting lives. The children of actors, sports stars, millionaire entrepreneurs all suggested that there was much more to be done in life than get a job, a wife and a mortgage. Then at university the world had narrowed. I graduated during a recession, when the best and the brightest competed hard to become chartered accountants. I had competed too, succeeded, qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, and then joined a merchant bank. The City had its glamour, I knew, but it was not to be found in the Project Finance Department of Gurney Kroheim. Sure there was travel, and that was interesting, and I found much of the work intellectually challenging, but where was it leading? To a wife, as yet unidentified, and mortgage in Wandsworth? Was that so bad? Isn’t that what I had worked for since leaving school?

  Guy was right, it would be fun to work with him. I had admired him at school. We had had difficult times together in France, and then again in London when he was a struggling actor and I a soon-to-be-qualified accountant. More than difficult. But despite these the idea of spending the next few years with him tempted me. Of course he had let me down in the past. And he came from a world totally different from mine. But that was the point. I could give him the stability he needed and he could give me, well, excitement. Although in theory my career was steadily moving upwards, it didn’t feel like that. It felt like it was going nowhere. With Guy, something would happen. Something that would shake up my life. Whether it would be good, or bad, or both, I did not know. But I wanted to find out.

  There is a premise that underlies almost all financial theory and it is this: a rational investor will avoid uncertainty. At that moment, I didn’t feel like a rational investor.

  I finished my coffee and sauntered towards the office, brushed on either side by workers more eager than me to reach their desks.

  When it had built its Gracechurch Street offices in the 1960s, Gurney Kroheim had been a major power in the City. Since then it had become a minnow. As I walked through the lobby, I instinctively searched out Frank, the commissionaire who had guarded this entrance since my first day in the bank and for a few decades before then. His memory for names and faces was legendary and outdid any database in Human Resources or Marketing. But he had been pensioned off the week before to be replaced by a tattooed operative with an earring from an outside security firm who looked as if his previous assignment had been in Wormwood Scrubs rather than Threadneedle Street.

  The third floor, my floor, had also changed in the last year. The Project Finance Department was now four desks tacked on to the end of a larger entity known as Specialized Finance. Teams of specialists in the funding of ships, aircraft, films, local government, and oil and gas were grouped together in an uneasy alliance. There had been a time when Gurney Kroheim had excelled in all these fields. But since the merger most of the best people had left to be replaced not by Germans, but by either outside hires or people from the second-tier US investment bank that Leipziger had swallowed a few months after Gurney Kroheim. My own group, Project Finance, had consisted of ten people. The best six had gone, leaving my nice but ineffective boss, Giles, in charge of a rump of three of us. We hadn’t closed a deal in six months.

  I powered up my computer and, with my cup of coffee already drunk, got down to work. Work was a huge spreadsheet, a computer model of all the flows of gas, steam, electricity and money in and out of a proposed electric cogeneration plant in Colombia. It was a gigantic beast, literally thousands of numbers all linked together that attempted to recreate all the variables involved in building, financing and operating the plant. I had started the model on my laptop computer six months before when Giles and I had visited the Swiss offices of the firm that was bidding to construct the plant. The thing had grown since then; grown, but still remained under my control. If you wanted to change the dollar–peso exchange rate in 2002, I could do it. Oil prices falling in 2005? No problem. Borrowing in fixed-rate Swiss francs rather than floating-rate dollars? Give me a minute and I’ll print off six pages analysing the results.

  Working on a computer model like that for as long as I had, I had developed a good feel for the key variables of the project: those risks that mattered and those that didn’t. Giles and I had come up with what we thought was an ingenious financial structure that would allow our client to put in the lowest bid for the contract.

  Giles came in, pink shirt, loud tie and sharp pinstriped suit beneath a dull brain.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, morning, David,’ he said nervously.

  I looked up sharply. Bosses shouldn’t be nervous, certainly not at eight-thirty in the morning.

  His eyes dodged mine and moved to his own computer.

  ‘Giles?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  Giles looked at me, looked backed at his computer, realized there was no refuge there, and let his shoulders sag.

  ‘Giles?’

  ‘They’ve pulled their bid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the Swiss have pulled their bid. They are convinced they won’t win. Apparently the Americans have the best local partners, and our boys have lost confidence in their own people. You know what Colombia’s like.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe it.’ I glanced at my spreadsheet. At the box-files stacked three feet high and two feet wide beside my desk. ‘So we just drop it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, David. You know how it is. We only get paid if we back a winner.’

  ‘So I was right. Remember when we first saw them in Basel? I told you they were flaky then. They never were serious about making a bid.’
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  ‘We don’t know that. Look, I know you’ve done a lot of work on this, but you have to get used to these things not coming off.’

  ‘Oh, I’m getting used to it all right. This is, what, the fifth in a row?’

  Giles winced. ‘It will give us a chance to look at that sewage project in Malaysia. We can go to Dusseldorf on Friday and pin the deal down.’

  ‘Pin the deal down! Face it, Giles, you’ve never pinned a deal down.’

  I had gone too far. I was right, of course, but because I was right I shouldn’t have said it. Giles appeared more hurt than angry.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  Giles closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, wincing under the strain. Then he opened them. ‘Get Michelle to book those flights, will you?’

  We sat there staring at each other. We’d never get the Malaysian deal. I knew it and Giles knew it. Suddenly everything became very clear.

  ‘Giles.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I resign.’

  7

  July 1987, Côte D’Azur, France

  I awoke about nine, with the worst hangover I had ever experienced in my short drinking career. Guy was still asleep and I tried to stay in bed, but once I had woken up there was no going back. Besides, I needed to do something about my head. I wasn’t sure what – water, coffee, food, pills – but I had to do something.

  I pulled on a T-shirt and some shorts and staggered out of the guest cottage. The morning sunshine was absurdly bright, and I stood still for a full minute with my eyes shut, gently swaying. Delicately I opened them, and saw that the table we had eaten at the night before was now laid for breakfast. Ingrid was sitting there, with some coffee and croissants. I stumbled over to her.

  ‘Morning,’ she said.

  ‘…’ I opened my mouth and no sound came out. I tried again. ‘Morning.’ It was a hideous croak.

  Ingrid tried to suppress a smile. ‘Are you always this sprightly in the morning?’

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to drink Pimm’s again. How come you look so good?’

  And she did. She was wearing a light denim dress. Her skin shone golden in the morning sunlight, and her pale-blue eyes smiled at me. ‘Practice.’