TUNA LIFE (18 page)

It seemed like an eternity ago.

Now he stood here. On top of the tallest building on the Gold Coast.

He was looking out at the city below.

His city.

He was the new rockstar.

He was the new emperor.

And he loved it.

PART 2

40

MONTH 6

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 45

NUMBER OF USERS: 25 M

VALUATION: $300 M

It was a wonderful chaos throughout Tuna Life’s premises. Ken had been responsible for the interior decorating, and he had chosen to go all out. In addition to the obligatory foosball game, and a row of pinball machines he had picked up from eBay, he had tried to outdo Facebook and Google in creativity. BusinessInsider had called them the coolest offices in the Southern hemisphere. They employed their own chef, and a kiosk with free snacks and mineral water. The restaurant was called Hot Tuna, the same as the iconic Australian surfing brand, but strangely enough they never had tuna on the menu. Andrew didn’t like it. The made-up story about how he came up with the name for the company had now become internet folklore though. Everybody loved rags to riches stories. And the story about a poor Andrew living on canned tuna when he built the company was just what people wanted to hear. It all contributed to the cult status Tuna Life enjoyed on the net.

For the first few weeks, after receiving coaching on how to deal with journalists, Andrew hadn’t felt comfortable lying. But Richard Smith had managed to convince him; they needed to control their own image. And the trick, crossing the thumb and index finger, really worked. Andrew could hardly separate the truth from the lie anymore.

The fact of the matter was that nobody wanted to hear the true story, nobody wanted to hear how the idea of Tuna Life had really been conceived. The truth was boring. Andrew needed to sell a dream. And it truly felt like a dream. After Roman had successfully closed the first round of external funding, and filled Tuna Life’s coffers with five million of fresh cash, the growth had accelerated. They now employed forty-five staff, and had recently moved to a brand-new office building that would make most Silicon Valley start-ups green with jealousy. The number of users had increased by three million the last week, and Andrew believed they would pass twenty-five million users before the end of the month. One hundred million pictures passed through Tuna Life’s servers in the space of a normal day. The numbers were astronomical, and the growth just didn’t seem to slow down. On the contrary, the growth was like a hockey stick, it was exponential.

Roman hadn’t been joking when he said that raising funds and valuing the company was an ongoing process. Even though they didn’t really need it, Roman and Richard wanted to raise another twenty million in fresh funds. To build a war chest, Roman said. The valuation would of course reflect the latest development in user growth. The company was now valued at three hundred million before the next share issue.

Andrew chewed at the number. In under a year he had gone from being an underpaid accountant to becoming the CEO of a company with a bigger market cap than some of the companies on the ASX exchange.

The whole thing seemed surreal. And the new investor Roman and Richard were having advanced talks with wasn’t just anybody either; it was one of the most well-known and respected Venture Capitalist firms in the US. Ferdeko Ventures had never before invested outside Silicon Valley – now they considered investing twenty million in an Australian start-up. They had even declared in a press release that they were honoured to be considered as a possible partner for Tuna Life, a company which was a leader in their field, and singlehandedly had disrupted the way people tried and purchased clothing.

The inclusion of new features, such as the possibility to share pictures on Facebook and to get feedback on whether friends liked your potential new outfit or not, had resulted in even more attention around the Tuna Life app. Market analysts now speculated that the company could be worth as much as a billion dollars if they chose to go public in half a year’s time.

Andrew was on top of the world. He just needed to fix the Frank Geitner problem. Roman had come up with the plan. It was almost as if he had been waiting for an opportunity to suggest it. That’s what it felt like for Andrew. In detail Roman had outlined how they could get rid of Frank. Andrew didn’t like it, but he did agree that Frank, regardless of how smart he was, had to go. He was a loose cannon, someone who could potentially destroy the company if he wasn’t controlled. It wasn’t just the fact that he used illegal substances and made that blooper on Twitter; he simply had a different view of what was right and wrong. He needed to be protected from himself. And Andrew simply didn’t have time to be a babysitter. God help them if Frank ever sat down with a journalist.

So Roman had come up with a story; Tuna Life needed to restructure the company before they raised more funds in the market. Andrew reluctantly agreed to the plan. Frank seemed to trust Andrew, and it was unlikely he would insist on getting a lawyer before signing the papers related to the restructure. In reality Andrew pulled the same trick Mark Zuckerberg had pulled on his co-founder, Eduardo Severin, in Facebook. He just adapted the restructure to Australian rules. Roman, Richard and Andrew constituted the board of directors in Tuna Life Pty Ltd, and as both Frank and Ken had given Andrew proxy to vote for them he transferred the assets of Tuna Life to a new company, which then executed a string of successive share issues until Frank Geitner’s ownership was diluted to less than two percent. For all practical purposes he was now out of the company. Andrew just needed to fire him, and tell him the news.

“Frank, would you mind coming into my office for a minute?” Andrew asked.

Frank Geitner stood leaning against one of the office walls, chatting with two programmers from New Zealand. He turned around and nodded to Andrew.

Sometimes Andrew wondered whether Frank hired programmers based on their ability to code, or based on how he got along with them. They all seemed quite similar. It didn’t really matter though. The team was working great together. Frank possessed this unique ability to make people willing to go the extra mile for him. They didn’t work hard because they were concerned about the valuation of the company or the wealth of the shareholders, they didn’t work hard because they feared losing their jobs; they worked their asses off because they wanted to impress him, impress Frank Geitner. It wasn’t about his title or his position. It was purely about respect. They all looked up to him, almost glorified him. To them, he was God, God of coding. And that was the reason this conversation Andrew was about to have could potentially result in a disaster.

Andrew closed the door to the boardroom and studied Frank, who’d lain down on one of the couches in the corner. Ken Speis had turned the third floor into a labyrinth of rooms. He had claimed that the floor was inspired by the traditional method Bluefin Tuna was caught in Sicily, Italy. But he had been incorrect. Andrew had googled it. It was actually an old Arab tradition.

The ceiling was covered with fishnet of various sizes, and all trails led to the boardroom, or the chamber of death, as the Sicilian fishermen had called it. It was a grotesque tradition, which luckily now was almost as extinct as some of the tuna species. Back in the old days it had however been a highly coveted tradition every single spring. The fishermen could be waiting for days, with their carefully constructed nets floating in the ocean, just waiting for an unsuspecting shoal of tuna to stray into their trap. When the tuna first got caught in the nets, it was coaxed into more and more restrictive nets, four chambers in total, before they reached the chamber of death and were hoisted to the surface. And then the bloodbath started. The fishermen would attack the tuna with spears, and pull the bleeding fish onboard waiting boats.

Andrew couldn’t stand spending time in the boardroom. To have all these nets hanging over his head, to think about how humans caught tuna, how we plundered the oceans of resources. He sat down at the floor, and lowered his gaze. He wanted to avoid staring at the fish skeletons Ken had adorned the room with. It didn’t feel right to say what he was about to say in here, not in this room.

“Frank, I’m terribly sorry for what I’m about to say,” he started.

Frank Geitner straightened his back. Andrew realised that he probably knew what was coming.

“Am I fired?” Frank asked.

Andrew shook his head. “You’re not fired. But you will no longer be CTO in Tuna Life. You will always have a job here, but you won’t have any management responsibilities.”

“Why?”

“We are starting to grow into a large company, Frank, and it’s the board’s opinion that you’re not the right person to lead the technology department going forward.”

“The board hires the CEO. You. They don’t care about other management positions. Those are your responsibilities. Is it you who want me fired?”

Andrew was busted passing off an amateurish, cowardly white lie. “In theory that’s correct. However, due to your infamous Twitter episode, the board has given me a strong recommendation, a sort of directive. They want to me to ensure that nothing you said can ever be used against Tuna Life.”

“And you just accepted it?” Frank asked.

Andrew studied Frank where he slouched on the couch. Andrew almost felt ill. “Actually, to be honest, I was the one who recommended it,” Andrew said. “I suggested it a while back. I was getting worried we could lose everything we had built. So I raised the issue with the board. I’ve changed my opinion since then. I don’t think you could ever become a liability for Tuna Life. You’re just too important. And if you ever did turn into a liability, then everything you have done for the company would easily weigh up for it.”

“Is there something you can do?” Frank asked.

“I can offer to step down. I can resign in protest.”

“Don’t do that,” Frank said. “Whatever you do – don’t do that. I know who is behind all of this, I know who is pulling the strings.”

“Nobody is behind anything. It was a unanimous decision, Frank. The entire board agreed.”

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Andrew. But you have no idea what is really going on. You don’t know who you are dealing with. What he is willing to do. It doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ll work out my resignation period – hand the baton to the new guy. By the way, who is the new guy?”

“External. Some hotshot from California. Google I think. I’m sorry, Frank, but I really don’t know anything more.”

“I thought you were the CEO,” Frank said.

Andrew fretted.

Frank Geitner rose from the couch, and walked over to the door. Andrew struggled to get up from the lotus position he had been sitting in on the floor. He swore.

“And my shares?” Frank asked, standing in the doorway. “What happens to my shares?”

“I think it’s best if you close the door again,” Andrew replied.

41

Mark Moss was hanging out in the reception of Surfers Paradise Police Station, chatting with one of the officers. He was working on a story about a woman who had shot her husband, but still managed to get acquitted for murder. The policeman was the first one to arrive at the scene of the crime, almost a year ago. His memory wasn’t the best, but he remembered the important matters; what his first impression of the crime scene had been, how the woman had behaved. After almost twenty years of physical abuse she had finally had enough. She had drugged her husband with sleeping pills, and shot him in the face, point blank, as he was asleep on the couch. The police officer had immediately recognised her. He had been to the house on several occasions the last few years. Always the same story; complaints from the neighbours about screaming and loud noise, the wife standing outside the house with a black eye and bruises, refusing to press charges, telling them that she had fallen in the kitchen.

The police officer had explained how frustrating it was. Without anyone pressing charges, there was nothing they could do. And then it had ended up in a homicide.

“When did that come in?” Mark Moss asked another police officer, hanging up an A4 picture of a blonde girl.

“Three days ago,” the officer answered.

Mark took a closer look at the picture. Another missing girl. She looked like the spitting image of the other missing women on his list.

Beautiful, young and blonde.

He wanted to say innocent, but he knew that description was most likely inaccurate. The other girls had also looked innocent, but a bit of digging had revealed that they had been involved in everything from minor drug offences to internet porn.

“Can I have a copy?”

“Sure,” the policemen answered. “Hope she shows up soon. Her mum is quite intensive. She’s called three times today already. And it’s not even noon.”

Mark said thank you, and put the A4 poster into his bag. An aggressive mother – sounded good. He would get in contact later in the day.

42

“What do you mean, just walked out of the door? Where is he now?” Richard Smith asked.

“I told him he was no longer CTO. That we were in the process of hiring his replacement. And then he just walked off,” Andrew Engels replied.

“Did you mention anything else?”

Andrew shrugged. “He asked about his shares. I told him he’d been diluted in the restructure.”

“What? You did what?” Richard yelled into the phone. “Why the hell did you do that? Couldn’t you at least have waited until we had a replacement ready?”

“I had no idea he would just walk off. And you told me only formalities remained before the Google guy accepted our offer.”

“Andrew, you still own fifteen percent of Tuna Life. Ken the same. How much does Frank own?” Richard asked.

“Just under two percent,” Andrew answered.

“Don’t you think that would piss you off too?”

“Yes,” Andrew started.

“Find Frank. Find him before he does something stupid like talking to a journalist,” Richard almost screamed into the phone, before hanging up. He didn’t look forward to the next conversation. Roman Bezhrev wasn’t a big fan of bad news.