The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus Read online

I intended to tell everyone that he had a terrible sense of humour.

  “And I treated you like shit, to see what you are like under pressure. I love your business plan. I want to give you a lot of money. We can do great things together. Why do you think you are here? To check out my wife?”

  As if in a co-ordinated act, the door slid open and the lovely Ilana emerged in proper clothes and strode towards the door. She smiled at us sweetly and headed out. Perhaps she had been part of our character test? I don’t know if we passed, but I would of course tell Sarah later that she looked weird up close and her neck was too long for her head.

  “Come, come… Let’s talk through the details. Sit with me and we’ll make a plan.” His people joined us at the table. Maybe they were part of the act too. I realised that the famous Avi Ram was not present as Moshe turned to Dimitri, who had remained seated in confused silence, and said, “Dimitri. We hear great things about you. You may be a genius like my Avi. We will have to see if you are as strange. Please go next door. Avi is waiting for you on Skype. He has some questions. If you can impress him, we will let you live.” He laughed again at his own joke, as we remained stunned and silent.

  Dimitri cracked his knuckles – a peculiar sign that he was about to do something technically brilliant – and trotted enthusiastically with one of the team to another little room. The door shut and we were left with an ebullient Moshe, who was growing more animated by the minute. What followed was a great conversation about our future and some very probing questions about our plan.

  Like Lord Dobson before him, he promised us that he would resolve everything in a couple of days and told Julian to prepare for conversations with his lawyer. After a breezy hour, the door slid open and a jaunty Dimitri silently joined us, looking pleased with himself. Simultaneously, there was a loud ping from Moshe’s phone, and he read the text immediately.

  “It seems, Dimitri, that you have passed your interview. Avi thinks you are nearly as talented as he is.”

  ***

  By Christmas, we were set fair. We had over £6m in our bank account and a team of six people ready to conquer the world in the New Year. It had all happened so quickly. Lord Dobson and Moshe had agreed to give us £2.5m each. Aware of the other’s existence, they had both tried to be the pre-eminent investor, but – keen to uphold Anglo-Israeli trading relationships – we didn’t allow this to happen and insisted on parity.

  The negotiations proceeded with surprising speed, although Moshe’s team took pleasure in bombarding us with awkward and incessant questions. We found most of them unnecessary and they seemed more concerned with reminding us how tough they were to deal with, rather than the quality of our answers. A number of conditions were eventually imposed that proved non-negotiable, and we capitulated in haste to ensure we got their money quickly. We just wanted to get properly started.

  Moshe wanted full access to all our data records and analytics, within the accepted jurisdictional constraints of EU law. We felt uncomfortable that this would lead to a commercial intimacy that was not usual, but we felt protected by law and common practice and did not want to lose either his money or his reputational support, which would count for so much in the tech world.

  George Dobson had one immovable stipulation. He wanted to have a veto on any executive hiring we made, which was decidedly unusual, but this had to happen if we wanted to progress. ‘Think of me as the American Constitution providing a few checks and balances. I am in the background and there to protect the people from voting for an idiot. You won’t know I’m there.’ I could see lots of disastrous future scenarios, but Julian tried to assuage my fears by constantly referencing his godfather’s aim of ‘supporting two bright lads and learning a bit myself along the way about the future’. Eventually I relented, realising that he needed to be able to have a level of intervention to satisfy his need for control. Days later, we toasted our future collective success with him over champagne at his club in town, and I even remembered my tie.

  We took a further investment from a boutique VC called iSeed, having met a number of interested businesses, all of whom seemed equally keen. What swung it for us was their engaging enthusiasm allied with an encouraging lack of probing questions. They thought we were cool and although this was an unfamiliar description for me, they seemed easy to distract with our prodigious talent for spin.

  We worked so hard that month. Fifteen-hour days, including the weekends, in a desperate attempt to get a Christmas and Boxing Day with our families. I was at home rarely and, even then, so focused that Santa and Mrs Claus could have come naked down the chimney, followed by enough elves to fill Wembley Stadium, and I would not have noticed.

  Distracted, energised, and propelled by the rocket fuel of my unleashed ambition, I prepared for 2013. It was going to be phenomenal.

  PART 2

  GETTING GOING

  7. Beginnings

  When I look back on our hapless first months, I am amazed that we emerged from the chaos to build something tangible. There were so many things to accomplish and a never-ending series of challenges that we could never have anticipated, not to mention the regular cock-ups.

  We started with an office of nine people. This included three interns who we had recruited from a graduate website with a listing that was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration in claiming we were voted ‘The UK’s Best Start-Up’. We expected them to lay down their lives to our cause. Indeed, Julian and I were so obsessed when we started that we blithely assumed that anyone who joined us would not mind foregoing the basic tenets of a social or family life.

  Dimitri told us that he needed one person only to help him at the start, a young computer science graduate called Oliver, who was without doubt the shyest person I had ever met. Eye contact was a distant aspiration for him. Rather cruelly, he became known by the nickname ‘Mumbles’, reflecting his preferred mode of speech. Undeterred, Dimitri told us that in the anonymous online world of collaboration, Oliver was a rock star. A mute one, of course.

  We sat in our open-plan industrial-chic loft with one meeting room, wittily called ‘The Bored Room’ to remind everyone that we were going to be a ‘can do’ rather than a ‘can talk’ sort of organisation. I had gone into mantra overdrive and the walls were awash with quotes and sayings that I had carefully curated after a vigorous Google search for ‘Interesting quotes about Ambition’. Napoleon once said, for example: ‘Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles that direct them.’

  I don’t know why I wanted to quote Napoleon so much. Yes, he was emperor for a bit, but he died in exile in the middle of the South Atlantic and had a inferiority complex named after him.

  There was also a lovely picture of Audrey Hepburn with the words ‘Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I’m possible’, which she allegedly once said, but no one quite knows why. Roman Holiday is one of my favourite films, romantic and impossibly elegant, which was my prompt. After a few months, however, Alice led a delegation of disgruntled female colleagues who demanded its removal on the grounds that it glibly suggested sexual availability.

  Julian hated these posters, worrying that he was trapped in some whacky Californian cult of self-indulgent navel-gazing. I was more practical and considered it our role to lead by example. If we expected people to match our drive and desire for success, we needed to create an environment that would make everyone want to willingly give up their weekends too. A poster and a quote would surely do the trick.

  Our early days were inauspicious. Simon incorporated the business incorrectly as ‘PrimalParent’, not ‘PrimaParent’. This only came to light when we were approached after a couple of weeks by a weird community just outside of Brighton called ‘Primal Earth Parents’, who had a strange concept of looking after children based on a dubious practice called ‘untethering’. They seemed to feel that we were a potential threat to their recruitment drive and sent us a very non-New-Age ‘ceas
e and desist’ letter from a large firm of City lawyers.

  In the first few months, we had clear areas of focus. Dimitri undertook to have a test site up and ready within three months, with a view to being fully operational two months later. Julian, assisted by Simon, worked on the financial planning and modelling and began to try to broker some commercial partnerships to support our launch. I drove our core proposition and the marketing plan. In particular, I looked at how we would recruit sellers on to the site and how I would drive subscriptions. Alice was Director in Charge of Cajoling and Shouting. She held us accountable to deliver what we said we were going to do on time. She also called out our bad behaviour or lack of integrity on a daily basis, as well as managing the infrastructure of a fledgling company – from recruitment, HR and bank accounts to toilet paper and coffee purchasing.

  Dimitri’s demeanour changed as soon as we started. He maintained the rigidity and obsessively structured approach to his working day, so you could watch him and over time work out his routine, down to the coffee breaks (9 a.m./11.30 a.m./2.30 p.m., and peppermint tea at 5.30 p.m.), as well as the loo trips an hour later. However, the effortless and arrogant disdain with which he dispatched projects previously was replaced with a much nastier streak that made him very difficult to deal with. Of the management team, he would only really talk to me as a necessary interface with the outside world. After about six weeks, he had an outburst that revealed his fragility.

  Hovering by his desk, I attempted to make a bit of small talk, but to little avail. I could have performed the Macarena in a thong, and he wouldn’t have looked at me. Eventually, I sort of whispered in his ear gently, “Dimitri, I really do need to get a sense of whether we are on track.”

  I did not expect what happened next. He didn’t shout or scream. He covered his face with his hands and began a series of convulsive sobs, accompanied by a steady metronomic rocking. The sounds emanated from the darkest corners of his unfathomable soul. He said the same phrase in Russian over and over as the sobbing subsided. And then he stopped. A few deep breaths and he turned to me with a sardonic smile and simply said, “Thank you, Alex. The doubt is gone. Please go away and let me start.”

  I slunk away, confused. I had delivered a pep talk without actually saying anything and I was also none the wiser about timings. I realised that Dimitri saw our project as a route to elevating himself to immortality in the world of developers and engineers that was his natural habitat. He only cared about what would happen to his reputation among these people, not necessarily the commercial gain.

  My first few months had a certain irony about them. I spent every waking moment immersed in searching out what was important for parents, obsessed and assiduous in my pursuit of solutions to everyday parenting dilemmas. But as a dad to Theo and Emily, not to mention as a husband to Sarah, I was a shadowy figure they occasionally bumped into in the house. I would leave for the office at 7 a.m. Emily had been an obliging child and slept through the night from a very early stage, and she and her brother woke about half an hour before I’d leave. I’d give them a quick cuddle in between checking my emails and writing notes to myself of shards with vague recollected thoughts, which seemed, at the time, crucial.

  My day normally finished about 10 p.m. and I would stagger home exhausted, sustained by takeaways and prodigious caffeine intake. Sarah would be asleep in front of the TV or, more usually, in bed with an open book on her chest and her glasses on the tip of her nose. I would try to remove them gently, invariably poking her in the eye in doing so. She’d stir, smile wanly and say something like “Made us rich yet?”, and then pull up the duvet and embrace sleep again. I promised her the weekends, but in truth I reneged and gave her only part of the weekends. I worked both days, and most Sundays popped into the office for a quick status update with the team. I did everything I could to play with the kids when I was home and I abandoned a social life and even my beloved Spurs to prioritise what little time I had for the family.

  My whole family were casualties of this war against non-achievement I was waging. Judith and I were always very close, but our contact became intermittent. She was presiding over a rapidly growing organisation and at that time was increasingly pessimistic about the disastrous consequences of the Arab Spring for children across the region. While I was busy recruiting children’s entertainers, she was monitoring the breakdown of civil order in Syria. I hardly listened when we did get together. I had deadlines to meet.

  My parents were tolerant but resentful of my absence and critical of its cause. They believed in a consistent calendar to preserve family unity: Friday night dinners and Sunday teas, birthdays and bank holidays. So when, for the second or third time running, I pitched up at ten to see plates being cleared and sleeping children being scooped into car seats, my mother looked coldly at me and quietly bemoaned, “I hope you think it’s worth it, Alex.” Sarah was silent and, at that moment, I wasn’t so sure.

  ***

  Julian encouraged the office to call me ‘the Child Catcher’ after the terrifying man with a net in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who lures Jeremy and Jemima Potts into a cage with the promise of lollipops. My job was to find a whole host of entertainment for children and he thought it was hysterical to compare me to a character in a film that has given generations of young people (me included) unnecessary nightmares. There was a serious point to the joke, and that was security, the reliability of the sellers we were recruiting, and the need for careful vetting and scrutiny.

  We had many conversations about security initially. In creating a vision for PrimaParent, we could sometimes forget that other people weren’t as nice and scrupulous as us. All digital experience brands had faced the consequences and adverse effects of bad behaviour from customers and sellers. I became an expert in safeguarding, something I had previously thought security guards did in banks. I even became certified in the subject (a thirty-minute online course one lunchtime, in which I aced the multiple choice). Fortunately, Alice did not flinch at the need for compliance and we put together a vetting process for future sellers who would come into direct contact with children.

  We wanted to establish at the outset the sort of company that would attract the best people. Despite our inbuilt cynicism, Julian and I respected that we needed to marry a sense of fun with the commitment and hard work we expected from everyone. Julian was definitely quite old-fashioned in his approach and felt that a ping-pong table, lots of free alcohol and the prospect of inter-company illicit relationships would do the trick. I knew we needed to be perhaps a bit more adept in how we set about creating our culture.

  One of the first team meetings we had was about ensuring that our company values befitted our company mission so that we would appear responsible grown-up parents, even if in truth we were probably as mature as reckless teenagers. There was inevitably tension between us as to why we were doing this. ‘Values’ for Julian were what stocks and shares have, but for Alice and some of the interns, we couldn’t function as an organisation without them. I just wanted to get something agreed and move on.

  We debated them endlessly and they seemed to have an organic life of their own, mutating like a nasty disease and evolving every time we had a conversation. Julian felt we should focus on success and his language was masculine and aggressive. He suggested we should be ‘Dynamic, Unrelenting and Profit Focused’ – not the best description to give a parent, perhaps. Alice suggested ‘Nurturing, Empathetic and Intuitive’. I showed the draft to Julian, who by this time would not engage directly in the conversation. ‘Not on my watch’ was his caustic reply.

  I shuttled between the different evolving factions in our tiny office like an optimistic UN peacekeeper, and feigned sincerity as I solicited clashing opinions. It became a battle of wills, as ever, between a righteous Alice and a cynical Julian. Remember, this all took place in our first months of working together, but it seemed the questioned values signified so much more, reflecting our individual moral codes.

  Words lost all r
ightful meaning. I was involved in a two-day multi-media conference (phone, text, email, face-to-face) as to the interpretation of the word ‘direct’. Did we mean in-your-face-say-itas-it-is direct, or simply that we got things done with straightforward efficiency? Peace in the Middle East seemed a more likely occurrence than agreement at PrimaParent. I could take my role as corporate Kofi Annan no more, and so I sat at my computer and, on a single sheet of paper, I typed:

  Enthusiastic. Creative. Kind.

  I grabbed Alice, Julian, Simon and Dimitri and a couple of the interns and slammed the paper on the meeting room table.

  “Well, I know I am enthusiastic, creative and kind. Now, do you muppets want to actually achieve anything?”

  Everyone nodded obediently. Alice looked on the cusp of a contribution, but I looked at her and tried to convey a clear sense that if she disagreed, I’d dissolve the company. In the end our debate had fizzled due to lack of shared vision, so my catch-all and inoffensive suggestion filled the necessary gap. Values are all lovely, of course, but what we really needed to focus on was getting customers and sellers sorted.

  8. Hacking at Growth

  There was no point attracting people to the site if there was nothing to keep them there when they arrived. Before we launched, we had to find an endless supply of people, products and services that could make a trip to PrimaParent worthwhile. Having given it much thought during the whole planning period, we realised that we were going to have to be very clever about how we went about this task. For months, like it was a complicated military campaign in need of rigorous planning, General Lazarus thought of little else. Imagine the war room in Churchill’s bunker with tanks being pushed around a map.

  First of all, we needed to do a bit of old-fashioned research and compile a list to end all lists potential of sellers for the site. In our first week, I sat down with our most experienced intern, twentythree-year-old Razia, a recent economics graduate, and briefed her. We sat by the coffee machine at a café table we had bought from Argos and I made her a flat white. I felt that a lovingly prepared cup of coffee from me could get anyone to do my bidding. Bloody millennials apparently don’t drink regular milk, though, and you try getting a decent froth from yucky soy or almond milk.