The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read online

  “Right!” Wiz laughed, the rustle of his fleece rumbling through the mike. “Don’t be evil!” It was Google’s founding slogan. Wiz laughed again and the crowd laughed too.

  “So like Tom was telling you, users have signed up to these groups. A lot of groups. And we have the affinity characteristics mapped out pretty well now, so it’s like a lot of Clamor users have given us all these super-specific keywords about their interests and tastes and stuff. Does any of this make sense?”

  Uh-huh, the crowd intoned.

  “Well, let’s just look at a real group. Who’s got a group.”

  “Triumph,” a British accent said.

  “Triumph?” Wiz said, looking behind him, back to the stage. “Oh, hey Mike.”

  Michael Marantz was Clamor’s Chief Financial Officer. He said: “Triumph, the motorcycle.”

  “Cool,” said Wiz. “Let’s look at Triumphs.”

  He moved over to the laptop, his sandals scuff-scuffing the stage. The big screen glowed to life again as the power-saver came off. Up came the web, then Clamor.us. Into the center-middle search box crept the first letters: T-r-i … Natalie shook her head upon realizing how trained she was to scrutinize such inane matters as keystrokes –

  Then something happened.

  The word auto-completed and resolved to Clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHoteland GiftShop.

  Huh?

  Filling the screen was a girl, the headshot of an Asian girl of indeterminate age. The photo could not have been more real. It was the girl’s eyes. Hurt, confused, pained and humiliated. Below the photo read:

  Today feature: Jasmine, 13 yrs. Origin: Fujian. $8,250.US

  It was like the north side of the Keaton had been struck by a thunderbolt. A shocked murmur went through the crowd. Natalie saw Brie DuBois cover her mouth, Tom rush over to the keyboard: “I think you’ve – er, here,” and he found the Escape key. The Clamor.us home page filled the screen again. “Yuri, maybe you could look into this,” Tom said loudly to Yuri Malovich, Clamor’s Head of Security and Privacy, also up on stage and thankfully on his feet.

  But Dwayne Wisnold and one hundred and twenty others simply stared at the impression left behind from the screen. The haunted eyes of a haunting, trafficked girl. Finally Dwayne Wisnold turned and spoke one word. “Bummer.”

  He sat down.

  “Well, that went well,” Natalie heard Ben Silverman say.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ben Silverman returned to Carmichael Associates’ offices on California Street, his day far from over. He muted his cell phone, sent office calls to voicemail and slumped into the chair behind his desk. Exhausted, he could barely focus. He needed time to think, to consider how he’d give this latest update to his boss.

  Through the window of his office, he could see the northern fringes of the city, the fingers of Fisherman’s Wharf. The bay shimmered lazily around Alcatraz Island in the late dusk. He tried to imagine what the view would have looked like to those more earth-bound, original ‘49ers. Those fearless men and women who led that first San Francisco gold rush, sixteen decades before.

  His sparse bachelor office featured four tombstones, as the trophy plinths are called in the trade, celebrating successful capital raisings over the years. Front and center in his dark wooden bookcase sat the spherical-shaped one for PingPong, an online payments service that had gone up against PayPal – and lost. Next to it were others, for increasingly less memorable web-based businesses that had chewed their way through ever greater amounts of investors’ cash: an online grocery business, an optical broadband adventure, a new-age ‘wellness portal’.

  Well, a fee is a fee, Silverman reminded himself, and they’d all paid Carmichael handsomely – while they still could. But there the tombstones sat, taunting him with the central conundrum of his career: just what was it that singled out the lottery-like winners on the web from the thousands – the tens of thousands – going nowhere at warp speed? If Silverman could only answer that question, he felt he had a real shot at being a truly competent technology investment banker, as opposed to being a merely well paid one.

  He flexed back in his Aeron chair and stared up at the ceiling tiles, willing the guy above to get this Clamor debrief over with. What a day, he closed his eyes. But the question kept taunting him in its hydra-headed way. How many pre-historic e-commerce companies had foundered before Amazon.com succeeded? How many weird and wacky ‘price discovery’ models had to implode before eBay became the global brand it now was? He remembered all the Johnny-come-lately investors who’d thrown their money in at the peak, including Silverman’s own dad – a retired cop for Chrissake.

  Silverman javelined his pencil into a far-corner waste bin and swiveled the chair round to his keyboard. But his hands refused to type. For then there was Google, Web 2.0’s founding father. To this day it bothered Silverman, intensely, that he understood Google’s success so imprecisely. Just how had Big G become such a spectacular winner, when so many apparently similar search engines had come and gone before? Sure, Google had a clean, ‘well-lit’ user interface – hadn’t Alta Vista too, back in ‘95? Yes its search algorithms were fast and accurate – was that to say Inktomi’s weren’t? The name itself, the socially infectious verb to google: it baffled him. Whatever its algebraic origins in geek-land, phonetically Google sounded like something his nine month-old nephew could’ve come up with. The only way Silverman could explain it was by a certain bigness that Google had somehow attained, allowing Google to match things. That Joe Six-pack, entering the keyword ‘asbestosis’ in Wichita, Kansas, could be brought together with a local class action law firm – and that Google could relieve said law firm of several hundred bucks for the introduction.

  The desk clock clicked over to 18:30. “Come on, come one,” he willed his phone to light up, with Steven Schweitzer’s assistant’s name. “It’s a freakin’ Friday night.”

  He turned back to his still warm turkey-and-fresh-cranberry sandwich. It had arrived on rosemary ciabatta with a side tub of turkey jus. He dunked the sandwich in the side tub and took a big bite of the juicy meat, dabbing his lips with the first of an accompanying mound of napkins.

  He munched thoughtfully. For, of all the success-stories, Clamor was by far the most mysterious. Clamor had hit the big time providing its users with essentially two utilities: the ability to create a profile page, i.e. fill out a basic web template with photos and other random stuff, and the ability to link this profile page to other peoples’. Six Degrees was doing the exact same thing a decade before. And since then, hundreds of ‘community’ companies had sprouted and withered. Geocities, the ‘trailer park of the web’, bought by Yahoo. PlanetAll, bought and shut down almost as quickly by Amazon. All those ethno-sites, MiGente and the like. What was so special about Clamor? And yet unquestionably there was something special, almost magical about it. Five percent of the planet’s population and ninety-five per cent of the most evolved part it could only be so wrong.

  ‘Francesca H’ flashed up on the phone.

  Ben picked up the handset, fighting to swallow: “Hi.”

  “Ten minutes,” Francesca said.

  “Fine,” Ben said.

  “I’ll let you know,” and she hung up.

  Google, Google – it sounded like some Silicon Valley heartbeat. Ben didn’t even want to think about the pain and humiliation heaped on bankers across the land when ‘Don’t be evil’ Google went out, avoiding the usual feather-bedding IPO process for a public auction designed to give little-guy investors access to that first-day ‘pop’. Shares were always slightly under-priced for the first day of trading, to ensure a ‘healthy after-market’ – a fair reward for the risk of backing bankers being saddled with large chunks of un-saleable stock, should circumstances change. In reality, Ben knew, IPOs simply got pulled when circumstances changed. It was indeed one of the few occasions he could recall investment bankers acting in unison, persuading institutional buyers to boycott Google’s 2004 IPO altogether.

  And
yet the auction had worked, well.

  At least Clamor hadn’t followed Big G down that path.

  The phone bleeted, causing Silverman to spill hot jus down his Hugo Boss suit – Fuck!

  He wrestled with the handset again. “OK, I’ll be right up.”

  The 39th floor was all dark wood. Francesca sat at a slim desk outside the corner office of Steven Schweitzer. Schweitz was officially Head of the Technology Practice – the title being a political compromise arrived at someplace along the way, for Carmichael Associates only did technology business. Walking out of Schweitz’s office was Leonard Carmichael, looking a little like Richard Nixon on a bad day. Silverman said: “Hello sir.” He never quite knew whether Carmichael recognized him. The Chairman nodded and went on by.

  Francesca looked dark and lovely as ever, her curved lashes lifting fleetingly: “Ben.”

  “Fran.”

  “You can go right on in.”

  Schweitzer sat swiveled to one side, his feet up on a row of low filing cabinets. He was throwing a plastic baseball against the wall. Occupying the opposite corner was a furled Stars-and-Stripes flag. Half way down the adjoining wall nestled a fireplace with ornately carved surround that Schweitz had bought from Butterfield & Butterfield, the august San Francisco auction house acquired by eBay back in 1999. He’d been trying to persuade Butterfield to drop its age-old advisors in favor of Carmichael. The play was to turn that role into a broader mandate, once the 134 year-old auction house was absorbed into the 4 year-old flea market with exploding technicolor logo, worth 200 times as much. But Butterfield was too disorientated to entertain Schweitz’s advances, and even Leonard Carmichael raised a thick eyebrow when an expense claim crossed his desk for a rare 1780s marble fireplace surround. The compromise was to install it someplace in the building, capitalizing it onto the balance sheet as a Long Term Investment.

  Such were the benefits of the intimate partnership structure.

  “Benjamin,” Schweitzer greeted Silverman in fatherly fashion. He looked like a slightly younger version of talk show host Jerry Springer, complete with specs. He wore a white shirt with silver striped tie, loosened. “What’s new in Dwayne’s World?”

  “Hi. Good, Steven. Yeah, good. Wisnold seems to be doing great,” Ben said sunily, sitting down and handing his boss a deal update pack. “It was an interesting meeting.”

  “Oh yeah? Like how.”

  “Well let’s see: Jon Vogel treated the room to Jon’s New Laws of the Universe.”

  “Only the fruits and nuts here in California Benjamin, only the fruits and nuts. You know that guy has some kinda steam clock in the grounds of his place down in Monterey, that’s supposed to cuckoo every ten thousand years? Jesus Christ in the morning.” He gave exactly the same shake of the head as Jerry did on the show.

  “No doubt. Erm, maybe we should consider getting someone else on stage for the New York presentations.”

  “Oh yeah? Like who.” Schweitz was already absorbed in the update pack, specs far down his nose.

  “I guess Paul Towse. He’s a big holder, shows well. He’s got the chops to sell the boys out East.”

  Schweitz nodded: “That’s where the real money is lying and waiting, Benjamin.” Two hundred billion. “That’s the away game we need to win.”

  Schweitzer stopped at a certain point in the update pack. Ben knew which. “Oh my,” he said.

  Clamor.us, Inc. ‘Pre-Money’ Capitalization Table

  EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL

  He said it as though in awe of a great painting, or some other priceless piece of art. “Oh my. Will you just look at the kinda money these pricks are gonna pull down.”

  Schweitz fell silent for a moment. Then in a faraway voice: “You know, Bill Gates once remarked that a man changes when his net worth passes a hundred million...”

  He snapped out of his reverie. “But I’m still here, Benjamin. What else?”

  “Just verification work mostly, for the S1 filing. Trying to find out about that Multiworld investor. And, there is something else I need to speak with you about.” Silverman hesitated. “You didn’t see my emails?”

  Schweitz eyed him. “Just got out of the meeting. Len makes us go topless. It’s a new edict.” He savored Silverman’s confused look for a second. “Lap-topless. No handhelds allowed in the Board Room either.”

  It was something Silverman had consistently seen in alpha males: the exaggerated leisure of guys like Schweitz as the stakes rose. He knew better than to delay the crux of his update any longer:

  “We had an incident at the end of the preso. The Kid got up to do his site demo turn, and managed to pull up the page of what looked like a human trafficking site, complete with thirteen year-old girl. Let’s just say there was a sharp intake of breath in the room.”

  Steven Schweitzer was silent.

  Ben: “Should I talk to the lawyers?”

  “About what?” snapped Schweitz. “Does eBay talk to its lawyers when some lunatic posts hate crime material on their site? Yeah, maybe they do – to make sure their site use policies are absolutely clear, that they have nothing to do with it.

  “Work with the Clamor team on this. Which of these guys can provide a little adult supervision in that department,” and he looked down the cap table again.

  “We’re supposed to be working with Marantz. He’s the CFO. Old school: blue shirt, flies around trying to do web one-dot-o deals with old media companies –”

  “Assuming there will still be any old media companies to do deals with. Who else?”

  “Nguyen seems solid. He spoke well today.”

  “Then work with him. Suggest they get a private security consultant on board to understand it better. Someone arms length and low key who could fly under the ‘Other Professional Service Fees’ note at the back of the S1. We could probably give them some recommendations.”

  “Sure. But what about –”

  “It’s good this happened here, where we have the home field advantage. Let me tell you something, Benjamin,” and Schweitz put the update pack down, picked up his baseball again and wandered off into some discourse about former Republican presidents. About how President Nixon “got a little over-competitive and was found with chicken-shit on him.” How Ronald Reagan “sold weapons to the Iranians, and used the proceeds to run interference throughout Central America… and that’s elephant shit, Benjamin. Yet we know which president had to go. So what does that little historical comparison tell us?”

  Perhaps that the man sat opposite him was finding increasingly inventive ways to avoid his gala-going wife on Friday nights, Ben surmised.

  “To never underestimate the power of being likeable, Benjamin. And people like Clamor. They like the story. They like the Kid. It’s – he’s – an emerging icon. ‘That’s my opinion, I welcome yours,’ as the Trumpington Bugle says.”

  “She was there today by the way, making snippy comments.”

  “What a surprise. Who else spoke out?

  “Hartman, over at American Milen.”

  “Fuck’n’ short sellers. I look forward to seeing them try to lean against this one.”

  Schweitzer sat up and rotated the baseball between his fingers, meditatively. “This is the big one, Ben. The Board meeting ran long today. Predators are circling Carmichael, with fat wallets. It’s especially helpful to land this deal now.”

  Ben reminded himself of the deal they’d co-negotiated: a 2% success fee calculated on the $2.5 billion of money raised, assuming they achieved a $15 billion total first day valuation. A $5 million guaranteed advisory fee, and a 0.8% commission for the equity sales guys placing the new stock. All told, $75 million in fees would flow Carmichael’s way if the IPO went well, and that left out the profit spread on the stock placed. The closing dinner would be epic. Perhaps the impossible-to-make-reservations-for Gary Danko’s, fully rented out, banishing all memories of Opti Shaft – the optical broadband misadventure for which Schweitz had once threatened a closing dinner at the local Jac
k In The Box.

  “… and if you can get this one between the uprights, we’ll be talking about a more central role for you, Benjamin.”

  Now Ben felt a pin pricking sensation travel up his shoulders and neck, for the code was unmistakable: ‘central role’ meant partnership, the glamorous wife, cars, weekend place in Tahoe. But even more than that, it meant that Jack and Gwendolyn Silverman, Ben’s parents, might finally find contentment in their son’s achievements.

  “Who knows, you may even snag Francesca.”

  “I wonder,” said Ben, restoring his poker face.

  “I wonder if you wonder,” Schweitz said, dismissing him. But not before adding: “Stay close on this one Benjamin. We need this deal.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Tom Nguyen saw Natalie the next day for Saturday lunch in the Marina district. They met on a corner of Union Street without a restaurant reservation, preferring to play it by ear. It was a perfect San Francisco day in the late spring: extra sunny with a sharp breeze. The city seemed blotchy white, the hard building outlines clumped around its many hills. Above, Natalie glimpsed a bright orange kite thrumming against a blue sky. The bay was all whitecaps and rippling sails like carnival streamers.

  Much as she adored Paris, and much as she loved Charleston, South Carolina – the respective hometowns of her parents – she’d always considered San Francisco to be the most exciting city on earth. A city whose optimism came in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its location on one of the world’s least stable geological fault lines (‘live for today’!) It prompted Nguyen’s funny response, when she asked him what it was like to have moved back down here from rainy Seattle. The irony referenced a freak Seattle earthquake in 2001 measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale:

  “Well, the weather up there was great. But boy, those earthquakes…”

  “But you never really told me the story,” she said, as they strolled down Union Street. “Of how it all happened. Getting the job at Clamor and all.”