Fishbowl by Matthew Glass Page A

which was most of the time – he ignored the chaos around him. When he took the headphones off, he joined in. The mantra in these all-in talkfests was not making the world a worse place. Despite the myths that would later develop about which of the three founders had originally articulated that slogan, none of them could actually remember who had said it first or what they had been talking about at the time. But over the last few weeks it had become the touchstone for the company and its fellow travellers.
    The numbers kept growing, running far ahead of the figures Andrei had scribbled on the napkin at Yao’s. The early users who had taken to the Grotto had established themselves as a kind of self-appointed advisory community through the sheer depth, intensity and fanaticism of their debate over every feature and change in Fishbowll, no matter how minor. They had developed a group page within the Grotto that they called the Cavern and although there were no enforceable rules about who could go there, it was quickly made clear to interlopers that they weren’t wanted. No one knew exactly how many of them there were, but in the common room at Robinson House they became known as ‘the 300’, after one of Andrei’s favourite epic movies. Their comments crowded out almost everyone else on the Sunken Wall of Atlantis, as the site for public comments in the Grotto was known. Although the three Fishbowll founders had never met any of them, they felt as if they personally knew the more prominent members of the group. They were almost phantom figures inhabiting the common room alongside them, especially for Ben, who spent much of his time responding to their comments.
    There was Karl Morrow, for instance, who was always angry. Even when they made some kind of change that he had been aggressively demanding for weeks, he was angry. Ben devised a measure of the degree of Karl’s anger called the Morrowmeter and he tracked it whenever an idea was under discussion. It was generally agreed that, as a rule, the angrier Karl was, the better the idea. At the other extreme of the spectrum was Barry Diller,or the Dillerman, as he was dubbed in the common room. The Dillerman had a reputation for finding a way to defend everything Andrei did. Some of the 300, never shy of conspiracy theories, aired suspicions that the Dillerman was actually Andrei himself, especially since he said he was from Boston, which was Andrei’s home town. Whenever they were testing some new innovation on the site, Andrei only had to ask Ben what Karl Morrow and the Dillerman were saying in the Cavern in order to hear the two extremes of the spectrum.
    But as Fishbowll’s growth exceeded Andrei’s projections, so did something else.
    It had been surprisingly easy to say no to Mike Sweetman’s offer of $100 million, but now Fishbowll ran the risk of going out of business for want of a couple of hundred thousand. They were burning through cash almost twice as fast as Andrei had anticipated. One night, Andrei took a look at the numbers and did some new projections. He estimated that if Fishbowll kept growing on the same trajectory, by May they would have exhausted the funds they had put in and the company would be broke.
    Andrei didn’t think he would be able to get anything from his parents, who had shown no inclination at Christmas to encourage what they considered to be a distraction from Andrei’s school work, despite Dina’s and Leo’s attempts to persuade them that it was much more than that. It was pretty clear that there wouldn’t be more forthcoming from Ben, who hadn’t even been able to raise the full starting sum. Kevin’s family was wealthier but even with another fifty or a hundred from Kevin, how much longer would that keep Fishbowll in business? There was Sandy, of course. He could try to tap her family for funds, but he had the sense that would only be putting off the inevitable. Logic