| |||
| |||
| | | |
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
Hi, Greg, I wasn't expecting to see you here. Danny, hey! Me neither! So, what happened to the Internet start-up? It was a huge success! It was six months of mind-boggling hard graft and then we were bought by a US agency: I bought a flat in central London, a ski lodge in Val d'Isere and an electric-blue BMW with WWW plates. Fabulous! Yeah! And that was just with the cash portion of the deal. Once the merged group IPOed, I was worth some five or six times as much. I bought a Ferrari, started having my suits handmade and literally bathed in cocaine every night with my Italian model girlfriend. Wow, I'm impressed. So you retired? Nah, why stop while you're ahead... Well... Anyway, so we developed a content aggregator and sticky portal that went for two rounds of venture capital before getting bought by its main rival to close it down. That netted a return of some 200 times on my initial investment, which had been seven figures anyway. Crikey. Indeed. I had a house built for me in Stoke Poges that was an exact replica of the Doge's Palace. I bought a racehorse and then a second racehorse so that it could keep the first one company. I had my own leopard. I hired a servant to pluck my nose hairs. I had a string quartet follow me around to play Little Fluffy Clouds for me at a whim. That's fantastic. But you were obviously losing it badly. Oh yes. When you no longer have to worry about how to pay the bills, even if it is from Boeing for a 747, reality becomes an entirely different place. So, that's when you went mad? Oh God no, I was regarded as being a Midas among alchemists. I had money thrown at me for new ventures. That was when we decided to start our own bank and issue money. Wow. Bet that didn't take off. Not at all: it was an instant success. Having international, completely fluid, untraceable, electronic money turned out to be a market smash. I was just behind Bill Gates in the Forbes rich list. Steve Ballmer used to ring me up for tennis tips. The chancellor used to drop by to brainstorm. You were powerful... And rich, Danny, rich. I bought the Isle of Wight. I funded research into bringing dinosaurs back to life. I had Concorde do a victory roll at my 28th birthday. I was on Radio 4, the Money Programme and someone did me on Stars in Their Eyes. And then... It all went wrong? But I don't see how. If you're a company in bad times you're trouble, but not a bank. Unless there was a bank panic. No, no bank panic: the trouble was that we decided not to use gold or bonds to back our currency. We decided to use something much better... Oh my God. Exactly. The entire thing was underwitten with Lastminute shares. So when the .com market broke? So did we. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. I still have the leopard, although it eats its weight in Kit-E-Kat. Anyway, what can I do for you? Erm, can I have a Big Mac meal please? Do you want to go large on that? | ||||||
16/02 16/03 16/04 16/05 16/06 16/07 16/08 16/09 16/10 16/11 16/12 16/13 16/14 16/15 16/16 16/17 16/18 16/20 16/21 16/22 16/23 16/24 16/25 | ||||||
| | | | | | |