Now he had made a decision he couldn’t undo.
He had screwed up his life.
2
The editorial office of The Gold Coast Times was buzzing. One of the journalists had overheard a rumour that the mayor, Eddie Molan, had an interest in the investor group that had just put forward a proposal to invest four billion dollars in a new cruise ship terminal and two new casinos south of Surfers Paradise. Everyone in the room agreed that something had to be done to attract more tourists to the Gold Coast. The high Aussie dollar, and cheap airfares to Asia, had put the tourist industry in a squeeze.
Vesna Connor coughed “It’s not a question about choosing sides. Every single one in this room knows that something has to be done to get the Gold Coast out of this rut it’s stuck in. For the last ten years I’ve lived in Burleigh Heads. My morning ritual has always been the same. Every single morning I go for a walk at the beach, from Burleigh Heads to Miami, and back. On this short stretch of sand I used to see hundreds of utes, and hundreds of locals on surfboards. In fact, this has always been the lifestyle of the typical Gold Coast tradie; to catch a few waves before the workday begins. When I walked this route yesterday I barely counted ten people out in the water. And that was under ideal conditions. Does anyone here know why there were so few surfers out there?” she asked.
Nobody answered. The room was silent.
“Because they are all stuck in traffic on the M1. They are all on the motorway, heading to their jobs in Ipswich, Brisbane and the sunny coast,” she answered rhetorically. “They don’t have time to go for a surf when they’ve got to jump in the car at four thirty in the morning, just so they can make it to where the jobs are before the day starts. This is the reality of the Gold Coast at the moment. Nothing is happening. There are fewer building cranes on the Surfers Paradise skyline than there were during the recession in the early 1990s. Nobody is building anything – and nobody is buying anything. It is therefore I believe we have a responsibility, a responsibility to create some positivity. To pull people out of this cloud of doom and gloom they are living under. But we can’t afford to take any shortcuts, we can’t afford to present anything one-sided. I want an unbiased presentation of this Tugun project. It doesn’t matter that we really need it. I don’t care that we all have seen our house prices drop over the last few years. You are journalists, and you have a professional duty to present all sides of the cases we cover. That is why we will investigate the rumours that our mayor has an economic interest in this latest proposal for a cruise ship terminal. We will give the tree-huggers and every other minority interest a voice, but we will let our audience make their own decision. We only present the facts. Am I making myself clear?”
The small team, consisting of five business journalists, nodded. It was quite obvious that they weren’t overly excited about being taken to task by the young editor. Who did she think she was? Hardly dry behind the ears. Twenty-five years old and devoid of any real journalistic background. Barging into the morning meeting on her first day in office, talking to them like they were children.
It was a bad start.
That much was certain.
Vesna Connor was an anomaly in the Gold Coast Times. The most read paper of the Gold Coast was mostly staffed by journalists in their late forties and early fifties. They had grown up with papers made out of paper, and were now with horror witnessing that new forces in the newspaper wanted less and less substance in the articles. It was the digital version that was the future. The paper paper suffered from declining subscribers and ad-revenue, and there was no cure. The circulation of the traditional paper would continue to whittle away as the younger generation, who had never paid for news and never ever would pay for news, gradually took over. And that was how Vesna Connor had entered the picture. Headhunted from an IT company, without any journalistic experience other than having written a below average popular blog about fashion and shoes when she was at university. Recommended by one of the major owners of the paper, she had been thrown into the position as editor and handed the responsibility of leading the paper into the digital century.
Scott Davis coughed. The old crime reporter knew he was on the list of people who were on their way out the door. Thirty-five years of service. It would be too expensive to give him a redundancy package. He wasn’t stupid. Of course he knew why he had recently been shifted to the business desk of the paper. Nothing happened on the coast. The business desk would be the next to face the chopping block after the political desk had been reduced by a third five months ago. Scott was already halfway into his Performance Management Plan. Weekly meetings where he had to outline what he was doing to improve the standard of his work. It was a joke. It wasn’t about improving the standard of his work. It was about shortening it. Apparently he was writing too lengthy articles. Too many words. Too many difficult words. He needed to learn how to express himself in fewer words, in more accessible language. Come up with catchy headlines that caught the attention of readers with the attention span of goldfish. Couldn’t they just change the name of the paper to Twitter? Everything he submitted that was more than 140 words was rejected anyway.
Vesna asked whether anyone had questions. No one had any. She declared her first morning meeting over, dismissed the journalists, and walked directly into her office and shut the door. Then she had a panic attack.
“They hate me,” she cried on the phone to her brother. “They all hate me.”
“Pull yourself together,” her brother said. “They don’t hate you. They don’t know you. They are just afraid of what you represent. Change. New blood. Progress. That’s what they are afraid of. They are not idiots, you know. They realise why you’re there. That the world has changed, that they need to change with it, or die.”
“I don’t think I can work in a place where everybody hates me again. I don’t want to do this,” Vesna cried.
“You’ve chosen to become a leader, Vesna. That’s not easy. You’ll have to make some tough decisions over the next twelve months. It will become easier. But it will take time. The only thing you need to know is that I support you whatever you decide to do, Vesna. But do me a favour: Don’t give up so easily. Give it a few weeks. Make your mark on the organisation, and do it quickly. If you wait too long, you won’t succeed. Call me again in a few months. If you still feel the same, we can discuss it. But don’t give up. Remember, you are a Connor.” Then he hung up.
Vesna Connor stared out the window. She missed a good girl friend. Someone she could talk to, someone she could share her worries and insecurities with. It was nice to a have a close relationship with her brother, but there was something missing. She always felt that he was judging her when they spoke together; that even though he never actually expressed it with words, he was disappointed. Vesna’s perfect brother; partner at Morgan Stanley Investment Bank’s Sydney office at the age of twenty-nine. He made more money per week than Vesna did in a year. How could she ever compete with that?
She opened the Excel spreadsheet. It was an overview of who were deemed to be ‘not essential’ for the organisation. Don’t hesitate, her brother had said. Move quickly. She might as well have presented the list at the morning meeting, her first official day in her new job. But she had decided to hold off for a few weeks. Let it seem like she had put some thoughts into it. That cutting the staff by twenty percent was a decision she didn’t make lightly.
She decided to focus on something positive. What could create positivity on the Gold Coast without jeopardising the paper’s integrity? What was booming? She reviewed the business articles for the last twelve months. It was mostly headlines about companies in receivership and properties in bank foreclosures. There was really no positive news. She flipped through the various articles so quickly that her eyes struggled to focus. Suddenly she stopped. She moved the scrollbar up two pages. Something had caught her eye.
‘App millionaires on the Gold Coast – the new economy.’ The article read.
The article was authored by Scott Davis. One of the reporters she had included in her Excel spreadsheet for early retirement. Human Resources had, however, advised her to exclude him. He had been on a Performance Management Plan continuously for the last twelve months. There should most likely be ample opportunities to get rid of him without handing him any money.
Vesna read the article with interest. Even though the Gold Coast in general had broadband speeds comparable to Albania, and investors avoided the coast like a plague, a small technology community seemed to have grown out of the local universities. It had spawned several successful companies, some of them even able to compete in the international arena. The last company out of the blocks had been founded by three Bond University students. They had developed a new smartphone app, a math game of all things. It had proven quite successful in Asia, and the three students had recently dropped out of their studies to pursue the development of the app full-time. Vesna raised her gaze from the screen. This was exactly what the Gold Coast needed. Success stories. She located Scott Davis’ number from the intranet directory, and picked up her phone.
3
The blank computer screen stared at Andrew. He sat in his office chair staring back. Neither of them blinked. But when the screensaver turned on, Andrew realised it was time to do something.
He had been so bedazzled by the presentation he had witnessed at the Hilton hotel four weeks earlier; the hooded teenager who, cocky and arrogant, had explained to the audience how he had developed an iPhone application that transformed your mobile phone into a flashlight. There were hundreds of competitors, but users had taken a liking to the minimalistic user interface the teenager had created, and in less than a month, without any marketing whatsoever, the free application had been downloaded forty-three thousand times.
Forty-three thousand times.
It was amazing.
The pro version cost ninety-nine cents, and the teenager received seventy percent of the gross revenue. Unfortunately, very few seemed to be willing to shell out a dollar to buy the pro version, but the teenager envisioned a huge potential if he could translate the free version into other languages. Andrew was dumbfounded. The teenager wasn’t even a programmer. He told the audience that he had taught himself app-programming over the last twelve months by downloading free lectures from the Khan Academy. The flashlight application had been developed in less than a month; he had done it late at night, in between his afternoon shift at McDonald’s and school.
Andrew Engels felt he had witnessed something truly remarkable when the teenager, still on stage, verbally accepted an investment of sixty thousand for forty-five percent of the company. Was it possible? What in hell was Andrew wasting his life trying to become partner at Avensis Accounting for? When a teenager with an IQ of ten could raise this amount of money, without having any revenue, without even having a business. He had sold four copies of the pro version, the paid version. Four copies. This was the opportunity Andrew had been waiting for.
This was the new gold rush, the new Klondike.
And he needed to seize the opportunity before it was gone.
Andrew had left the Hilton Hotel without returning to the tax conference. He had simply jumped into his car and driven straight to the office, where he had written up his resignation in less than thirty seconds. Then he had walked straight in to his boss, Gerard Cassar, and handed him the letter. Gerard Cassar hadn’t shown any feelings. “That’s a shame,” he had said. “You were the next in line to make partner. We had big plans for you, Andrew.”
Andrew didn’t believe a word Cassar said. He had heard that promise too many times before. And who cared anyway? It didn’t matter anymore. After having witnessed how easy it was to raise funds, Andrew knew he had made the correct decision.
The correct decision
. How wrong he had been. It had seemed so obvious there and then. Even his mandatory four weeks of notice had seemed to fly past. Now he bitterly regretted not having spent those precious weeks of guaranteed pay to do some groundwork. Seriously. Had he believed that he could just sit down in front of a computer, brainstorm a little bit by himself, and come up with a million-dollar idea? He had been an idiot. That’s what he had been.
He didn’t even own a smartphone. Avensis Accounting had always provided their employees with Blackberry Bold models. Officially, the reason had been that they were more secure. The real reason, of course, had been that the accountants didn’t spend time fidgeting with apps and games when they had Blackberry phones, they were too crappy for that. And Andrew had never seen the need to buy his own phone when his employer provided him one for free. Now he had to cover that expense too. For the first time in his life he actually understood how many fringe benefits he had enjoyed at Avensis Accounting. And it made him even more scared. Profits and cash flow – Avensis Accounting’s mantra. Andrew had neither. He studied the phone in the palm of his hand. He hadn’t bought the iPhone he had really wanted. The gorgeous looking girl in the Virgin Mobile store had convinced him to buy a Samsung Galaxy S3 instead. iPhone is so last year, she had said. Andrew had no idea, but he was smart enough to listen to the younger generation after having witnessed what he did at the Hilton Hotel. It was quite possibly Andrew and his entire generation that was
so last year
.
He opened the Mozilla browser on his mobile, and searched up the phone number to the Hilton Hotel. After a bit back and forth, the Hilton Hotel provided him with the name of the firm that had organised the conference four weeks prior. It was a so-called incubator, something that supposedly meant that it invested or provided early investors in technology companies. The chosen companies didn’t only receive funding, however. As part of the package they also gained access to knowledge, expertise and the contacts the incubator could provide. Andrew keyed in the number to Y-Bator.