TUNA LIFE by Erik Hamre Page B

for too long, and the downloads kept creeping up throughout the evening and night. Andrew pulled a blanket over his freezing cold body, and lay down to get some rest. It looked like it would be an all-nighter.
     
    The morning after, Andrew was still stuck in the basement. They had planned a low-profile launch of the app, to test how people responded to their product. Now they found themselves in the strange position that the app had been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times, and it didn’t seem to slow down. They had to pull the plug. They had to pull the plug before it was too late.
    Andrew called Richard. “We need to kill it, Richard. If we don’t remove Tuna Life from iTunes we could risk having several hundred thousand users with a trial version of our product.”
    “The beta version works fine,” Richard replied.
    “But it doesn’t have the correct name. It’s supposed to be called Virtualme. I’m very close to securing the name rights. Now we have all these people downloading an app called Tuna Life. When we launch the real app there’s going to be massive confusion.”
    “Don’t change the name. The name works. It’s hip. It’s cool. It’s got nothing to do with our product, and that’s why it’s so great.”
    Andrew shook his head. “Well, you know best.”
    “It’s not up to me anymore,” Richard replied. “It’s up to Roman now.”
    “Up to who?”
    “Roman Bezhrev. Our owner. He wants to meet you.”
    “Today?”
    “Yes. Lunch at the Hilton. Dress smart casual,” Richard said, and rang off.
    Smart casual, Andrew sighed. What the fuck did he mean with that? What was smart casual in an industry where most of the players strolled around in flip-flops and hoodies? Was he supposed to put on some glasses to look smarter? Wasn’t this the whole point of the new economy? Old dress codes didn’t apply anymore. Andrew studied Frank’s basement. Racks and racks of servers were stacked on top of each other. Frank had insisted on running the network themselves. No outsourcing to the famous cloud. The result was that the basement now looked like a data warehouse. Apparently he had almost totally dismantled the servers before hooking them back up again in some sort of intricate and advanced system. Loose cables were hanging everywhere. The air-conditioning system was humming like a hard drive about to break, and all the fans Andrew had bought were going at full speed. It was freezing cold. It didn’t look professional at all, not even safe. But it worked. It worked fantastically well.
    But why had people suddenly started to download the Tuna Life app? As far as Andrew knew they hadn’t done anything special the day before. No special marketing, no press releases or media coverage. How on Earth had all these people come to know about Tuna Life?
    Was Frank Geitner responsible?
    Was this the reason he was missing?
     
     

15
    Andrew checked his Seiko watch impatiently. Their meeting had been scheduled for one o’clock. It was now one thirty. “Can you try calling him again?” he asked Richard.
    Nervously, Richard checked his watch. He had already placed three missed calls. He didn’t really want to make another.
    Andrew had never given it much thought, where the money Y-Bator had injected into Tuna Life had really come from. He had simply assumed that the funds originated from a large pool of small investors having placed their funds with Y-Bator. And that even though there could be several hundred different owners in the actual fund that had given them the money, Capital 3, Andrew and his co-founders would only have to deal with Y-Bator. That assumption had turned out to be wrong.
    Normally, that was the way incubators and venture capital firms operated. But Y-Bator had an eccentric owner. The Russian Roman Bezhrev had built his fortune in the oil and bank industry in his home country before settling in Australia five years ago. Apparently he still maintained good political contacts