Julie Meyer’s a rare breed. So intrinsically entwined with the past, present and future of the internet is she that if you’ve had anything to do with the scene you’ve probably met her.
From the earth-shudderingly disruptive time of the late 1990s as the dot com craze took off to the shaping of the new era, Meyer is a woman who possesses most of the business cards in circulation and straddles the roles of entrepreneur, adviser and investor with equal gusto. It’s no surprise that the Saturday night before our meeting she was at the birthday party of Niklas Zennström, the founder of online telco phenomenon Skype.
However, if you were not in the thrall of Brent and Martha, Larry and Sergey, Jeff Bezos and every other dot com entrepreneur as they monopolised the business pages for three intense years – and that’s understandable given the era’s unenviable proclivity for hyperbole – then perhaps you need an introduction.
Back in 1998 INSEAD MBA graduate Meyer was working for internet investment house New Media Investors – now AIM-listed NewMedia Spark – helping fund Lastminute.com among others.
Together with journalists Nick Denton and John Browning and investment banker Adam Gold she started organising networking events for the new media set on the first Tuesday of every month.
Aptly titled, First Tuesday became the meeting place for venture capitalists looking for hot dot com entrepreneurs and vice versa. “The vision of First Tuesday was to help companies,” she explains. “I’d been raising capital for companies such as Lastminute.com and it was always about raising money to go into a new geography and so I saw these companies taking on fixed costs without having recurring revenue and thought there’s got to be a better way.”
First Tuesday went international in September 1999 – ultimately spreading to 17 cities accross Europe – with the aim of offering a network of relationships businesses could tap into.
While it began life as a sales and marketing exercise its immediate success and place in the industry zeitgeist led to it being incorporated as a business in February 2000. Five months later it was sold for around £33m to Israeli firm Yazam.
The timing couldn’t have been much better as the brittle foundations of an industry built on paper expectations crumbled, bringing down new businesses and investors alike. Unsurprisingly, Meyer won’t divulge how well she did from the deal, but with a 22.5% shareholding and only a £35,000 upfront investment it’s not unreasonable to assume she made a pretty penny.
Meyer immediately set about on her next project Ariadne Capital, a technology and new mediaorientated investment and advisory firm.
THE ARCH NETWORKER
Meyer left First Tuesday behind, but she’s been unable to shed the attachment. Not that she’s unduly concerned. She does bristle briefl y when asked about comments attributed to her relating to the way her co-founders allegedly sabotaged some of her efforts as First Tuesday fl irted with liquidation. “Nobody’s really interested in that now are they?” she asks, before responding in full:
“People have intense feelings at a particular moment. I don’t think anybody thought anybody was trying to sabotage it. There have been a lot of things attributed to me where people are trying to create a major trauma, psycho-drama.”
In general she has little but positive memories. “It was a fabulous time,” she says. “A lot of people felt empowered and never would have thought they would take those kinds of risks.” Some VCs will wish they hadn’t, of course.
It’s little wonder then that a monthly event called Second Chance Tuesday recently started, led by a pair of dotcom veterans – founder of gadget website Firebox.com Michael Smith and Judith Clegg, the founder of entrepreneurs’ network The Glasshouse, which organises it.
Meyer herself feels she couldn’t network on that scale any more. “I remember being so ‘on’ for six hours every Tuesday evening and running around Europe. It was exhausting.”
INTERNET’S NEW ERA
Instead, Ariadne is well-placed to capitalise on what many are calling the second phase of the internet. Meyer has noted many changes since landing in Paris as a 21-year-old in 1988. “We think of Europe so differently from people who were our age in 1988, with cross-border transactions and pan-European venture funds now commonplace. The need for something like First Tuesday will never go away.”
The phrase Web 2.0 is all about the true globalisation of the internet, says Meyer, with countries such as India and China able to operate in the same sphere from a near-standing start. “I’m not sure any internet entrepreneur in India and China feels they’re catching up – I think a lot of them feel they have a headstart by virtue of their markets being billion person strong. They’re leapfrogging technology – ‘Forget this fi xed line crap, we’re mobile’.”
Meyer’s experience of internationalisation and her global contacts has attracted an enviable portfolio, boasting early involvement with Skype before its $4bn sale to eBay, as well as global projects for Sage, BT, Carphone Warehouse, FTSE 250 mobile ATM business Morse, and Zopa, formed by the founder of internet bank Egg, Richard Duvall.
While Ariadne has not raised a fund as yet, Meyer firmly believes it will make the tier one club of investment fi rms at some point, given its track record for picking winners such as Skype. “When there were fi ve people we were advising them and, in fact, four of my Ariadne people went over to Skype and we became a part of the fabric of their company.”
