If I Could Tell You Just One Thing.... Richard Reed

he was off to see some whizz kid he was excited about and asked whether Ari wanted to come along. ‘It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night. I’m in bed. It’s been a shitty week, pounding away trying to make this place work. But I think, right, fuck it. I get out of bed, put my trousers back on and drive an hour to meet this kid. Best thing I ever did. I loved him, decided to back him, and his company has been a huge success.’

      I say it’s easier to be curious, to show up, to stay in touch when you are already successful, when your name opens doors, so I’m keen to understand how he first got going, before his name meant anything. ‘Basically I started out by calling the big guys in the agency world back then. I was a nobody, a pimple on their ass, but I just kept calling them and doorstepping them until eventually they gave me an in.’

      I say that it takes a thick skin to keep going in a situation like that. He concedes that’s the case and, surprisingly, says that the extreme dyslexia he suffered from as a kid helped him.

       ‘When you’re dyslexic you constantly fail, nothing comes easy, so you lose the fear of failing, you get used to being embarrassed. So with cold calling, who gives a shit? They say no, big deal, you just keep calling them till they say yes.’

      Furthermore, he says being dyslexic teaches you other things too. It gives you better emotional intelligence: ‘You might not be able to read books but you get great at reading people.’ And it teaches you how to put a team together, ‘because you can’t do everything when you’re dyslexic, you need people to help’. And ironically in an industry typically about ‘me’, Ari’s reputation is for being about the ‘we’. The loyalty of his staff seems absolute, as is his to them. As an illustration, one of his colleagues was telling me how, during the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier in the year, as soon as Ari heard the news he got straight on a plane and was there within twenty-four hours, making sure his French team were OK.

      Curiosity. Not giving in. Team. All things instrumental to his success.

      And it is one of his loyal team members that now gives me the nod. My time is up. As I’m shown out, I take a look back. The last thing I see is Ari going back to his desk, getting back on that treadmill. And thanks to the time he’s given me, now busier than ever.

      ‘I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS, AND MY ADVICE FOR SUCCESS COMES DOWN TO THREE THINGS: BE CURIOUS, SHOW UP, STAY IN TOUCH. YOU HAVE TO KEEP READING, LISTENING, TALKING, THINKING, FINDING OUT HOW PEOPLE THINK, WHAT THEY DO. AND CHASE DOWN ANYTHING THAT SEEMS INTERESTING.’

       – Ari Emanuel

MARTHA LANE FOX, FAIRY GODMOTHER 2.0

      I’M IN THE OFFICES OF a hip London digital agency to meet Baroness Martha Lane Fox, the First Lady of the internet. The company is full of people with ironic T-shirts, directional haircuts and piercings that allow you to see through their earlobes. Martha’s sitting in the communal coffee bar, looking gloriously countercultural by being dressed in a smart, powder-blue trouser suit. As someone who knows more about digital than all the trendies in London put together, she doesn’t need to wear the ripped T-shirt and body piercings to prove it.

      As we chat generally, I discover my favourite remarkable fact about Martha. It is not that she was the co-founder of lastminute.com, the dot-com-era-defining start-up that sold for half a unicorn. Nor that she was the youngest female appointee to the House of Lords, impressive though that is. And it is neither the car accident that nearly killed her and resulted in two years confined to a hospital bed as they rebuilt her shattered body, nor that she now runs Doteveryone, her charity focused on making the UK the most digitally advanced nation in the world. Remarkable though these things may be, the nugget that best gives you a sense of the woman is her number of godchildren: she has nineteen. That’s two more than Princess Di.

      When you meet her, it’s not difficult to see why. She is alive with a sense of possibility, potential and optimism. ‘I love building things, I love ideas and I love that you can always empower people and improve systems and make things better.’ And her guiding philosophy? ‘Without sounding too kooky about it, you feel much better as a person if you default to generosity as opposed to being mean-spirited.’ What lucky godchildren.

      Ironically, she herself has not always been on the receiving end of people’s better natures. When her friend and co-founder Brent Hoberman floated lastminute.com and the share price crashed, she received more than 2,000 pieces of hate mail, ‘including death threats and people calling me every name from B to C’, as well as business journalists writing in the press that they wished they could shoot her, or that she ‘should be put in a burka and told to stay in my box’. Not much generosity of spirit there. And, tellingly, all that vitriol was focused on her, not her male co-founder.

      The lastminute.com story is a time capsule that reflects the internet of the late 1990s. They were ahead of their time, launching in an era before Google even existed. Their original name was LastMinuteNetwork.com but they thought it would be cooler if they dropped that third word. They struggled to raise funds because venture capitalists said people wouldn’t buy things over the internet as no one would put their credit card details into a website. It seems laughably naive now, but Martha says it was a different internet back then. ‘It was so new and exciting, a real sense the whole world was going to change, we didn’t foresee that these huge monopolies like Amazon, Google and Facebook would just go boom and lock down the internet.’

      Her belief in the fundamental power of the internet to help people change things is the driving force behind her organisation Doteveryone, which has the mission to democratise access to and understanding of the internet for, literally, everyone. She is mobilising the government, businesses, schools and communities to ensure everyone has the skills to get online and in a non-curated way: ‘No disrespect to Facebook, but the internet is not just Facebook. If you know how to really use the internet, you have access to every opinion, piece of information and tool out there. It can help us all change things.’

      It is this spirit of wanting to improve herself and others, and of seeing the endless possibilities in the world, both online and off, that drives her and it is reflected in the advice she passes on:

       ‘Be bold. If you’re bold you might right royally screw up, but you can also achieve much more, so be bold. You’ve only got your own reputation to lose and that’s not important. It’s much better to strive for something that seems impossible, that’s quite nuts on some level. So be bold, whatever it is. Even if you work on a customer help desk somewhere, ask yourself how can I be bold? Find those small moments of boldness because they are everywhere.’

      ‘BE BOLD. IF YOU’RE BOLD YOU MIGHT RIGHT ROYALLY SCREW UP, BUT YOU CAN ALSO ACHIEVE MUCH MORE, SO BE BOLD. YOU’VE ONLY GOT YOUR OWN REPUTATION TO LOSE AND THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT. IT’S MUCH BETTER TO STRIVE FOR SOMETHING THAT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE, THAT’S QUITE NUTS ON SOME LEVEL. SO BE BOLD, WHATEVER IT IS. EVEN IF YOU WORK ON A CUSTOMER HELP DESK SOMEWHERE, ASK YOURSELF HOW CAN I BE BOLD? FIND THOSE SMALL MOMENTS OF BOLDNESS BECAUSE THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.’

       – Baroness Martha Lane Fox

HARRY BELAFONTE, KINGSMAN

      I’M TALKING US POLITICS WITH Harry Belafonte, the eighty-nine-year-old Grammy award-winning singer, titan of the American Civil Rights Movement, and confidant of Martin Luther King. It’s a big conversation. He is a man of extraordinary eloquence, intellect and life force, the latter being fuelled by the twin engines of his anger at social injustice and his enduring love of the better side of his country.

      We talk about the Republican primaries, which are raging