Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler

of the shared knowledge of all the companies in this incubation lab.’

      Gross was later raised into the pantheon of great entrepreneurs. Just as Henry Ford’s car lines in Detroit had profoundly affected the creation of products through mass manufacture, so Bill Gross was praised as a huge influence on how corporations were created. He became a star of the Internet, indulging in the cars and private planes of the trappings of wealth. Remembers an investor, ‘I went to a conference with him and there were women, you know, there were groupies. He had ugly tech groupies running after him, it was incredible.’ He received the ultimate seal of approval when the pre-eminent American entrepreneur Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric since 1981, joined the Board of idealab!.

      Back in late 1996, though, Gross was still looking for his first blockbuster idea. One of the people he brought into assess business plans had just left Disney’s Strategic Planning department. This was a ferociously clever man called Toby Lenk.

       4 ‘This is a Digital Hijack’

      ‘I saw myself as an electronic joy rider; I was like James Bond behind the computer; I was just having a blast.’

      Kevin Mitnick, convicted computer criminal

      In October 1995, etoy convened a meeting in a room they’d booked at Zürich’s official youth centre, Dynamo, a seventies concrete block located beneath a flyover. The email sent out prior to the event stated, ‘Project etoy: How to proceed? What concept will enable us to reach our instinctive goals?’ Morning and afternoon meetings were rigorously timetabled to discuss their Web site, music projects, decision making and how to find ‘freelancers’. Everyone was asked to bring ‘your laptops and your inspiration’ and to ‘be as punctual as etoy is able’.