A few weeks ago, when I was up in the Valle (as it were), I did a telephone interview with the delightful Danuta Kean for the Orion website. The resulting ‘featured author’ profile is now live. Here’s the first half; click the link at the bottom (or here) for the rest...
(Oh, and the ‘makes him click’ title made transported me back to my Guardian column days - wondering what web pun would adorn the top of each week’s nonsense. Still, at least people don’t use Friday puns any more. Friday feeling, Friday’s child, The long good... heady days, heady days.)
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Paul Carr tells Danuta Kean what makes him click
Up a mountain in Spain, Paul Carr is in exactly the kind of place he loves. But it is not the glorious Andalucian scenery that takes away the journalist-turned-publisher-turned-author’s breath. It’s the company. Carr is on a retreat with some of the biggest names on the web, men - and they are almost always men - whose youth has not stopped them making the kind of money even Euro Millions winners only dream of.
It is not the scent of greenbacks that makes him happy: it’s the whiff of fame. “I know lots of people who have made ridiculous amounts of money and it hasn’t actually made them that happy,” he explains of fame’s allure. “No, I want people to go ‘Wow, he’s brilliant’.”
Fame, notoriety even, is bound to follow in the wake of his new book, Bringing Nothing to the Party, a How to Win Friends and Influence People1 for the Web 2.0 generation. The book started out as an analysis of the European end of the web bubble that burst as suddenly as it blew up in the late Nineties and early Noughties.
Carr is well placed to dig beneath the surface PR pumped out about the generation of teens and twenties who were taking the Stock Market by storm. After setting up his own web business while a law student at Nottingham, he bagged a column in the Guardian and started mixing with the new money the web had created at the exclusive Adam Street club. “I found myself hanging out with these people who had multi-billion dollar valuations for their companies and thought, ‘There is a story here’,” he explains.
He had also tried unsuccessfully to crack the net with two more start-ups of his own, most famously the web-to-page publisher The Friday Project, which went into receivership at the start of this year amid much mud-slinging. Carr had left a year earlier and would rather not discuss its demise. It has since been picked up by HarperCollins.
No one had written about the London entrepreneurs powering the British ’net boom, but as Carr sat down to write about it, it became apparent that this was not going to be any old sober account of a virtual gold rush.
Instead the book morphed into something much more interesting - and hilariously funny: a self-deprecating story that features jail, writ-happy footballers, ex-girlfriends with a grudge and a brief, never-to-be-forgotten clash with Inspector Knacker of the Yard. Like Dandy in the Underworld, Carr comes across as wide-eyed and out of his depth in a sea of sharks and obscenely successful entrepreneurs whose youth becomes a running joke throughout the book.
“It’s hard when you see a 20-year old who tells you, ‘Oh yeah, I made a million dollars in seven months. How are you?’” he admits. He speaks fast, very fast, as if any minute he might run out of time. That may explain why the increasing age difference between Carr and the latest Bright Young Thing to clock up a Coutts bank account rings like a till throughout the book.
Like a model fast approaching 30, Carr watches his dream of youthful mega-success slip from his grasp with increasing desperation. “It was a real twisted bitter rage,” he laughs. “When I started writing my column in the Guardian I was like 22, 23 and I felt king of the world. People were saying he is so young. But now I am 28 and it’s like, oh God, there are all these 22-year-olds making these ridiculous amounts of money.” His voice rises a desperate octave: “I am feeling that I must be past it.”
Footnotes...
- shurely, Alienate People? -Ed [↩]