Rear view

It's official: I now have a friend who is a self-made Internet multi-millionaire. A few years ago he worked for VNU, the company which publishes What PC?. He was even up for an editorship of one of our publications.

He didn't get the job. He was just a little more scruffy and unconventional than the ex-salesman who ran the magazine could handle.

Richard then went off to a rival publisher, launching and editing a couple of new publications. The next thing I heard, he had left to start his own company. Soon after Fortune City started, I remember going down to visit his office above a shop off Kensington High Street. There were a lot of cardboard boxes, some old furniture, a couple of computers and one or two staff - it was all very messy. Richard explained the idea behind the Fortune City online community: a Film Noir city on the Internet where people could create their own houses/Web sites, elect a mayor and buy software and books. It all sounded quite plausible, the way he explained it. But when I looked at the Web site I was a little disappointed. I didn't find it very inviting or easy to use.

Another friend, Jez, also worked on Fortune City in the early days. But after a year or so he pulled out. Richard and he had had a slight falling out and Jez's girlfriend, who works in PR and knows about these things, advised him that Fortune City was going nowhere fast. The next time I heard from Richard he was emigrating - to New York. But he wasn't abandoning Fortune City, he was taking it with him. Some of the Web development would carry on in the UK where programmers are, it seems, a lot cheaper but the US market was apparently more attuned to this kind of online community.

I didn't hear from Richard much in the next year or so. Then in quick succession I got a whole flurry of press releases explaining the millions of page impressions Fortune City now generates, naming the members of the new high-powered board of directors and describing a tie-up with Warners.

Fortune City (www.fortunecity.com) is now publicly quoted on the German stock market. And Richard's stake was worth so much he's become a tax exile, dividing his time between New York and Monaco. Me, I divide my time between Queens Park and Soho and travel by bicycle.

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