California · France · Apple · Wall Street · The Guardian Technology
On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake
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J ulie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes.
Key facts
- In March 2000, after a few months of trading, Lastminute.com would make history by floating on the London stock market at a valuation of £571m
- On the first Tuesday of October 1998, about 80 people gathered at the uber-hip Alphabet bar in Beak Street, Soho, London
- In 2009, Meyer launched her venture capital arm, Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs, the ACE fund, for short
- According to Meyer’s own origin story, after graduating she left for Paris with $1,000 in her pocket
Summary
A California blond in a crisp, white shirt, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knee, she listens intently to the young man standing before her. Eventually, she tells him: “I’m going to make you an offer.” It could be a scene from a heist movie, but Meyer is in a BBC studio, shooting a 2009 episode of the TV show Dragons’ Den. This is an online spin-off from the original Dragons’ Den series, so the stakes are a little lower. During the dotcom boom that tore through London like tulip fever in the late 1990s, Meyer was a big name. At the centre of it all was Meyer’s monthly networking club, First Tuesday, where young hustlers with little more than a concept and a funky brand name could raise millions on a handshake, as investors scrambled for a piece of the digital revolution.
Accolades followed: the Davos forum named Meyer a “global leader of tomorrow”; the Wall Street Journal ranked her as one of the most influential businesswomen in Europe.