In the age of internet startups, PT Barnum’s dictum that there’s a sucker born every minute needs to be amended: lots of people can go broke by overestimating the intelligence of the average founder.
WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, traced the rise and fall of WeWork (valued at at $47bn until it very suddenly wasn’t). The Dropout put the boggling madness and eventual collapse of the healthcare company Theranos, built on hope, fraudulent data and the charisma of Elizabeth Holmes (now at the start of an 11-year prison term for defrauding investors), on fully illuminated display.
The implosion of the ticketing platform Pollen was on a smaller scale – the company was valued just shy of $1bn at its height – but still worthy of note. The makers of the hour-long BBC Three documentary Crashed lay it all out neatly. Pollen was founded in 2014 by Callum and Liam Negus-Fancey (Callum, former employees interviewed for the programme agree, was a marketing genius and Liam was … his brother) and built on the innovative idea of creating networks of “ambassadors” who would sell gig tickets to their friends and earn free ones for themselves in the process. It was a good idea and Pollen became a successful global brand.
Things were going well – though some staff did wonder if the company retreats (“when there was all this work to do”) needed to be quite so frequent and lavish, even if the brothers believed that bonding was the key to creative collaborative work and productive employees. Then the pandemic hit. Rather than hunker down and wait for better times, as most of the entertainment and hospitality industry was doing, Pollen decided to diversify. They planned to put on events themselves, bundled with travel packages, so they would be ahead of the pack when Covid restrictions lifted.
The first event went really well. The next – which promised a weekend in Las Vegas with Justin Bieber readily available to fans, but which apparently neglected to contract the singer into anything of the sort – did not. Bieber did an hour-long show before departing, leaving frontline staff deluged with thousands of calls from outraged customers demanding refunds.
It was to become a familiar experience, as more and more events failed or were cancelled, and it became increasingly clear that the company was unable or unwilling to provide either the promised services or refunds. Suppliers, too, noticed that proofs of payment sent by Pollen did not result in actual payments nearly as often as they would like. Then there was a code malfunction that led to extra money taken from customers’ accounts – coincidentally totalling the exact amount needed to meet that month’s Pollen payroll … On and on it went until the wheels finally came off and the administrators were called in, to discover that the company owed about £78m to various parties who were unlikely to recover what they were owed.
Callum sent a breezy email to staff saying that he was sorry it hadn’t worked out. When Emily, senior manager of paid social (Don’t ask me what that is. I stopped acquiring new tech knowledge after email), who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer a month before her job and health insurance disappeared, was asked what she would say to Callum if she saw him now, she was clear. “I would say: ‘I want you to eat a bag of my shit.’” She has a delivery system worked out and everything.
Although it has managed to secure what seems like fairly damning evidence of the company’s rumoured mismanagement (at best) – including figures showing the extravagant expenses that continued to be racked up long after money was running short and exchanges about the code change that resulted in multiple payments taken from accounts – Crashed lacks any confrontation with the brothers or anyone else in a leadership role in the company, which leaves the viewer slightly underwhelmed and unsatisfied. No one interviewed – apart from Emily, and even her difficulties are largely glossed over – seems to have personally suffered much more than a few missed wage payments and a sense of betrayal by the boss who created an effective cult of personality. They are all young and able enough to have bounced back, and although Rosie, the former strategy and operations manager, mentions the losses (of rental apartments, mortgages and so on) of those further down the food chain, we do not hear directly from any of them.
The programme takes no broader view of the startup phenomenon, the investor madness, the lack of expertise that seems so common and yet seems to take these people so far – or what it means for us all to live in an economy in which financiers seem so easily persuaded to pour their – ultimately, our – money into snake-oil sales. I suspect many more bags of shit need to be eaten.
• Crashed: $800m Festival Fail aired on BBC Three and is available on BBC iPlayer.
