BOOK REVIEW: The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insaneby Randall Lane; Portfolio; £19.99 (€24)
TOWARDS THE end of The Zeroes– Randall Lane's generally entertaining tale of woe about his time as a magazine mini-mogul catering to Wall Street billionaires in the first decade of the 21st century – he finally gets round to affixing blame for the implosion of Doubledown Media, his appropriately named media company.
Advertisers “weren’t merely holding back, but actively shunning us . . . Wall Streeters were the bad guys . . ? For all my manic scrambling looking for a cure – social media! merger! electronic distribution! – we had contracted a fatal form of corporate cancer.”
What Lane never gets around to admitting – but the reader can easily surmise – is that Lane appears to be one awful businessman.
After a stint at Forbesmagazine, Lane started – and soon buried – P.O.V., a publication focused on the young and ambitious (in other words, a dry run for what was to come).
His luck seemed to change when he met Magnus Greaves, a Ferrari-driving bear of a man and wealthy London hedge-fund manager, who could not wait to throw some of his money at a magazine catering to young traders.
Trader Monthlywas an instant sensation, Lane is happy to report, especially after the two men decided to throw a lavish launch party at Manhattan's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in November 2004, overlooking Central Park.
Here some 800 people jammed into the place, swilling Moët, Chivas and smoking Davidoff cigars.
The magazine quickly won a cult following of sorts among traders hoping to be featured in its glossy pages, and high-end advertisers hoping to relieve those same traders of a large portion of their exorbitant compensation.
From that auspicious start, Lane then leads us through the path of his self-destruction – the decision to buy Private Air, a fledgling rag catering to those who only fly "private", the decision to start Dealmaker, a clone of Trader Monthlyfor the MA guys, and so on.
What is mind-boggling, however, is the number of poor business decisions Lane makes.
Why would he waste so much time and money trying to do one deal after another with Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball player, a seemingly deranged, formerly gritty star who is known as “Nails” – as in “Tough as . . .”?
The warning signs about Dykstra were everywhere, Lane notes – perpetual unreliability, out-of-control spending on homes and private jets, and the recutting of agreements – but he still ignored every one of them.
Lane shows us more examples of his equally poor judgment by developing relationships with a handful of dubious business partners.
The reader knows how these interludes will end, even if Lane seems not to at the time.
Predictably, Lane loses pretty much everything in the wake of the financial crash of 2007 and 2008, when in 2009 Doubledown is liquidated: the $233,000 (€182,000) he invested to cover early payrolls, the $50,000 he loaned during 2008, the $130,000 or so he had to pay to settle with his landlord, and the $115,000 he had the chutzpah to borrow from his mother, to whom The Zeroesis dedicated (and to whom the proceeds of the book will go until she is paid back). In sum, he flushed $530,000.
What Lane once thought was worth $25 million was auctioned off in the autumn of 2009 for $55,000. Incredibly, what Lane doesn't lose is the support of his wife, Jennifer Reingold – a former Fortunereporter. Reingold is the real hero of the book.
How she put up with her husband’s business shenanigans is a question Lane does not address.
The closest we get to seeing how wonderful she must be comes from Lane’s all too brief mention of her in the acknowledgments: “Passionate individual, devoted mother, amazing editor.”
William Cohan is author of House of Cards, and a former investment banker
