At this very moment, back in Philadelphia, Jain's market research professor is giving a midterm exam, which Jain will have to reschedule, at the cost of a 20 percent penalty. Pourbaba and Medwell are in better shape; they e-mailed their assignments for their classes at the University of Southern California just under the wire this morning. (Shriftman is off the hook entirely; he graduated last year.) The boys haven't had much time for school this semester.
Brouwer tells Jain that he is applying for a job at the giant real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
"Did you call Bruce?" says Jain. Brouwer hasn't.
"Jelle," Jain says, locking sunglassed eyes with him, "if you want a job at Cushman & Wakefield, we can make it happen like this." He snaps his fingers. "Honestly, Bruce is one of my closest, closest, closest, closest friends." Jain is referring to Bruce Mosler, a self-described "passionate fan of Ankur's" and Cushman & Wakefield's chairman of global brokerage. As the beers arrive, Brouwer asks Jain to make introductions to Mosler over e-mail, and Jain gladly agrees. "Cheers, guys!" says Brouwer.
A bicycle glides by, pedaled by a distinguished-looking middle-aged man.
"The CEO of Shell just rode by on his bicycle!" Brouwer declares.
"On a bicycle?" says Reid.
"You should have stopped him and introduced us, asshole!" Jain says.
Brouwer shrugs. "David's father knows him."
Reid goes back to bringing Jain up to speed on Kairos developments. "Hilary made us advisers to the Center on Entrepreneurship." He means Hilary Halpern of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Jain assumes he means Hillary Clinton. "I wrote this, like, article for the State Department," he says. "It's being distributed around the world, every embassy."
"Solé shoutout!" says Pourbaba.
"I wrote it about young entrepreneurs around the world," says Jain. "I wrote two paragraphs on these guys," gesturing to Shriftman and Medwell, whose bicycle company, Solé Bicycles, sells stylish, inexpensive Chinese-made bikes.
Medwell and Shriftman smile at Jain and put their hands together in mock prayer and bow. Brouwer orders more beers.
What a couple of months it has been for Jain and friends. It all started in February, with the third annual Kairos Summit in New York City. More than 350 students attended the gathering, which included events at the United Nations, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and at the Rockefeller Estate. On Saturday afternoon, there was a bit of downtime, so the bros took a group of new Dutch friends, the very people they will be hanging with here in The Hague for five days, for brunch at the über-exclusive bistro Bagatelle, at which champagne-tipsy models were literally dancing on tables in the middle of the day.
In early March, they and 10 other friends put on Snowball, a multiday music festival in Vail, Colorado. Then they went as a group to Ultra, the massive house-music festival in Miami, Shriftman's hometown. For the duration of Ultra, Shriftman and Medwell operated a pop-up store for Solé Bicycles; they sold fixed-gear bikes by day and hit the clubs all night. Thanks to Shriftman's connections—as a kid, he DJ'ed at all the big Miami clubs, and his older sister, Lara Shriftman, started the fashion public relations firm Harrison & Shriftman—the gang found themselves one night in the VIP section of a club called Liv, where the cover was $500 and tables were available only to those ordering more than $5,000 in bottle service (they didn't pay a thing). A sanguine Russian at the table next to them bought them two bottles of Moët each.
It was at Ultra that they met a great bunch of guys who were sharing a big house on Miami's gated Star Island. One of the guys was Elliott Bisnow, who puts on something not altogether different from Jain's Kairos Summit, called the Summit Series. And Bisnow invited them and a few other friends to attend, as delegates of Kairos, an exclusive cruise/conference called Summit at Sea, at which they drank champagne with Peter Diamandis, the head of the X Prize foundation, and Troy Carter, Lady Gaga's manager. They listened to talks on the beach about things like lucid dreaming—the idea that you can control your dreams—and took part in a yoga session led by Def Jam founder Russell Simmons.
And now they are in The Hague, where they will network with Europe's power elite, earnestly attend panel discussions, and set up business meetings—all the reasons their parents paid for their plane tickets. They will also drink and dance all night in Amsterdam's best clubs, flirt shamelessly with women, and have one hell of a good time. It's a total win-win, the latest produced by Jain's big, beautiful perpetual-motion win-win machine.
Privileged young men are nothing new. It's not extraordinary that Jain and his friends want to chase women, hang out with their friends, experience the best of everything, and maybe someday change the world. (It's not extraordinary, either, that when they are talking business, there are very few women around.) The difference with these guys is that they believe they can do it all at once, very soon, with one magic word: entrepreneurship.
Some fathers dream of making their sons football or tennis stars. Ankur Jain's father, Naveen, groomed him for the world of business.
Naveen grew up in poverty in India and immigrated to the U.S. in 1983. In 1996, when Ankur was 6, Naveen left his job as a program manager at Microsoft and founded the Web listings company InfoSpace. Every day after school, Ankur would join his father at the office. As the company's fortunes soared with the dot-com boom, Naveen, whom Ankur remembers as regularly working 20-hour days, showed Ankur the ins and outs of running a large, fast-growing corporation. He would take Ankur through the company's marketing and sales and customer service departments, explaining what they did. When the company prepared to go public in 1998, Naveen took him to investor presentations. He had Ankur sit in on executive meetings and didn't hesitate to stop a meeting to ask the boy what he thought. Once, he had Ankur sit in a room off his office, close enough to listen, while he fired an employee. Then he solemnly explained to the boy why it had to be done. When Naveen hosted dinner parties for Seattle's rich and powerful in the Jains' 16,500-square-foot home down the street from Bill Gates's, he would have Ankur pitch his business ideas to the guests.
By seventh grade, Ankur had started his first Web company, Starnium, whose site offered desktop wallpapers, jokes, and games for young Web surfers. Soon he added other webpages, with names like Bored.us and Myonlinequiz.com. "I was trying to do what my dad did with InfoSpace a little bit," Ankur says.
But just as InfoSpace rode the dot-com boom, so, too, did it collapse with the bust. By the beginning of 2001, the company's stock had plummeted 98 percent from its high. Shareholders and the press started circling, accusing Naveen of misleading investors. In 2002, he was ousted as CEO. In 2005, when Ankur was 15, the local paper published an investigative series titled "Dot-Con Job: How InfoSpace Took Investors for a Ride."
Ankur felt, and still feels, that his father was wrongly accused. He points out that when Naveen settled a shareholder suit, for $65 million, he never admitted wrongdoing, and that the SEC filed an amicus brief in the case on Naveen's behalf. But he does feel his father, who now runs a company called Intelius, which does background checks, did make a mistake of a certain sort. "My dad was never a networker," Ankur says. "He knew everybody, but they were people he did business with, not real friends. That would have been helpful when people started making those false accusations—to have that trust."
