Firekart
plus ça change, plus c'est la même

International Bright Young Things, Revisited. March 2010

Interview with Brad Hatchett, Part One: Bogata. April 2010

The Next Big Thing? - April 2010

International Bright Young Things, Revisited

Reproduced with kind permission from Hello! Consultant magazine
March 2010

By Michaela Viaduct

Los Angeles, Milan, Hammersmith. A decade has passed and yet this alluring triad of metropolitan dynamos still is synonymous with one category-busting mother of a company, Firekart.

In this special commemorative series, written with the approval, full disclosure and funding from top Firekart executives, we explore how commerce was changed forever by the vision and daring of six of the smartest graduates ever to have taken non-mainstream subjects at provincial universities. Their passion, resolve and insight resonates with our collective experience and shines a light on alternate go-forward options in these turbulent times.

It is said that the most powerful ideas emerge contemporaneously at the same time in different places. How much would a shrewd investor have paid to known that one of those places would be the slightly shabby public bar of the Four Horseman public house, an ancient and rarely renovated drinking establishment in Hammersmith, West London? But on this the seventeenth day of March exactly twelve years ago as I write, two Firekart employees happened upon an interlocking circular pattern - made on their table by the removal of empty glasses - that was a catalyst which would cause the unleashment of events which in turn had significant consequences.

I happened to be dining with friends in the adjacent lounge that night, and on finishing my Stolichnaya and Bollinger, I immediately caught up with Lucien Receivable, the then (and I confess still now to me), poster boy of the phenomenon that is Firekart. Here are my notes, verbatim, from that evening:

MV: Lucien, clearly you must be delighted by this evening's outcome, how do you feel things went for you?

LR: Michaela, seminal moments don’t come everyday, so don’t expect a scoop each time we happen to be out of an evening at the same venue. However, on this day we have realised that it's the connections and nodes that are important. Furthermore you can’t underestimate the importance of the nodes. per se. We see this as being relevant to our nascent plans to overthrow the management of Firekart as it stands now and how we can reach more customers for our clients, our client’s clients and so on and so forth. We've just sketched out some detailed business plans for leveraging the relationships between the important business contacts we have and their contacts who they are always meeting when their schedules are too full to meet us. That's just the start, this thing can reach the masses, the kids and the greybeards.

MV: Are you able to give us a revenue projection for that last idea given a large amount of initial funding?

LR: We see incalculable social and commercial benefit with some negative amortisation, it’s a category killer and we’re the prime movers in uncharted territory. We will travel down a long road of enlightenment strewn with speedbumps. potholes, landmines and other such challenges. My colleague will reveal our end game in exactly thirteen years and thirteen months.

It is this broad vision which this unlikely duo continues to espouse that I hope to capture in these vignettes; I'll dwell at length on their impact on how we live now, my narrative inter-woven with cautionary tales from the flawed web logic of last decade.

Next time, external players in the rise of Firekart’s global digital influence: I’ve booked my tickets to Bogata, (I always get a cold), and I’m hoping for an exclusive interview with Firekart mentor, Brad Hatchett. Hasta Luego.