Picture this. I'm standing on a wobbly chair - one of those cheap, gold-painted banqueting chairs you find in hotel ballrooms. The chair is right in the middle of the dance floor of the legendary Rainbow Room, on the top floor of the Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, way above the studios of the NBC network (I saw Conan O'Brien in the lift).
I think it's around 1996 but I guess it could be even earlier.Through the panoramic windows I can see the Empire State Building, the whole of downtown, the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island in the bright morning sunshine (I've been here an hour but it's still only 8 o'clock in the morning).
I would love to stand and stare from this oddest of vantage points butI can't. I have two minutes to present my business to the assembledventure capitalists, fund managers, lawyers, accountants, relocation consultants, recruiters... and quite a few stationery suppliers. Behind me is a queue of maybe 20 entrepreneurs. Ahead of me 10 or 15 people have already stood on the plush-upholstered chair for a chance to pitch this crowd - a weekly gathering of people they suspect might have what they need - a couple of million dollars of cheap capital for their start-ups.
Two minutes isn't long so I gabble and repeat myself - I have no script and I didn't plan to do this. I came to schmooze, to find some useful New York contacts, to find a possible American launch partner for our little London-based web design studio but I definitely didn't anticipate joining the line for the chair.
Something came over me I suppose - ambition for my business, a bit of greed maybe - but I think it was mostly just curiosity and amazement. Coming from distant, cool London, the idea that people might meet (paying good money too) at 7 o'clock in the morning for this kind of torture - open mike capitalism - was so stunning that I just had to try it, to find out what kind of lunatic would do it, what it would feel like to climb onto the chair...
In the end, a combination of my English accent, adrenaline-fuelled panic and total lack of chutzpah meant that no one in the room even understood what I was saying, let alone reached for their cheque book.
When I got down from the chair the crowd applauded and cheered just like they did for all the others but their faces said: "Huh?". On later trips - on the East Coast and in Silicon Valley - I would make more presentations like this - and with the same degree of success.
In the trendy, inky black interior of a hotel in the shadow of the World Trade Centre I presented to another group of money minders in their standard issue Chinos and blue shirtsleeves. This time no distracting views of New York and no wobbly chair. I had a 20 minute slot, printed "leave-behinds"', about 1,000 business cards and the obligatory Powerpoint presentation.
The format was cruel: at 15 minutes a green light changed to amber, at 18 to red and at 20 minutes the microphone went dead and the next guy started to unpack his presentation. That's it. Sudden death.
The worst part was still to come, though. I packed up and went to my "break-out room", a conference room with a white board - Perrier and pretzels provided - and waited for the stream of eager investors. No one came. Not one. The door opened once: "sorry. Wrong room."
Torquemada could hardly have put on a crueller show. After 20 minutes the next guy came in and we chatted while he waited for his audience. No one came. Later we learned that the people selling a cool "push media" concept down the corridor pulled a big crowd. We failed the basic test - we just weren't glamorous enough.
Looking back on those strange meetings from the other side of the bell curve of boom and bust, on each occasion my main motivation wasn't the money or the likelihood of getting a US foothold for my business. I think I was falling in love with this exotic and utterly alien way of being, with the whole business of American optimism, openness and self-creation.
In those strange meeting rooms I took a crash course in the American way and learned that I liked it. I don't like everything about America - America in times of war is a particularly unlovable place and Oscar ceremonies could just as easily come from another planet as from the other side of the Atlantic - but there's no going back now.
America is still unshakably the centre of the world economy and when the recovery comes I'm pretty sure they'll be setting up that chair in the middle of the ballroom again and the next generation of mega-IPOs and killer products will be lining up to climb onto it.
