Tuesday, 26 December 2000 – Riversoft’s Infamous Xmas Party
Christmas has been and so has your birthday. You got so many presents! All that R. and I got was champagne and cheese (from Angela). I suppose once you become a parent presents are hard to come by. Not to mention that I hate the madness of Christmas (buy, buy, buy) and try to avoid it at every cost. I just cooked us a Sunday roast instead yesterday and the 3 of us had a really relaxing day. We bought you a little bike and took you out for a walk, but it was so bitterly cold that we came back pretty much straight away. I’m going to spend the next three months indoors if I can.
Your grandma Linda came over for a few days around your birthday and then she was gone again. Time really flies when she’s here. She’s dying to leave Ken (her husband) and we are trying our best to convince her to do so, being as Ken is such a horrible man. So she’s had a pretty sad Christmas up in Manchester, just her and Ken. She didn’t even bother inviting Warren, as there would have been a bad atmosphere… She has gone to the council and asked for a flat, hopefully she’ll be out of there soon. We thought it would be nice for her to move here, but what about all her friends? It would have been great for us, as she would be here to look after you all the time, but I don’t think she would have been happy. It would get very complicated whenever we moved out of here, as we would need a 3 bedroom flat/house. We just wouldn’t be able to afford it.
You are watching Jungle Book for the 100th time! Even I know the songs now… My favourite song is the one the Orangutans sing! I just love it!
We had a big party at work on the 9th of December. I managed to get two mates from work (Dave and Mindy) to invite two of my friends, as each employee could bring only one person with them. So Angela and Shelley (Angela’s flatmate) came. I know Angela from Uni. This party was a masked affair, so we all had to wear masks. A lot of people also wore fancy dress, but not me. I wore a metal gold top (I always wanted one!) and sparkling trousers. My outfit looked great even if I say so myself!
We got to the party around 9, and missed the dinner, so we all had empty stomachs. The place was packed already. Some guys were dressed up as women, Mindy was wearing a traditional Indian costume. Dave was dressed as a medieval knight, with a massive sword. Phill Tee was dressed as a Roman General. Matt Pritchard was dressed as the Joker and his girlfriend was the Catwoman. Glen’s wife (he’s the office manager) was dressed as a nurse, drunk out of her mind, hanging from Mindy’s arms, When I was next to them the photographer came along and snapped a picture of Mindy’s and Glen’s wife’s tongues touching in the air! Mindy had to run after the photographer later and ask him to burn the negative. Although it was an innocent tongue touching exercise, it wouldn’t have been funny to see that picture in the cold light of day. Anyway, Glen’s wife was so gone, that Glen took her home shortly after, and it was only 10 pm!
The drinks were free flowing as in all Riversoft events. I started with champagne, and spent the rest of the night drinking the evil red drink. I don’t know what was in it, but it was delicious and I thought that if I stuck to one drink I wouldn’t get a hangover the next day.
Our office has rooms named after the 7 deadly sins (Phil’s idea). So on the top floor is Heaven, and the play room is Hades (it’s in the basement). The main party was in Hades. In Gluttony there was a table full of profiteroles (hundreds!) and people had to find a coin inside them by having their hands tied up and searching with their mouths. When R., Angela and I went there, Simon was devouring the profiteroles (Simon sits next to me at work) with a passion. I had one and gave up because they were sickly. The ‘keepers’ of the room gave me a coin anyway, so that I could go to Lust (which I never did, I don’t think).
Angela had to eat 5 before she found a coin. People were leaving the room with chocolate moustaches… We went to Heaven and I got a lovely foot massage. R. had a hand massage. Mindy was laid next to me and (we were pretty drunk by then) we had a laugh attack, not sure why. We were laid there laughing our heads off for a good five minutes. I got up and put my boots on and was just hanging around with Mindy and Shelley, waiting for Angela and R.. We got told off for talking too loudly (it was supposed to be a quiet room) a few times, but soon enough the whole room was far from relaxing. The party was happening there as well. My PGL (manager) Abdul came up with his wife, and I tried talking to them but probably made no sense as they soon moved away from me (they don’t drink at all).
The fire alarm went off and I zoomed down the stairs. Then it stopped and I came up again. Nobody else had even moved… I didn’t even stop to wait for anybody! I was pretty drunk by then. rom then on things are at first a bit blurry, and then non-existent. The last thing I kind of remember was arguing with R. who was upset that I kept disappearing. I had just spent ½ hour in the women’s toilet talking to everyone that came in, hugging Jacks (the receptionist), telling her how wonderfully funny her e-mails are, and when I got back R. started giving me his paranoid thoughts.
I thought I managed to convince him that, no, I wasn’t shagging anybody for the last 30 minutes or so and we went dancing. I kept falling on the floor, and R. kept picking me up, and I kept falling again. I remember going to Irene (the only other woman developer, since Bronagh went to America) and crying, saying how we should be friends and have lunch together and drunken sentimental bullshit. She probably thinks I’m mad! She works there and so does her husband (Ed) and they’re from New Zealand. After that I remember brief moments.
I remember crying more, and someone telling me that I didn’t have to go home with R., I could just stay somewhere else, and they’d look after me. It was Paul and Chris White, talking in my ear. Then I remember Jo Simpson picking me up and saying “time to go now”. I also remember dancing with Jo Simpson and her boyfriend and giving her a massive hug for organising such a wonderful party. In fact I remember hugging a lot of people, that’s what happens when I’m really drunk, together with the crying. The next thing I know it was morning. I was in bed next to you and my mum, not wearing my gold top. My head hurt really bad. I went downstairs and found R. in the spare room. It should have been Angela and Shelley lying there. Where were they? I had to lie down because I was a mess. Later R. woke up and told me he hit someone, but didn’t know who he was. What happened? I finally got up after throwing up in the bin next to the bed (R. put it there earlier because he was feeling sick too). I couldn’t find my glasses or my bag or my phone or my jacket…
Angela phoned, they had stayed at some bloke’s house they met at the party (he didn’t work for Riversoft). Shelley got off with Dave, and Angela with the guy who lived in the house. Angela is supposed to be in LOVE with her boyfriend. She said that R. had been kicked out for using one of the rooms as a toilet (she was there next to him when it happened…). She didn’t see R. hitting anyone probably because she had gone inside to look for me. R. said he hit this guy (not too hard, more a push) because he seemed to be laughing at his misery. R. said he was distressed because he had been kicked out of the party and couldn’t find me anywhere. Apparently, I then came out, argued with R., and wasn’t going to get in the cab with him. Angela was watching me from a ‘safe’ distance. She said that suddenly I got in the cab and she said she was staying at the party, and we left. I remember being outside and people around me, but that’s it.
On Monday, back at the office, I was asking people if they knew what happened. Apparently Tim was sat in the sofa with his girlfriend. I sat next to him, said hi, and passed out on his lap! I just fell asleep on his lap. He said that he just left me there, and his girlfriend wasn’t impressed. Dominic said that I made him go and look for R. because I couldn’t find him anywhere. Angela said R. made her look for me as he couldn’t find me either (I was probably asleep). It’s only happened on one other occasion that I couldn’t remember most of a night’s events. I’m sure they put something in that drink, like every spirit under the sun! R. asked me to apologise to Chris White because apparently he was only trying to cool the situation down and R. was rude to him.
I also e-mailed everyone asking if they had found a pair of glasses. When I came in the office my bag and jacket were there, only my phone was missing together with £20.00. Luckily I have a spare pair of glasses. I phoned out to cancel my phone but their systems were down, so I couldn’t do it.
In the afternoon I walked past reception and Jacks asked me to have a look at the lost and found bag. There were lots of masks there, but at the bottom were my glasses, my phone and my little hand bag, with my tobacco and lighter still there! Needless to say I was ecstatic! I lost my dignity, self-respect and memory, but the material things were still there.
On Tuesday I found out that R. hit P. Baker, he’s been working there for a long time. R. had told me it was more a push, so I just forgot about it. I e-mailed R. Phil’s picture to make sure he was the guy that he hit, and R. said it was. On Wednesday, P. Baker came up to see me. He asked me what I knew about the party and I said I had found out the day before R. had hit him, but R. said it wasn’t a bad hit. Phil then said that R. was lucky he wasn’t prosecuting him, because R. hit his girlfriend too. I said there was no way that R. hit his girlfriend and asked him how he hit her. Well, apparently, when R. hit P. Baker, he accidentally headbutted his girlfriend when he got pushed back and she got a black eye. Which is unfortunate, but R. didn’t hit her, and that pissed me off.
Anyway the conclusion was that R. was supposed to write Phil’s girlfriend a letter of apology. I was pretty shaken and pissed off with R. and P. Baker (he was saying that if R. worked there he would have been sacked and that we hasn’t welcome anymore to Riversoft’s parties – who the hell is he to say that?) . Anyway I know that R. is not violent and he may have lost it because he was drunk but he wouldn’t have gone for P. Baker unless he had said something bad. Although hitting him was wrong it is, in a way, understandable. So R. spoke on the phone to P. Baker, apologised, but he still wants R. to write a letter, which R. hasn’t done yet. He better do it though. I just feel sorry for P. Bakers’s girlfriend with a black eye. P. Baker himself looked intact, I was scanning his face for a bruise and there was nothing. It was very unfortunate that his girlfriend was standing next to him when it happened.
I had a couple of bad days at work walking around, wandering who knew what happened, who didn’t. People kept coming up to me asking if I found my glasses… A couple of people mentioned the incident with P. Baker and how R. could come to another party as long as we wore a straight jacket. So now they all think he’s a thug.
That same week, Wednesday 13th (your birthday), Riversoft became a public company and floated on the market. The shares started at 94p and shot to 130p on the same day. Meaning that Phill Tee, founder of the company and owner of 9%, made £25 million in one day (were he to see his shares, of course). So he was on the newspapers and the press were around Riversoft. Article in the Sun – below:
Tesco checkout Mum’s Rich Son
Computer genius Phil Tee, whose mum works at a Tesco checkout, notched up £25million on paper last night.RIVERSOFT, a computer firm Phill founded, made its stock market debut.
Phill, 33, owns 10% of the shares, which shot up to 125.5p, after being issued at 95p, valuing the firm at nearly £250million. And he promised to buy his mum Barbara something nice for Christmas.
Phill, from Litchfield, Staffs, told The Sun in his first press interview: “This won’t change my life, but hopefully mum won’t have to work on Tesco anymore if she doesn’t want to”.
Married Phill grew up above a corner shop owned by his father Arthur. He has a first class degree in Physics and reads books on algebra when he goes on holiday.
He and his wife Fiona have two daughters: Isabella, 2 and a 2 week old baby who has not yet been named. She was born on the day Phill had to go on the road to promote his company to City investors.
Phill founded Riversoft on St. Valentine’s day, 1997. Only 13 people worked there then but now there are 230 in London and San Francisco. The staff are also celebrating as they own a fith of the company. And Phill took the original 13 out for dinner.
Riversoft specialises in internet “protocol network solutions”. Phill explained “One of the problems with every company that has computers is that, from time to time, the network goes down. We reduce the amount of down time.”
Customers include US computer giant HEWLET-PACKARD and German engineering and electronics company SIEMMENS.
The article in The Sun came out on the 14th of December. On Sunday, The Telegraph printed this, and it even mentions the party!
writes Amanda Hall
It is 11am on Thursday and Philip Tee and I are in Heaven. It is a curious place – nothing like I had imagined Heaven to be at all. No fluffy clouds, no blue sky, no white robes, no golden harps lying around, and not even a whiff of a scented candle.
For in the world of 33-year-old Philip Tee, Heaven – which is what it says on the outside of his lilac-painted door – is an office at the top of a brick building on the Lower Richmond Road, a few miles west of central London and opposite a densely populated cemetery.
It just so happens that on this particular day, Heaven for Tee is also a state of mind. Last Wednesday, the day before we meet, he floated Riversoft, his computer software business, on the London Stock Exchange and joined Britain’s small but growing band of technology brains on the high seas of the public markets.
Caption under Phil Tee’s photo: “I once spent four months in my underpants, with a case of Jack Daniels, writing software”
By the end of the first day’s trading, the company he founded in a Chelsea basement four years ago which designs and sells software to monitor networks and root out faults before they wreak too much havoc, was valued at £295m. On paper at least, that put a price tag of £26.5m on the 9% of the company owned by Tee and his wife, Fiona. A sufficiently heavenly number, I would have thought, for him to be feeling pretty good about life.
Yes, today of all days, Tee, the youngest of five children born in Lichfield in Staffordshire whose dad was an electrician by trade and whose mum still works on the checkout at her local Tesco, should be feeling pretty pleased with his lot. “Would you like to have a look around?” he asks just as we are settling ourselves in Heaven. If the red-bellied piranha fish I spotted in his reception on my way in are anything to go by, it could be an entertaining tour.
We set off, leaving Heaven behind, head down the stairs and back through the door marked Stairway to Heaven for a whirlwind tour of Riversoft. “There’s a story that I once spent four months in my underpants, with a case of Jack Daniels, writing software,” he says as we zip past lots of brainy-looking software engineers, glued to computer screens. “But it’s only partially true.”
Before I have a chance to ask whether the true bit was the underpants or the Jack Daniels, we arrive at a meeting room called Sloth, Elsewhere there is a room called Lust, one called Pride, Avarice, Gluttony (which is where he put the accountants who worked on the flotation) and a basement called Hades complete with its own bar, a pool table, dart board and arcade machines.“It was my idea,” he says when I ask him if we should read something deep and meaningful into his decision to name every meeting room after the seven deadly sins, of Dante’s Inferno. “It’s just about my love of the macabre.”
Later he reveals that at his 30th birthday party he turned his house into Dracula’s Castle, hung a surgical skeleton in his hallway and went round all evening with a boa constrictor called Kevin around his neck. He is also heavily into what he calls Ripperology. “Yeah, Jack the Ripper,” he says. “I just love unsolved mysteries.”
But back to Sloth. Is it a sleeping room for exhausted programmers? “Sloth, yes, people go there and sleep,” he says, opening the door on an unslothful-looking meeting his office manager is holding. “She’s fantastic,” he says, closing the door. “She organised our Christmas party. We had ferret racing in Avarice. People could bet on the races but we lost one of the ferrets and we think it’s still in the building somewhere.”
And what exactly happens in Lust, I wonder as we charge past. “Training,” says Tee. “People lust after our software, you see.” At the Christmas party things apparently got a little more heated in there with a 1950s peep show on offer. Meanwhile, if you wandered into Gluttony, you ran the risk of being handcuffed and made to eat profiteroles.
It is hard to imagine, but Tee set out to be an academic. “At the age of 20, my plan was to go to some European university and find a nice quiet corner to wile away the rest of my life battling with theoretical concepts,” he says. “And here I am! I think I must have got drunk one night and got on the wrong bus.”
It’s a nice story but, sadly, not true. The defining decision that influenced how Tee became chairman and chief technology officer of a £270m (by Friday’s close) company and not an academic physicist grappling with the finer points of spin conservation at the sub-atomic level, was one based on love.
He got his degree in chemical physics at Sussex University and had been offered a place to do his PhD at Edinburgh University, “To be a great physicist you need a great mentor. Peter Higgs, a man who had a particle named after him, wanted to be my tutor at Edinburgh,” he says. “Peter Higgs! This was my big break!”
But Tee’s girlfriend, who later became his first wife, was still at Sussex and he did not want to be separated from her so he turned down Higgs and Edinburgh. “That was the end of my academic career. I started my PhD at Sussex under a complete idiot and lasted a year. I wanted to solve problems, understand something. I wanted to exit my life with a greater understanding of the world around me. But I was surrounded by people who were not interested in sharing that journey with me.”
So one day he walked off campus and never went back. Instead he took a job as a software engineer in Redhill. The Life and Times of Philip Tee would make a fascinating story – partly because of the things that have happened to him and partly because of how he tells it – with drama and feeling. Even at 33, he seems to have gone through more than most people get through in a lifetime.
He eventually married his university girlfriend but they divorced 10 months later. Then he married Fiona, his present wife, who was the finance director at MicroMuse, the last company he worked at. Three weeks ago, they had their second child, which is why he is wearing “New Dad” cufflinks.
At MicroMuse, a Nasdaq-listed software business, Tee became great friends with Christopher Dawes, the company’s maverick founder, but later fell out with him spectacularly and left the company to set up Riversoft. He made about $2m selling his 2.5 per cent stake in MicroMuse.
Then, last year Dawes, who made about £100m from Micromuse and lived a lavish, extravagant lifestyle, died when his MacLaren sports car crashed and exploded. He was facing drugs charges at the time. Months before Dawes had given his father a list of names of people he thought wanted to kill him. “I was probably one of them,” says Tee. “He was paranoid about me. It was a commercial paranoia, yes.”
The pair did not patch up their differences before Dawes died. “He was the missing person at this party,” says Tee. “There is a cadre of people at MicroMuse who see me as a traitor for starting another company and maybe they blame me for Chris’s demise. You always think maybe I could have moderated him a bit but I sober up very quickly by picking up my little girl. Had I stayed there, the kids wouldn’t have been born, Riversoft wouldn’t have happened. There’s a danger in getting too maudlin about the past. You have to move on.”
When I ask Tee how his story began he takes it literally and says: “Maternity Ward B, Victoria Hospital, Lichfield.” And then he starts telling me about the time he met the midwife who delivered him and how Lichfield is the most amazing place that used to be a brothel for the Roman Empire and how Dr Johnson was born there and a branch of the Darwin family come from there and how they burned the last witch there.
“I remember it because I was six,” he says. “No, not really, it was in 1541.” It’s enough to make you think he was a Lichfield tour guide. “These kind of things fascinate me,” he says and tells me about a chemistry set he used to keep in his bedside cupboard and how his dad is his real hero.
“He rose to be pretty senior in a light engineering company and ran the production floor and then he went barmy and decided to run a corner shop. He said whoever you work for, they’re an idiot So work for yourself because at least you know the idiot.”
Ask Tee about his hopes for the business and he sounds like the giants in Silicon Valley who believe their technology is changing the world. “I’ve always felt there was room for a really big company in the network management space that could do everything,” he says. “I set up Riversoft to be that company. We’ve always been a bunch of people with a mission – and our mission is to take over the world. What do I mean by big? Multiple billions of dollars of turnover and an organisation of 10,000 people worldwide.”
Compared to where he is today, that is a tall order. For the nine months to September, Tee’s company had revenues of just £2.8m and some 200 staff. Mind you, for a man who works in a place called Heaven, anything is possible.
8 October 2000: RiverSoft goes for £400m flotation
So there you have it! Work is going well, I might get a pay rise (I’ll find out on the 11/01/01) and will use my bonus to buy shares with Riversoft. I got 8,000 share options and a period of 4 years in which to buy them. I buy them at the original price (94p) and just hope they’ll go up in a couple of years. Who knows, might get enough to buy a nice house! The shares have gone down during Christmas to 113.5p (remember they went up to 130p) but I have faith in Riversoft. Plus I won’t lose any money, I can, at any time, just get the money back. I have also got a pension, and a direct debit so I can save money for you every month. I’ve learned that the years fly by very fast indeed and I better start putting money aside. I don’t want to be poor when I retire!