‘I’m waiting for Hollywood to tell my story’
As Friends Reunited closes for good, the site’s reclusive co-creator – who made millions in its Noughties heyday – tells Peter Stanford why he’s finally happy with suburban life
‘Mark Zuckerberg is a geek just like me’
It’s happened to Mark Zuckerberg and it’s happened to Steve Jobs, but Steve Pankhurst is still waiting for Hollywood to come calling at his semi in Barnet. We are yet to see a big-screen celebration of his internet-age success story. Yet in any roll call of the pioneers of the e-era, this 52-year-old software engineer is surely right up there, with his rags-to-riches tale of dot-com glory.
Back in 2000, from his back bedroom in suburban north London, Pankhurst, his wife Julie and friend Jason Porter launched Friends Reunited, a social networking site before the phrase had even been uttered. Within a year, 2.5 million people had signed up to get back in touch with old school friends. At its peak, 23 million were using it.
In 2005 ITV bought the site for £175 million, making the Pankhursts and Porter rich beyond their wildest dreams. But this week, after years of being eclipsed by the slicker, smarter Facebook, Friends Reunited called it a day. It was Pankhurst who issued the death notice on his blog, having returned to the business in 2014 in an ultimately futile effort to revive its fortunes.
“Take Mark Zuckerberg,” Pankhurst muses on the Facebook founder. “He’s a geeky developer just like me. Except that nowadays geeky techies are almost cool. In fact they’re the new cool. They’re celebrities. When I was first doing it, you were just a geek. I wish I could be cool now, but I’d just be the cynical one sitting chuckling to himself at the back of the room.”
That would require him to be in the room in the first place, and Pankhurst is, by his own admission, a bit of a recluse. Despite the tidal wave of obituaries for Friends Reunited, he has resisted all offers of face-to-face interviews, finally agreeing to meet me in typical geek fashion on Skype – with only the sound on.
“By nature,” he apologises as I stare at the blank screen, “I’m not someone who likes standing up in front of people. There are some in my industry who have gone on to make themselves into a brand name, but I am the sort of person who just wants to disappear. When we sold Friends Reunited in 2005, I never wanted to do another interview in my life.”
In its heyday, it was Steve’s wife, Julie, who was the public face of the site. She had come up with the idea while on maternity leave in 1999 with the first of their two daughters, after using the internet to trace her long-lost grandfather. “She was a natural at it,” he recalls of her presentational skills, “whereas someone wrote that I sounded like a broken record player. In fact, she’s
probably listening to me now, saying all this, from the next room.”
At which stage he abruptly gets up from his computer and disappears, returning a few moments later to report that his 13-year-old daughter has been eavesdropping. The domestic interlude seems to have relaxed him a little and he briefly relents and switches on the Skype camera. A bearded, bespectacled face stares back at me. Wearing T-shirt and jeans, he is hemmed in by shelves of books and DVDs.
“I’m still a geeky developer,” he says. “I’m just a sponge for all new technology. I’ve got them all here – Twitter, Facebook, Slack. I keep in touch with my daughters on Snapchat. I’m probably the only 52year-old to use Snapchat. That’s me being sad again.” I can’t decide whether he is playing up to a stereotype or just being honest.
So is this, I wonder, the same back bedroom from which Friends Reunited was launched? He laughs. “No, we moved, but its only half a mile away, and it’s still a semi, only a slightly bigger one.”
My question appears to have crossed a line in intrusion. The Skype camera is clicked off. Pankhurst’s voice, though, remains warm, selfdeprecatingly charming, and even occasionally confessional.
He studied maths at Imperial College, London because he didn’t know what else to do. “It was what I was good at. And my first job [at GEC] just happened to be as a software engineer, because of my maths, and then I stuck with it because, again, I didn’t know what else to do. I have never been a natural programmer.”
Good enough, though, to launch one of the most successful websites of the Noughties. “Jason and I always described ourselves to each other as cowboys. Like a cowboy builder who puts up dodgy walls, we were building dodgy sites. When we set up a consultancy in the 1990s, we called ourselves VCS – Visual Computer Solutions. Or as we said, Very Crap Solutions. We were fast and cheap. I probably shouldn’t tell you that.”
So what has he spent all those millions on? “We’ve tried to keep grounded. I’m not materialistic. What the money did was give me time for experiences – nice holidays as a family, or doing challenges I set myself. I know I’m sounding sad but I’ve been walking to Land’s End and back in stages over the last 10 years, usually about once a month, with a couple of mates.”
No round-the-world cruises or fast cars? “No,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m just boring.”
Instead, Pankhurst has filled the gaps between his walking excursions by becoming a “business angel”, investing in the next generation of techies trying to follow in his footsteps.
“I started doing it 10 years ago, but not very well. I was putting my money into start-ups where I enjoyed using whatever they’d come up with. So it was all mainly to do with sport or music. [He is a lifelong Spurs fan and has digitised his entire and vast collection of vinyl.] But that’s a bad way of investing, I’ve now learnt.”
For the last three years, he has immersed himself in what he calls London’s “tech scene”. “The youngsters I invest in teach me as much as I teach them,” he says modestly. “I try to guide them into allowing start-ups to bed down a bit, not to go off with wild ideas too quickly, to be cagey. I’m very conservative, really, which is not ideal for an entrepreneur.”
In 2014, Pankhurst and Porter were persuaded to renew acquaintances with Friends Reunited. Its new owners, Dundee-based publishers DC Thomson, who had bought it from ITV in 2009 for just £25 million, recruited them to breathe new life into the declining site. As we now know, they failed to save it.
“There’s always been a cycle to these sites,” says Pankhurst. “We lasted longer than our contemporaries like Bebo and Myspace. I was a bit disappointed it closed. We had believed we could put it back to what it had originally been for – so that people could find people – and we did that pretty quickly. But so many of the details of people registered were out of date. And now there are just so many other ways to find people.”
He seems philosophical about its closure, even when I broach the bad publicity Friends Reunited received. At one stage, it was blamed for a spike in the divorce rate on the grounds it encouraged classroom sweethearts to rekindle romances.
“I suppose that sort of thing has always happened,” he says. “When everyone first got telephones, it was a great thing, but then the telephone could be blamed for divorce. You can’t blame a communications tool for marriages ending. It’s ridiculous.”
Pankhurst currently has a new venture all of his own to nurture. No Porter – “he’s taking time off carracing” – and no Julie. “I’ve tried to drag her in, but she doesn’t want to be involved.” Liife is a site that will enable users to plot their lives through key moments by sharing pictures and mementos.
“It feels like scratching an itch to be successful again. And I’ve been getting such a buzz from it,” he enthuses. “Creating something is a fantastic feeling.” Another Friends Reunited in the offing?
He chuckles. “It would be nice, but I am a realist.”