Fling Fling CEO Marco Nardone.
London-based social media app Fling burned through $21 million in less than three years.
Fling never brought in any revenue.
The founder splashed out on 1st class flights, Ibiza hotels, and Michelin-star restaurants.
The app struggled after Apple pulled it from the App Store last summer for becoming too sexually explicit.
In early July 2015, temperatures were rising in the boardroom on the top floor of a 12-storey office block in Hammersmith, West London.
Marco Nardone, the 28-year-old CEO and founder of social media app Fling, had called an emergency meeting the day after his app was removed from the App Store by Apple for being too similar to the notorious Chatroulette platform.
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The atmosphere was tense and Nardone was furious, three former employees said, because his COO, Emerson Osmond, had gone behind his back. Specifically, he was angry because Osmond had told Nardone’s assistant, Kris Gillet, not to order tents for the office that would allow staff to sleep by their desks and work around the clock to get Fling back onto the App Store, a former employee told Business Insider.
Nardone shouted and swore at Osmond before squaring up to him as if he was about to do something more, said two former employees. At this point, Nardone’s Italian father, Remo Nardone — a man in his eighties and Fling’s biggest investor — stepped in to try and cool the situation down, one of the employees said. But his son didn’t react well. He swore at his father before hurling a Pret a Manger baguette in his direction. It narrowly missed and collided with a glass window above his head. The event was described to Business Insider by four former employees.
In the lead-up to the incident, Fling — a social media app that raised $21 million (£17 million) from investors — had become inundated with explicit photos. Built by a London startup called Unii, Fling allowed people to send photos and videos to strangers around the world. The random recipients could then chat and reply to the sender. The app also showed “Flingers” a map of where their Flings had landed.
At its peak, Fling claimed to have 4 million users on its app, who sent a total of 50 billion messages. However, the revenue-free company burnt through the last of its millions in August 2015, according to documents produced by bankruptcy administrators.
The app — built by up to 50 staff and backed by a network of wealthy individuals from the UK, Italy, and Asia — struggled to retain users. Mismanagement at the top of the company was a major issue, according to nine former employees that Business Insider has spoken to over the last three months.
Several of them said they believed Nardone’s behaviour changed significantly during Fling’s lifetime, while others told stories of mysterious girls around the office and wild party weekends. But more on that later.
After failing to secure the funding it needed to continue, Fling quietly shut down in August 2016, based on bankruptcy administration documents submitted to Companies House by Unii Limited.
Nardone told Business Insider he refutes what his former colleagues have told us, but he declined to comment further.
Fling started out as a social network for students
In 2012, Nardone set out to build a social network for students called Unii from an office on Berkeley Street in London. That’s the Berkeley Street that adjoins the legendary Berkeley Square in Mayfair, where a nightingale once sang for Vera Lynn. It’s the capital’s most expensive neighbourhood.
The 28-year-old only child — who attended the £37,000-a-year Charterhouse boarding school before studying physics at Imperial College London — worked as a trader for Credit Suisse for a year before becoming a technology entrepreneur. His father is the multimillionaire founder of Enotria Winecellars, a successful wine business that distributes wine and spirits to bars and restaurants around the UK. “Marco felt pressure to live up to his father,” said a former Fling employee. In person, Nardone was hyper, ambitious, and volatile, our sources said. He had the ability to charm investors and would-be employees, but several former staff said they ended up scared of him, citing his unpredictable moods and confrontational approach as major issues.
Describing the concept behind Unii to Tech City News on a speedboat in the River Thames in October 2014, which is where Tech City News got entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas, Nardone said: “Unii.com is a social network made exclusively for students in UK higher education and it allows students to better engage with individuals and societies at their university or college.” The platform included a jobs board, opinion polling, accommodation matching, society pages, and student offers.
TechCrunch
The Unii platform.
Nardone secured approximately £1.5 million from his father to help him build and launch Unii.com, according to a former employee, who added that he went on to receive a total of around £5 million from his father for Unii.com and Fling.
Things started off relatively well at Unii.com. “The culture of the company was great, the team was a good mix,” an ex-employee said. “However, from the top, it was built to feel like a university startup built out of a dorm room. I think it envied what Facebook had become, and wanted to emulate what they had done.”
Unii.com attracted 100,000 UK students within six months of going live, according to Nardone. But the entrepreneur said he had a flash of inspiration for Fling while on a flight to Hong Kong in January 2014, which ultimately led to the demise of the Unii.com platform.
“While I was staring at the flightpath map on my seat screen I had one of those insane moments where my fingers couldn’t type my idea fast enough on Notes,” he told TechCrunch. “What if we shook up the messaging structure? What if you could ‘fling’ a private message out to the world, and literally see it fly and land all over a world map – much like the one I was looking at on my British Airways seat screen. By the time we landed I had already prototyped the designs for Fling.”
YouTube/Tech City News
Marco Nardone in London in October 2014.
When Nardone returned to London, he pulled his engineers off the original Unii idea. He assigned them to build the Fling app and moved them into a new, top-floor office in Hammersmith — far from Mayfair — that had the ability to accommodate more staff. The new HQ was roughly 15 minutes walk from his riverside penthouse apartment at Distillery Wharf.
Fling was built in less than four months between March and July 2014. When Nardone felt it was ready, he took it upon himself to set it live in the App Store in July without consulting other people in the company. “Marco made decisions completely on his own to the point where the tech team didn’t know what he was doing,” a former employee said.
Fling was getting ‘a thousand users every 10 minutes’
Almost immediately after the launch there were thousands of people signing up to Fling on a daily basis, according to a former employee. “I remember seeing the signups just going up, and up, and up, and up, for the app,” they said.
“We were pretty chuffed because we were being told ‘this is all organic’ or ‘I’ve only spent a few hundred pounds on a few Facebook ads’ and the numbers were shooting up like a thousand [users] every 10 minutes.” It later turned out that considerable sums of money had been spent on social media marketing campaigns in order to get these users, according to three former employees and documents submitted to Companies House.
Fling’s tech team wasn’t anticipating the initial strain on the company’s servers and Fling’s infrastructure buckled.
“Our tech guys had no clue what was going on so things started to fall over and Marco started to show his true colours and lose his rag on a regular basis with the tech teams,” said a former employee. “He’d shout and scream and throw things across the office.” These claims were supported by four ex-employees.
“The ego took over,” said the same employee. “The perceived success took over. He was likening himself to Evan Spiegel, the Snapchat guy, and all this bullsh*t.” Another employee said Nardone used to compare himself to Elon Musk.
Apple banned Fling after nudity became a big issue
Anonymous ex-Fling employee
A photo that Marco Nardone uploaded onto Fling.
Insufficient computing resources weren’t Fling’s only problem.
Within weeks of launching, people were using the app to send nude photos and sexual material to strangers.
In an early review of the app in July 2014, TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas wrote: “The most obvious use-case — beyond shiggles [sh*ts and giggles] — appears to be as a virtual hook-up app to find remote sexting buddies to photo-message to one-on-one.”
Lomas later updated her story to say: “Well that didn’t take long; the first five replies to my inaugural Fling included one picture of a penis. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
In September 2014, three months after the app was released, a moderation team was hired in the Philippines to vet photos on the platform. There were about 10 people moderating Fling content at any one time, according to a former employee, who said Fling was paying the moderators about $20,000 (£16,000) a month in total.
Nardone kicked other male users off the platform who posted inappropriate photos of themselves on the app.
“They couldn’t even have a photograph with their shirt off,” said a former employee. “Unless it was him. He would then boost himself to everybody on the [Fling] database.” Nardone would regularly walk around the office with his shirt off, according to multiple former employees, and had a topless portrait of himself stuck to the ceiling.
As Nardone clamped down on male nudity, he allowed female users to “pretty much do what they wanted and actively encouraged it as well by boosting pretty girls and stuff like that,” said a former employee. “Guys were getting booted off the app as soon as they approached it while girls were getting absolutely trolled as soon as they were on it. It was just a spiral.”
In June 2015, as the company struggled to deal with sexual photos, Fling was pulled from the App Store by Apple. Apple hated the fact that Fling was a randomised messaging app that was similar in many respects to the notorious ChatRoulette, according to a former employee.
Anonymous ex-Fling employee
Apple emailed Fling to tell the company what it didn’t like about the app.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Nardone told Business Insider’s Matt Weinberger at the time, referring to the day he found out his app had been pulled from the App Store. The removal took Nardone by surprise. He found out while having an unrelated a conversation with a would-be venture capital investor. As he reached for the investor’s phone to show him how to download the app, one of his executives stopped him, muttering “no, no, no.” As Weinberger wrote at the time, “a perplexed Nardone made it through the conversation. But when he asked the employee what had him so agitated, he got the worst news that an app startup can get: It had been removed from Apple’s App Store.”
On the day, Nardone asked staff to work late so they could address the issue. The CEO turned up in the middle of the night with two women that staff had never seen before and took them into a room, according to three former employees.
Commenting on the evening, one employee said: “He came into the office around midnight, with two girls I’d never met before in my life. He proceeded to be in the social space, which we had as a chill-out room. It had a big company sofa and [fake] grass on the floor, big screens, all that sort of stuff. And he basically frolicked, for want of a better word, with these girls in that room, sending out Flings of the two girls kissing.”
Fling
The Fling app.
Unsurprisingly, Fling’s employees were not able to fix the problems with the app in one night.
For 19 straight days, Fling’s team worked all hours of the day and night trying to build a new version of the app that met Apple’s guidelines.
Nardone wanted to put up tents in the office so that staff could work longer hours. When Fling’s COO told him that this might be a violation of UK employment law, there was a heated debate in a boardroom that ended up with a baguette being thrown at Nardone’s father.
As the engineers worked on the problem, Nardone went to Ibiza with two other members of staff, according to multiple sources and Instagram posts like this one. While in Ibiza, Nardone and his staff stayed in a suite at the Ushuaïa beach hotel, which is one of Ibiza’s premier hotels, complete with an open-air club.
One former employee said the trip was to a “supposedly quiet beach to have a relaxed weekend so they could think about stuff.” But while in Ibiza, Nardone took them partying.
The ex-employee added: “[It was] full on, full-scale, Avicii partying, which is well documented,” the source said, referring to a concert they attended featuring the Swedish DJ.
“Ok FIIIINE Avicii, I’ll fly over to see your opening party tonight pfff
The post Inside the crash of Fling, the London startup whose founder partied in Ibiza while his company burned through $21 million appeared first on Business Insider.
