Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Glesby went three months without work, burning up savings. She joined Neteller by fluke. In university, Steve Lawrence and his roommate had become fast friends, and they remained so afterward. Lawrence’s roommate married a woman with a sister named Danielle, and Glesby’s brother had married Danielle. That’s how she heard about a job opening for something called “FedExing.” She had no idea. “I just knew that I’d be helping them because it’s family, and family is friends, and friends need help, so maybe we can help each other out.”

On Glesby’s first day, October 23, 2000, she was half an hour early and self-conscious about looking desperate for work. “Hi, Meranda Glesby. I’m supposed to have an interview with Steve Lawrence?”

“Well, come on down!” said Lefebvre. “Have a seat with me.”

Glesby went behind Lefebvre’s desk and pulled up a chair. Lawrence had mentioned the family connection to him.

“So ya wanna work here?”

“Yes.”

“Well, when can ya start?”

“Anytime.”

“What about right now?”

That was Lefebvre’s interview. If you’re good enough for Steve you’re good enough for me, so let’s get to work. Glesby became the first Neteller employee to receive a payroll check. She worked long hours and could take it. She could dish it out, too. She was tough enough to hang out with the boys. They let her hang out with them most of the time after hours. Sometimes they left her behind, but not often.

Glesby says, “I guess there were a few questions. I don’t even think John looked at my résumé. My first impression was that he had a playful side to him but was also at peace. I felt an instant closeness, like, This is one cool boss! This is going to be a great gig! It was like a friendship.”

Lefebvre showed Glesby the website before passing her on to another woman in the office who could teach her the system for sending out FedEx checks. Two shifts later, that woman moved on and Glesby was in charge of FedExing. “That was a big difference for me, working there. It was like a loft. In the office, they had snowshoes on the wall, patched walls, and open brick. We played Hacky Sack for breaks. I got in there and played a few times. Steve was known for having good tunes and he’d pass them along to John. Back then Napster was popular in the office, so we’d get the music going.”

Lawrence, about a decade younger than Lefebvre, was the boss — straight-looking, a bit pudgy, balding on top, a business guy, serious — but he had a dark sense of humor. Lefebvre says:

Steve’s fortieth birthday party, you know how they sometimes make a binder of historical photographs for birthdays, and there was this one picture of him when he was sixteen. You know how you see pictures of Homer Simpson in the Bachman-Turner Overdrive days, when they show Homer going back to those days, and it looks so weird because he has hair, like he’s wearing a wig. That’s what this picture of Steve looked like. He looked like himself in every way except that he had this mop of hair sitting on top of his head and he was sitting at this little table with stacks of coins piling them up and counting them, probably from doing gardening or selling lemonade, who knows?

I went to a Christmas party at his place around the same time. It might have been the first time I met Jeff Natland, probably around 1997–98. Jeff would have been sixteen. I remember it was the eve of Christmas Eve, a December 23 party at Steve’s house, and his parents were there and a lot of their friends, and Steve’s friends and some of their kids were there. Steve had six Frank Zappa CDs on the changer. That’s what they listened to for Christmas music, Zappa on random.

Lawrence loved Zappa’s satire and the Onion , the small satirical paper out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. By this point the paper had been around for a decade, but going live on the web in 1996 boosted its national exposure. Lefebvre thought the business side and the satirical side of his partner weren’t irreconcilable: “You could be a Frank Zappa fan or an Onion fan and come to the point of view that nothing really matters. It’s all bullshit. I don’t think Zappa felt that way about stuff, but if you’re an it’s-all-bullshit kind of guy, that humor is attractive. Steve was quick to call bullshit on stuff.”

During the initial hiring period, October 2000 to February 2001, Neteller turned itself into a small, tight-knit, dedicated group. They worked long hours but didn’t take themselves too seriously. Glesby recalls:

We would be playing Hacky Sack, and here’s Steve’s little desk — so tiny, so modest — and he had the worst chair in the office. So many times the Hacky Sack hit his computer, or hit him, or hit his paperwork. You could definitely tell in his face and in his behavior when it was time, you know, “Uh-oh, I’m going back to work.” Steve didn’t mind the Hacky Sack, but for him it was, “Hey, don’t take advantage of the situation — get your work done.” We’d always go down and meet at the Keg or get our coffee at Mac’s or the 7-Eleven. Or my cigars. Every day we’d walk to the Royal Bank downtown on Eighth Avenue and pick up money and send checks and do FedExes. Everything was manual then.

The girl in charge of the Neteller account was super-nice to us, and she told me she was going to quit the bank. I said to her, “Oh my goodness, we totally need you!” And so I went back to the office and told them Cindy was quitting and they hired her for Neteller. That’s kind of how it went, a lot of referrals. I referred a friend, who worked there for a little bit. Then Steve Glavine referred Mel — Melanie Robinson — so she was there in the first three months. Rob was the only real interview.

Rob Eltom answered an actual want ad he’d noticed in the Calgary Herald , making him what he described as the first hire “outside nepotism.” It was the cheapest want ad money could buy: E-commerce. Great remuneration. Call Steve .

Eltom had been pouring concrete at bowling alleys and other mid-sized work sites and was looking for something a little less backbreaking. He’d done some oil field surveying “up in Bumfuck, Alberta.” He’d done landscape construction. He’d been a pizza chef. He’d worked since he was twelve years old, starting with a paper route. He’d just always worked. That was what you did. You want money, kid? Get a job. He bought his first car, a 1980 Toyota Celica, at age sixteen. He had the car in his parents’ driveway before he had the insurance, which cost another $700. He put twelve miles on the car — backing it out of the driveway, driving it back in — until he could afford the insurance to make the car street legal.

E-commerce? Eltom didn’t know anything about e-commerce. Never heard of it. Never even used email. He’d used and understood computers well enough, so he called “Steve.” Instead, he got Lefebvre. He tried again later. Lefebvre again. Always Lefebvre. “Steve,” whoever he was, never seemed to be around to do interviews.

Finally, Lefebvre said, “Hey, why not just swing by?” Good idea. Off he went. Neteller was situated directly above a bar/restaurant, he noticed. Hey, that’s cool. Upstairs he met Lefebvre, who started running through the essentials of signing up accounts. “There’s the phone,” he said, nodding to an empty desk.

“What about the interview?”

“Don’t worry about it, just start calling,” said Lefebvre.

“It was just ‘Game on!’” Eltom recalls. “It was a great place to work. And, well, you can’t not like John.”

Glesby says:

I remember the day John hired Rob. John says, “Okay, hop in, let’s go,” and we drive around downtown in John’s little RAV4. We stop at his house to get something and then we stop at Staples — maybe we needed ink.