Julie Meyer's Trail of Failed Ventures and Alleged Scams

Julie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes. A California blond in a crisp, white shirt, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knee, she listens intently to the young man standing before her. As he talks, she sizes him up. Eventually, she tells him: “I’m going to make you an offer.” It could be a scene from a heist movie, but Meyer is in a BBC studio, shooting a 2009 episode of the TV show Dragons’ Den. A celebrated entrepreneur with a venture capital fund, she is ready to invest in whichever contestants catch her eye. For the viewers, she has some advice: “What is success? A lot of it is self-belief. Continuing on when most rational people would stop.”

This is an online spin-off from the original Dragons’ Den series, so the stakes are a little lower. But for Lex Deak, a 23-year-old with a big idea for a social media website, what happens in this room today could be make or break. He desperately wants to work with Meyer.

During the dotcom boom that tore through London like tulip fever in the late 1990s, Meyer was a big name. Apple’s brightly coloured iMacs were flying off the shelves, people were rushing to get online, and the web was becoming truly worldwide. For a short, thrilling moment, it felt as if anybody could start a tech business – and get filthy rich doing it.

At the centre of it all was Meyer’s monthly networking club, First Tuesday, where young hustlers with little more than a concept and a funky brand name could raise millions on a handshake, as investors scrambled for a piece of the digital revolution. Along with Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, founders of the online travel agency Lastminute.com, Meyer became the face of a movement, the star of a golden generation that was upending the male, pale and pinstriped world of British industry.

Accolades followed: the Davos forum named Meyer a “global leader of tomorrow”; the Wall Street Journal ranked her as one of the most influential businesswomen in Europe. She had a newspaper column, was recruited as a UK government adviser, and in 2012 was awarded an MBE.

For Deak, who had watched Dragons’ Den religiously, taking notes in front of the TV, Meyer seemed the ideal mentor. When she offered £20,000 for a stake in his venture, Family Fridge (like Facebook, but for families), he didn’t hesitate to say yes. “I was very keen to get her involvement, but very naive,” he says now. She gave him space in her office and introduced him to people. But the money? He never saw a penny.

“I was primed and ready to be the young, talked‑about tech entrepreneur. I’d been nominated as a rising star by the Institute of Directors. At the time, it felt like she had stolen an opportunity from me … it created a fork in my trajectory. She definitely did me a wrong-un.”

Deak says Meyer never gave him a straight no; she just kept asking him to revise the business plan. Of course, not all deals agreed on air work out – many fall through after the show, during the due diligence process. As time passed, however, Deak found himself offering support to a growing circle of people who say they were damaged by their own dealings with Meyer.

Over the years, the one-time queen of the dotcom scene has left a trail of trouble in her wake, with a series of failed ventures that entangled everyone from the former chair of Marks & Spencer to the prime minister of Malta. The Guardian has seen evidence of insolvent companies, unpaid wages, debts to suppliers and millions in lost investments. Those who admired and trusted her say they have been left with burning regrets, describing a seemingly endless cycle of seduction and betrayal.

A former associate describes Meyer as a “professional confidence trickster”. For her ex-boyfriend and business partner, the Swiss millionaire René Eichenberger, she is a “master of manipulation and false narratives … Once she gets exposed in one country, she finds new supporters who believe in her and help her move on to the next jurisdiction.”

In recent months, the Guardian has heard allegations of a darker nature against Meyer. Investors and founders say they have lost hundreds of thousands in three separate incidents, which they describe as scams.

Meyer did not respond to requests for comment. She has previously rejected any suggestion her activities are not above board. In her marketing, she describes herself as “one of Europe’s leading backers of entrepreneurs”, who has spent decades identifying transformational companies.

Despite years of controversy, she has kept the show on the road, hiring new teams and starting new ventures, all while releasing an endless stream of social media content to maintain her profile and seek out fresh contacts. “This will continue until the public sees who Julie Meyer really is,” says Eichenberger.

In a year-long investigation, the Guardian has followed the trail to London, Malta, Switzerland and Greece, gathering accounts from dozens of former staff, business associates and entrepreneurs. By speaking out, they hope their stories can serve as a warning.

London

If there was one place for a young and hungry entrepreneur to be in the late 90s, it was London: a Silicon Valley breeze was blowing into town, and the city was at the centre of Europe’s first internet frenzy. Tony Blair had entered Downing Street at the head of the first Labour government in 18 years, and the capital was swinging to the beat of the Cool Britannia pop‑culture revival.

“It was fabulously exciting,” recalls the author and former BBC tech journalist Rory Cellan-Jones. “I mean, the polar opposite of going to BP’s annual general meeting. There were a lot of parties. There were people becoming rich overnight in a way that we in this country were absolutely not used to.”

It was into this heady atmosphere that Julie Marie Meyer, armed with a US accent and a master’s from France’s prestigious Insead business school, first arrived in the UK.

Born in Michigan in 1966, she was raised in a small‑town suburb of Sacramento in California. Her father, a physician, insisted on a religious upbringing. According to Meyer’s own origin story, after graduating she left for Paris with $1,000 in her pocket. Meyer often recounts her parting words to her father, who saw her off at the airport. “He turned to my stepmother and he said, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be back soon. She doesn’t have that much money.’ And I spun around and said, ‘You watch, I’m gonna live over there the rest of my life. I don’t need your money.’

Meyer spent a decade in France, jumping from one job to another, before securing her master’s. Recounting those years in a blog, she says she became “obsessed with making money”. One day she was out driving with her boyfriend – 15 years her senior – when he pulled over and told her: “Stop talking about money. If you are good at something and focused on it, the money will find you.”

Meyer didn’t wait to be found. She crossed the Channel in 1998 and joined a venture capital firm where the boss, Thomas Teichman, reportedly rode a micro‑scooter in the office. Their hottest new investment was a travel website offering discount holiday deals. In March 2000, after just a few months of trading, Lastminute.com would make history by floating on the London stock market at a valuation of £571m.

Hoberman, Lastminute’s co-founder, had been approached to help run a networking business pairing tech-company founders with potential investors. Too busy to do it himself, he pitched the idea to Meyer. “She was very outgoing, she was very good at convening people,” he says. “I thought she was an operator, in the sense that she was a real networker.”

And so Meyer opened her address book and hit the phones. On the first Tuesday of October 1998, about 80 people gathered at the uber-hip Alphabet bar in Beak Street, Soho, London. “From that original meeting grew an organisation that was to spawn many of the dotcom investments of the following 18 months and itself grow into a multinational business,” Cellan‑Jones wrote in dot.bomb, his ringside account of an extraordinary period.

Hoberman and Lane Fox spoke at the second event, in November, while entrepreneurs with green dots on their name badges mingled with investors with red dots, looking to cut deals. Soon, the parties were so popular, they were hiring Lord’s cricket club. A chief executive was recruited, an American called Reade Fahs. He says he wanted the job because First Tuesday really stood for something; it was “commerce with a cause”. He describes Meyer as the driving force: “If you had to pick one person to give credit for First Tuesday to, it would be Julie … I hand it to her. She had vision.”

In the space of two years, Meyer and her co-founders turned First Tuesday from a cocktail party into a company and franchised it around the world. They claimed to have helped raise more than $147m (£98m) for startups, including the fashion retailer Boo.com and the beauty site Clickmango.

A self-described workaholic whose political views were firmly on the right, Meyer liked to describe First Tuesday as “my revenge on socialism”. But it was a short-lived triumph. In March 2000, stock market screens around the world flashed red. The dotcom bubble had burst. By June, Meyer’s investors were pushing for a sale, hoping to recoup their money. An Israeli company offered $50m in cash and shares. Meyer wanted to hold out and keep going, but her male co-owners thought it was a good deal, and she was out-voted.

In the years that followed, she would often talk of being dismissed and underestimated by men. In 2015, she told Harper’s Bazaar: “I think I’ve always been inherently distrustful of people telling me I can’t do things.” Proving her doubters wrong became a motivating force.

If First Tuesday was her revenge on socialism, Meyer’s next venture, Ariadne Capital, was about showing the world she could make it on her own. In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, headlined “Net’s queen bee still buzzes”, she set out her stall. Ariadne would host networking events and earn fees advising startups on how to find backers. It would also make some investments of its own.

As Ariadne grew, its boss spent lavishly. Meyer’s team moved to £10,000-a-month offices just off Trafalgar Square. For Meyer, there was a chauffeur-driven car, a personal trainer and two personal assistants – one at the office and a second to keep house. Successful businesswomen had to look the part, she told Harper’s Bazaar. “During the week, I wear … Ralph Lauren, Mulberry, Michael Kors … and Roland Mouret.” She saw her facialist – an expert in Indian alternative medicine – every Saturday “without fail”.

In 2009, Meyer launched her venture capital arm – Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs – the ACE fund, for short. Edward Wray, founder of the gambling group Betfair, was among the high-profile backers.

Rachel Lowe was hired in 2012, to help advise startups. When she arrived at the Ariadne offices, she says she found herself entering “a temple to Julie”: framed pictures of Meyer lined the walls. While the boss looked the part, Lowe says the organisation felt chaotic. “Everything was just an absolute mess,” she recalls. “There were just a lot of young people who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

Meyer, says Lowe, had a tendency to explode with rage at staff: “I knew whether Julie was in the office just through feeling something in the air … She ruled by fear.” Towards her, however, Lowe says Meyer was sweetness and light. At least, at first.

After a few months without problems, Lowe says Meyer began making excuses for not paying her invoices, eventually accusing Lowe of poor performance. Lowe brought a legal claim against her. The judge ruled in Lowe’s favour and awarded her approximately £26,000 plus interest and costs. By then, multiple staff and suppliers were also claiming to have not been paid. A PR agency sued for about £76,000, and settled out of court.

Writing anonymously on the recruitment website Glassdoor, a former employee claimed Meyer would sometimes hide from her creditors. “Once, when a supplier came to the office demanding payment, she snuck out down the fire escape.” (Meyer has previously said of the Glassdoor reviews: “There are a lot of people much more important than me who get written up on anonymous websites. Comes with the territory.”)

By the summer of 2017, Ariadne could no longer afford the rent on its offices. The staff were sent to work from home.

So where did it all go wrong? It seems the vision never quite matched the reality. At first, Meyer had talked of pulling in £60m for her ACE fund, but an investor report circulated in 2017 put the final total invested at just £7.6m. Controversially, the report states that more than half the money raised – £4.4m – was spent buying a 100% share in one of Meyer’s own ventures.

None of Ariadne’s investments produced a big return, and many resulted in a loss. A former employee, asked to put a value on a software firm Ariadne had invested in, says: “When I looked at it, it was snake oil. She understood about fundraising and schmoozing, but she did not understand the tech startup space at all.”

Under pressure from creditors, Ariadne went into administration in December 2017. Those with shares in the ACE fund found they were worthless. Meyer said at the time: “I remain deeply sorry that it was necessary for me to put the company into administration, especially given the consequences for employees and unsecured creditors.”

A separate group of investors – which included Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer – also say they lost out. Lawyers acting for the group would later allege that funds intended for investment in a digital marketing startup were paid into a bank account controlled by Meyer, and subsequently misappropriated to fund Ariadne Capital.

In their report, administrators for Ariadne found no assets, other than a few investments that they valued at just £2,528. Hundreds of thousands were owed to employees, a similar amount to the tax office – and a chunky £7,500 to the taxi firm Addison Lee. For Meyer, though, this was not the moment to throw in the towel.

Malta

While accountants untangled the mess in London, Meyer was already on to her next venture. By the summer of 2017, she had installed herself in a suite at Malta’s five-star Westin Dragonara hotel. On the top floor, her staff commandeered the business centre as a temporary office.

She acquired a Maltese company with a licence to manage investments. Soon, she was telling the press that Ariadne Capital Malta was going to raise a €1bn European fund.

To attract the cash, she needed to make some noise. So Meyer convened a summit, assembling startups and big money investors from around Europe. The prime minister of Malta spoke at the glittering summer launch, in the ballroom of the Dragonara hotel. On the terrace afterwards, Meyer held court, smiling as investors milled around, ready to op