It is not a particularly professional way to approach an interview, but before I met Alex Tew I reminded myself that I mustn't like him. He is the 22-year-old who took the Web by storm last year with his Million Dollar Homepage. This fiendishly simple idea, which saw Tew selling tiny slices of advertising space on a site that everyone suddenly wanted to visit, made him more than US$1 million in less than four months. He is clever, modest, funny, rich and single. See? Loathsome.
I told Tew all this the first time we met, 13 months ago. We were together for less than two hours and we watched his online bank balance swell by more than US$1,956.
"It's criminal, isn't it?" he agreed.
The following month he rang me to say his idea had just brought in US$100,000 that day.
"Go away," I said.
It is a measure of Tew's generosity of spirit that he invited me to meet again to discuss his new big idea, something that could make him another US$1 million every few months.
And it is an idea that could see the Million Dollar Kid make lots of other people dollar-millionaires too, while at the same time making hefty donations to charity.
To explain how it works, we must go back to August last year when Tew came up with his first big idea. He was 21 and had been avoiding college for three years, bouncing from job to job before landing a place on a business course at Nottingham University in the middle of England.
"My accommodation and fees for the first term were [US$13,695] and I realized I was going to be broke," he said.
"I don't know why, but from the age of eight all I've ever wanted to be is an entrepreneur. I sit in bed at night brainstorming -- that's when I get my best ideas. So on this night I wrote down, `How can I become a millionaire before I go to university?'" he said.
"I wrote down the attributes that this idea would need -- it had to be simple to understand and to set up, it had to attract a lot of media interest and it needed a good name. After I wrote them down, the idea just came to me. I would like to say it was more dramatic than that, but it wasn't," he said.
The idea was the Million Dollar Homepage (www.milliondollarhomepage.com)
Tew set up a website on which he explained that he was a young Briton about to go to university who needed to raise money.
He didn't want charity so instead he was offering to sell one million pixels (the dots on a computer screen that make up images) on his web page at US$1 each. There was a grid measuring 1,000 x 1,000 pixels which Tew offered to sell in minimum-size blocks of 100.
Advertisers were invited to buy them and post their logos on the space. When visitors clicked on a logo, they would be whisked to the advertiser's own homepage.
A press release sent out by Tew was picked up by the BBC and then news of his novel idea went "viral" over the Internet. The more people heard about the site and visited it, the more advertisers wanted to buy pixels.
"I had to employ a couple of friends to maintain the website while I did dozens and dozens of interviews," Tew said.
"Last November, my elder brother Mike [he has three] and I were asked to go over to the States, and there I was doing interviews with people like ABC news radio and then Reuters TV in Times Square. We got a nice hotel and a people carrier, and I found myself being interviewed through an interpreter on Cuban radio. The whole thing was surreal," he said.
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