On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake
Julie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes.
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.
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.’”
