Back in 2016, the week after Britain voted to leave the EU, I sat opposite Rupert Murdoch for the most important meeting of my life.
A year earlier we had taken £2 million in venture capital funding and pitched up in New York to spice up the earnest world of college journalism, just as we had done back home. We hired 20 people, got an office in Brooklyn and toured the country recruiting students.
This American adventure yielded plenty of scoops, readers and funny stories, but precious little in the way of revenues. We burned through the money at an alarming rate, and soon The Tab was down to its last few months of cash. I’d spent most of the spring going up and down Manhattan with my begging bowl, trying to persuade venture capital funds that a graph which was flat was in fact going up, but to no avail.
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