After On

by Rob Reid

  As for Giftish.ly, its lack of anything to entice perk junkies has been fine up to a point. Infant startups have an inherent mystique, Mitchell’s a charismatic recruiter, and Kuba has a magnetic reputation, both as a developer and an engineering manager. All of this drew solid talent—particularly before their service’s debut (pre-launch companies having a special allure to some). But as the months dragged by with no perceptible traffic spike, the bloom drained slowly from the rose. Canny recruits troll sites like Alexa to gauge a startup’s user traction, and Crunchbase to track its fundraising. So just a few momentum-free months will lend a certain odor to a startup in the eyes of potential hires.

  Not that Giftish.ly’s hiring just now. Indeed, they’ve been losing good people since September. Danna’s right-hand designer started the exodus, and she’s been covering for him ever since. Next, two not-bad engineers took off. Then in December, a software architect named Jimbo left for a LinkedIn spin-off. He was a quarrelsome twit whose facial topiary placed well in the annual World Beard and Moustache Championships; who painted his left fingernails black, cut his own hair, and refused to accept direct deposit for paranoid reasons he’d lay out in five-page rants larded with ENTIRE PARAGRAPHS IN ALL CAPS! (which Mitchell dutifully read but never quite fathomed). But he was one hell of a programmer. Coding is a dark art, whose greats excel in logarithmic ways. So while superb accountants might grind out the output of two, or even 2.6 average accountants; and likewise the best plumbers, lawyers, and bartenders; stupendous developers routinely do the work of five, ten, or even (Steve Jobs famously claimed) twenty-five mere mortals. Jimbo was one of those edge cases, and they’re in no position to hire another like him.

  Now January finds Team Giftish.ly sheltering from foggy Farallon winds in an office whose low-rent vibe has gone from feeling scrappy and virtuous to desperate and mandatory. The sole benefit of this no-budget drudgery is its undeniable appeal to tight-fisted investors. This may just help a smidgen this morning, when #GreenSprout C@pital’s M@naging P@rtner, Founder, C:>iefInvestmentOfficer, sole LTD.partner, and solitary employee arrives for the board meeting. No doubt the jackass’ll be exactly seventeen minutes late. It’s like his trademark. He adopted it after reading that this interval optimally heralds the latecomer’s importance, on a blog called Persuadifi.er, which promotes techniques for dominating beta males and females.

  Sure enough, Mitchell and Kuba are twiddling their thumbs at 9:10. And at 9:12. And 9:14. Then at 9:15, Kuba flatly says, “Of course it was them.”

  Kuba’s a habitual spouter of non sequiturs. Having decoded them for years, Mitchell instinctively scans his memory for topics to connect to this one. Last night’s discussion about who created the magic glasses in the bar, for instance. “You mean Phluttr?” he assays.

  “Those people give me the creeps,” Kuba confirms. He’s generally averse to social networks. Enough so that he absented himself from them entirely for years, until co-founding a social-gifting company made this professionally untenable. It’s not moral distaste but personal skittishness. As he often states, he just doesn’t like being surveilled. Early childhood behind the rusted Iron Curtain seeded this aversion. Kuba was then surveilled more meticulously still as a teen—here, in the land of the free! As a direct result, he was then exiled (yes, exiled!). Remarkably, this never soured him on the US (intimacy with Soviet rot being a strong inoculant against anti-Americanism). But he shrinks from sites that track user preferences and histories too comprehensively, and no site is more invasive than Phluttr.

  “The creeps,” Kuba reaffirms at 9:16.

  At precisely 9:17, Harold Pugwash waddles in. Chubby and rather beady-eyed, he’s a full head shorter than Mitchell. He’s just “Pugwash” to everyone, including immediate family—and also non-immediate family, which is to say Mitchell, who is one of his many cousins.

  “Your email said we’ll be doing some kind of technology review,” he grumbles, thunking down across the table from them. “What’s the point? You guys’re fucked, you’re an acquihire! No one cares about tech in an acquihire. They only care about the team! So why don’t you just give me a roster of your engineers and let me get on with my day?”

  Kuba shoots Mitchell a seething look, making zero effort to hide his scorn for Pugwash. Kuba was still in high school when they first met, and Pugwash gave him the worst career advice ever proffered from one human being to another (and I do mean that quite literally in dollar terms, as we’ll see). More recently, he’d heard countless anti-Pugwash screeds at Google. Pugwash had preceded him there by many years, but though long gone, his name still rang out in its hallways. You see, Fortune’s a bitch with a great sense of humor—and so she made Pugwash a ridiculously early Google hire, which scored him a commensurately ridiculous stock package. Of course, all companies make hiring boo-boos. But when the true greats make them really early on, some real knuckleheads can get moronically rich. This effect produces plenty of accidental tech millionaires. Some accidental gazillionaires, too—but only a smattering of Pugwashes, and the man is rather famous. Some take his exquisite luck almost personally. Not merely those who worked far harder for far lesser bonanzai (although to be clear, those folks’re plenty pissed). But also those who are even richer still through their own godsends of timing, genetics, or happenstance, and have since fetishized a vision of the industry as an immaculate meritocracy. Those who fancy that they earned every dime of their tech fortunes through talent, toil, and daring (which is almost everyone who has one) regard any whiff of the lottery (Pugwash, for instance) as a PR liability.

  Mitchell starts the meeting. “We’d like to begin by taking you on a deeper tour of our technology, as we think this’ll prove that an acquihire would be a terrible mistake. Because as you’ll see, we may be on the cusp of a massive breakthrough.”

  “I hope that doesn’t mean you think you’re getting another dime out of me,” Pugwash snips. “Because Giftish.ly is already the biggest capital investment I’ve ever made.” This is no exaggeration. Pugwash’s industry nickname is Fiddy—as in Fiddy-K, in honor of the fifty-thousand-dollar investments he tries to foist on any Google alum who starts a company. Enough have said yes over the years (along with graduates of Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, and the other companies he stalks) that his portfolio is a bit like an index fund of startups from 2004 to the present. This could well be the greatest vintage in the history of entrepreneurial equity. So if Pugwash’s initial fortune annoyed his early cohorts, his current one must be robbing them of the will to live.

  But Pugwash blew way past his standard fiddy-K for Giftish.ly, offering them ten times that sum the moment he got wind of the company’s formation. It was indeed the scale of this bet that prompted Mitchell to resist his better instincts and accept his cousin’s capital. From a sheer logistics and brain-damage standpoint, one big check is always better than lots of teeny ones; and most of the angel money on offer to them was in small denominations. Pugwash’s relative generosity at the time had everything to do with Kuba’s reputation within Google and nothing to do with family loyalty. Indeed, it had nothing to do with generosity, as his true agenda was connected to #GreenSprout C@pital. With hopes of turning it into a proper fund, Pugwash was then making bigger bets on fewer companies while also taking his first board seats. This turned out to be a brief phase, as nobody he called on had the faintest interest in backing #GreenSprout. Which was a catastrophic mistake for them, as his one other large investment from that phase will soon become the single most lucrative angel investment of all time (and again, we can blame that cosmic bitch with the great sense of humor). More on that in a bit.

  Mitchell launches his first slide—a simple visual representation of how their Animotion technology works. “We briefly discussed Animotion when we first pitched the company to you. I’d like to go into some more depth today.”

  “How ’bout the thirty-second version?” Pugwash asks, shunning Mitchell’s PowerPoint for his new phone, which is the size of a serving platter. />
  “Well, the basic concept is rooted in evolutionary psychology.”

  “I said seconds, not eons,” Pugwash grumbles, but pulls his eyes from his screen.

  “It all starts with the fact that thinking is expensive from the standpoint of natural selection,” Mitchell continues. “The brain consumes 20 percent of the calories that humans eat. And while intelligence enabled humanity’s survival, our ancestors were in a constant race against starvation, too. So their brains only got so big.”

  Pugwash gets it. “Being smarter gets you more to eat but only up to a point,” he says. “Then there’s diminishing returns.”

  Mitchell nods. “And if human brains devoured double the calories, grandma and grandpa wouldn’t have found twice the nuts and berries. So our ancestors’ brains grew until they hit a certain equilibrium.”

  “Which means humans are a lot stupider than maybe they could be. Which explains Republicans.”

  Mitchell gives this thigh-slapper a courtesy chuckle. His cousin is the most relentlessly politically correct person he knows and misses no opportunity to denounce the right (as well as the center, and for that matter, the center-left). This posture is so safe and common among tech elites that it’s dictated by conformity as often as principle. Pugwash himself is about as idealistic and committed to empowering the vulnerable as an Abu Dhabi housewife with three Filipina slaves staffing her kitchen.

  “As a result,” Mitchell continues, “human thought is full of shortcuts, patches, and hacks. It has to be. Because it runs on a fixed budget, and we face countless mental challenges that cavemen never dealt with. Brain MRIs are now so sensitive that researchers can actually see some of these shortcuts in action. And many are driven by emotions we evolved over eons on the savannah. For instance: you don’t compute the number of calories that an enemy caveman stole when he swiped your brontosaurus burger. You just get mad and bash his head in. Then the other cavemen don’t derive the expected value of grabbing your next burger. They’re just scared of you and don’t dare. Meanwhile, you don’t quantify the benefits of your newborn cave-son living long enough to help you hunt, eat, and conquer enemies. You just love your kid and do everything you can to help him survive.”

  “Unless I’m a Tea Party douchebag. Those people just aren’t human!” His catcalls aside, Pugwash is now fully engaged. Though lazy, his intellect is also robust, and Mitchell has perfected a concise yet chatty style that really draws him in. As dumbest guy in the room, he has to come up with ways to be useful, and this one’s a biggie.

  “The point is that millions of years of natural selection baked these emotions into us. But we never built them into computers. Which didn’t matter when computers were just adding up columns and transferring data. But now we want them to find our soulmates. Decide who should live or die on a battlefield. Or allocate scarce resources amongst deserving people.”

  “Or, in the case of Giftish.ly’s noble purpose, figure out which MP3 in your catalog’ll get the hot chick down the hall to cock a leg,” Pugwash says. “If you’re like, some sexist, rapey frat boy.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Mitchell says, managing to sound like he’s savoring an astute and subtle point. “Anyway, Kuba’s wife’s research seems to show that emotions run much deeper in analytical processes than anyone previously imagined. And that an emotional substrate is actually essential for all sorts of analysis.”

  “So then why don’t I burst into tears whenever I do a jigsaw puzzle, or whatever?” Pugwash snorts.

  “Because that requires raw linear cognition rather than oblique reasoning,” Kuba says, sincerely trying to help. He then clams up, as if this is a complete explanation.

  “Sure, a cat can’t do a jigsaw puzzle,” Mitchell expounds, as if Kuba’s non sequitur was part of a carefully rehearsed spiel. “Nor a toddler. But just grind away at it, and you’ll eventually complete it.”

  “Then what’s this substrate of yours actually good for?” Pugwash snaps.

  “Well,” Mitchell says, “imagine I spend an hour trying to figure out how America should fix its relations with Russia. I’m a foreign affairs novice and don’t get anywhere. And I won’t get any further if I spend ten more hours at it. Or a hundred. Because certain problems are completely resistant to increased rumination. But things are different for a diplomat who has spent years engaged in Russian-American relations. Not because he knows more facts and figures, because that stuff’s available to all of us via Google, now. But because his framework includes lots of intuition. Educated guesses. Vague rules of thumb that have just kind of worked over the years—that sort of thing. This much has been known for a while.”

  “Which is why motes can be viewed as nucleic particles of analysis,” Kuba adds obtusely.

  “Exactly!” Mitchell says, deftly nudging things along. “What we’re now learning is that this thought framework is powered by a wildly complex undercurrent of emotions. Emotions connected to personal experiences and values. To the diplomat’s visceral reactions to events as they unfold in real time, or to new facts as they emerge. Most of these emotions are minuscule and fleeting. So much so that they aren’t even experienced consciously! Kuba’s wife’s lab is doing a ton of research into these feelings and their function. And as Kuba just mentioned, she named them ‘motes.’ ”

  “Like something you dig around a castle? That’s stupid.”

  Masking a familiar urge to belt his cousin, Mitchell says, “No, it’s spelled M-O-T-E. It’s short for ‘emote.’ Also, they’re tiny—like dust motes.”

  “Got it. And how do they help our Russia expert?”

  “The mosaic of motes he’s affixed to various facts, ideas, and personal experiences over the years will supercharge his thought processes,” Mitchell says. “By enabling those gut shortcuts. By creating conviction when pure analysis would lead to indecision, and more. It’s as if he’s now speed-skating around a rink instead of running around a field.”

  “So he’s thinking faster?”

  “Not exactly. It’s that he’s thinking more deftly. He’s moving around the same geography as a novice, but that hard-earned emotional substrate gives him the ice. It gives him the skates, as well as speed, power, and grace. And it lets him pull off moves no one could manage on solid ground! This sort of thing happens in any domain that’s intractable to raw rumination, or raw computing.”

  “Like figuring out what songs the chick I’m banging will like.”

  “For instance.”

  Earlier, I said that while Mitchell usually invokes his “dumbest guy in the room” mantra metaphorically, it’s sometimes literally true. This is one of those times—because Pugwash is quite bright, much as we all hate to admit it. And hats off to Mitchell because it’s good for a founder to be the dim bulb at the office! Since your own IQ is fixed, pulling this off means recruiting a brilliant team, which is a huge part of your job. It also means that you’re almost always learning. And when you’re not learning, you can fix that by changing the subject. When surrounded by engineers, Mitchell steers away from MBA topics, preferring to discuss software architecture, say. Or if in a discussion of hockey (he’s the smartest guy in the city about this), he might bring up string theory (of which he has a sub-Neanderthal grasp). He figures the more you learn, the better you teach—which is quite useful in circumstances like today’s.

  Pugwash is now firmly under the conversational spell, despite himself. “So assuming you can port all of this into software,” he asks, “what could it enable? Besides what you’re trying to do with it now. Because I’m pretty sure that’ll never make a dime.”

  “There may not be any commercial application for it,” Kuba blurts cheerfully, and Mitchell deftly masks an urge to strangle him. “But there could be radical applications from a pure-science standpoint!”

  Mercantile to his core, Pugwash is about as drawn to pure science as a ravenous, horny lion is to something he can neither eat nor fuck. “Like…what?” he asks, with something verging on d
isgust.

  “Well…” Kuba begins. He then goes somewhere entirely new to Mitchell. “Quite possibly consciousness.” He says this very, very quietly. “Because my wife’s research indicates that human consciousness is in some way enabled by motes.”

  Pugwash gives a low whistle, then falls silent. Then, “Holy crap!” Then more silence.

  And Mitchell allows himself a moment of hope. Yes, his cousin is more a lover of money than of ideas. But he is smart! And he does care about his reputation. Perhaps even his legacy! And the radical significance of Animotion is clearly dawning on him (on both of them, frankly, as this is the first Mitchell has heard about this consciousness angle).

  More silence. Then, more still. Then, finally, Pugwash speaks.

  “This is the most incredible technology I’ve had a personal hand in creating since me and Larry invented the Page Rank algorithm at Google,” he begins grotesquely. “And—”

  Still more silence.

  Then: “There’s not a fucking chance I’m putting another dime into it.”

  “But—” Mitchell begins, his calm fraying.

  Pugwash cuts him off. “NO, Mitchell! It’d be way too expensive. You couldn’t even take a baby step down this path with just a few weeks of financing. Which, let’s face it, is the best you could hope to claw out of a tightwad prick like me.”

  “But we can’t just let it die,” Mitchell says, as this might just be tantamount to letting him die—for reasons that Dr. Martha will hopefully elucidate whenever she gets back from the damned Amazon!