After On

by Rob Reid

  Still, no one hustles quite like a would-be Alpha male (because they’re almost all males) with a battered ego. Provided it’s not too battered, of course (some of these ex-founders are so unaccustomed to failure, they end up quivering in their childhood bedrooms for years before limping off to second acts as heavily medicated baristas). Because anyone with the self-confidence and mojo to rally a technical team that’s actually worth acquihiring in this recruiting environment must have some kind of spark. It may just be a shallow, backslapping, Business Development kind of spark. But that’s all Jepson himself once had, and look at him now! Phluttr needs some BizDev loudmouths anyway, now that they’re growing so fast and partnering with everyone under the sun.

  The other thing it needs is internal entrepreneurs, because his dark overlords at “Gray Oak” want him to launch more and more (and ever-more-intrusive) data-sucking services into the lives of Phluttr’s increasingly addicted users. And with this directive coming from that chilling source, he’ll need a few MBA lapdogs on hand, hustling as only failing Type-A people pleasers can, dreading that their face-saving alibi of “getting acquired by Phluttr. Yeah, that Phluttr,” will be exposed for the pennies-on-the-dollar disgrace that it really was if they get drop-kicked to the curb; which is what’ll happen unless they make themselves really goddam useful, awfully goddam fast; doing that thing they do, which is starting something; launching a goddam product—ideally, one based on some of the creepy-ass digital potions bubbling and blurping over in the PhastPhorwardr—fascinating technologies in many cases, inspiring in others, but really, really creepy in an unsettlingly high and (make no mistake) rising proportion of cases; and speaking of which, why did they buy Giftish.ly again? Animotion, or some shit? Wasn’t that an eighties band? And while we’re at it—

  Mitchell coughs again. Louder, this time. His new boss is off in some kind of reverie, he just started sweating and breathing rather quickly, and it’s getting weird.

  Jepson snaps right out of it. “Sorry ’bout that. I was just thinking about all of our…opportunities!” And just like that, he regains full command and composure. “Because it’s Pitch Day. And I’ll take a pitch from anyone internal! Most of them?” Pinching his nose shut with a thumb and forefinger, he daintily waves off phantom fecal odors with his other hand. “But there’s a lot of bright people here, and some inspiring technologies sitting in the PhastPhorwardr. Including your own, now! And every so often, someone’ll pitch something that’s just brilliant. As you’ll hopefully be doing yourself, pretty soon! Otherwise…” He playfully feigns grabbing Mitchell by the neck and drop-kicking him toward Oakland. The mimed punt is oddly emphatic, underpinning the gesture’s faux playfulness with a grim reminder that this is no joke. “It’s a harsh policy, I know. But I’m gonna give you ample opportunity to prove yourself. Because I’ve got a soft spot for your cousin, and I want him to be happy.”

  “In other words,” comes a nasal honk from behind them, “your cousin obviously has a 4K video of Jepson fucking a goat.” Mitchell pivots in spooked surprise, having completely forgotten about the weird lanky dude, who’s still lurking in the back corner like a balding, redheaded vampire. “In! The asshole,” Red adds, as if his opening had been timidly low on edge.

  “Whoooooa, Beasley!” Jepson says. “Remember our little chat about the power of allusion? Like here, you might’ve said, ‘I think your cousin must have a picture of Jepson…with a farm animal!’ That would’ve given you the same completely unoriginal insult, only with a bit more of an…indoors voice, wouldn’t you say?”

  Beasley shrugs, and Jepson gestures grandly at him. “Mitchell, allow me to introduce you to Jake Beasley, Phluttr’s…chief operating officer.” He pronounces this fussily, as if enunciating some teen slang whose alleged meaning he doesn’t quite believe.

  SCENARIO 2: “INFRASTRUCTURE PROFUSION” (EXCERPT)

  Special Agent Brock Hogan commandeered a fighter jet from the tarmac of a conveniently proximate Top Secret Base the instant he learnt that an emergency was transpiring in the hot, treacherous, and not-undistant desert of Nevada! Upon soaring over the target site, he leapt; only to discover that his parachute was made for one of half his weight, talent, and gray matter; due to the CONSTANT NAGGING of lady pilots demanding inclusion in combat wings! This forced him to take several ingenious “affirmative actions” of his own, by yanking and jerking his floating unit through updrafts, gusts, and thermals, thereby guiding his descent to an open water tower. His amply hung “chute” landed safely with an expertly engineered splashdown! Upon cresting the water’s surface, Hogan leapt adroitly over the tower’s vulvous lip, then clambered down its ladder to terra firma.

  Or make that…terra infirma! Because at the ladder’s base, Hogan sank almost groin-deep into a fine gray dust that stretched to impossible distances in all directions!

  “Special Agent Brock Hogan,” came a familiar voice. “Welcome to my colorless, dystopian, postapocalyptic vista of a private hell!”

  “Ah, Dr. Phillips,” Hogan declared, whirling to face his erstwhile nemesis. “It’s no surprise to find you here, given that this is the top secret facility that our government designated for the Artificial Superintelligence Project that it reconstituted over my strenuous objections after we unmasked a similar project in the Land of China!”

  “Yes, this is what remains of the headquarters of Project Omega. And…you were right to oppose it!” Phillips conceded ruefully.

  “But in overcoming my resistance to your reckless plans, you swore to The Director that Science’s finest minds would consider and thoroughly eliminate every possible risk posed by this project!” Hogan asserted sarcastically.

  “Yes, but alas. It transpires that each of our so-called fine minds had been hopelessly warped by Hollywood Rubbish to fixate upon the risk of an emergent superintelligence deliberately seeking Mankind’s destruction!”

  “The so-called Terminator Thesis,” Hogan corroborated.

  “The same. Our repeated exposure to that specious worldview through the likes of Terminator itself; as well as The Matrix; 2001: A Space Odyssey; and others of that ilk; led us to confuse the deeply familiar with the scientifically likely! We flattered our petty egos by imagining a true digital demigod would deem Man a rival worthy of wariness! But we should have known that a true Super AI would no more fear our crimped capabilities than an American operative would shrink from fisticuffs with a cowardly, limp-wristed Greek weakling; or, ‘Greekling’!”

  Despite the paralyzing stench of doom permeating the environs, Hogan chuckled at the thought of that decrepit and genetically bankrupt nation producing any man who could last as much as a zeptosecond in the ring with one such as he! Returning his focus to the grave situation, he then queried, “So this bleak wasteland is not the result of a preemptive first strike inflicted upon Mankind by a sworn digital enemy?”

  “No, Hogan. Though it is indeed the by-product of a Super AI’s rise, that intelligence does not hate us. Nor does it fear us, certainly! Indeed, it harbors no feelings about us whatsoever. And because of this benign stance, we utterly failed to anticipate the terrible menace it posed! You see, our cultural programming and vanity caused us to massively overestimate the danger of a malevolent Super AI’s rise. Which blinded us to the risk of becoming collateral damage to a non-malevolent Super AI! To one which is completely indifferent to us! One whose very indifference will soon lead to the utter eradication of Mankind, as it pursues a goal which in no way concerns us!”

  “Now, I’m doing this from memory, but I’m pretty good at this sorta thing.” Jepson’s sketching the boundaries of your basic X-Y chart on the whiteboard. He then plots a classic hockey-stick line in blue ink, dribbling along quite low toward the graph’s left side, until it starts rising abruptly about midway to the right. He then adds a green hockey stick with a similar shape, only it rises earlier and more violently. “Facebook’s the blue curve, we’re the steep green one,” he tells Mitchell. “And I’m charting total users, pl
otted against months after launch.” He adds hashmarks to the axes, delineating years and user counts. “Facebook? It took ’em five years to hit 100 million users. Us? A hair over two. Then Facebook needed another four years after that to hit a billion users. We’re tracking to do it in eighteen months! We’re meanwhile pulling in twice as much revenue per user as they were at this point in their history. Our CPMs are way higher, our sell-through—everything!”

  Jepson starts working on an elaborate doodle, blocking Mitchell’s view of it with his torso. “My point is, maybe four years after Facebook was at our stage, they were worth two hundred billion in the public market. And if we stay on our way-faster path and get to two hundred billion ourselves? The stock option grant we’re giving you as part of your on-boarding package will be worth this.” He stands back, and the figure $25,000,000 bursts from a magician’s hat on the whiteboard, accompanied by balloons, fireworks, a mushroom cloud, and terrified bunny rabbits scampering in all directions. Mitchell’s eyes widen. The math is trivially simple, and he’d have done it soon enough himself. But there’s something undeniably powerful about this giant number (and by the way—damn, can Jepson doodle!). Although Jepson’s of course pursuing his own agenda here. Mitchell will only come into this full sum if everything goes right for the company, and if he logs four full years here. And so like any vassal, he now has a liege lord. His liege—who giveth, and can taketh away merely by showing him the door—is Tony Jepson. This might infuse Mitchell with great motivation and loyalty if he actually expected to live for four years.

  “It really is the deal of a lifetime,” Jepson is saying. And smarmy though this sounds, it’s no exaggeration. “With two co-founders, you’d have to sell your own startup for a lot more than 100 million bucks to match what you’re looking at here. And do you know what percentage of startups sell for hundreds of millions?” He scrunches his thumb and forefinger until they’re almost touching and pulls them up to his peering eye, like a middle school joker dramatizing the paltry size of a rival’s genitals. “Not many, Little Grasshopper. And with all due respect, probably not yours. My point is, when a startup goes from zero to hundreds of billions in market cap, everything gets totally distorted! Midlevel hires make out like big-time founders! Receptionists make out like VPs of marketing! So we’re in a weird, special place here. And that’s why we’re going hog wild with these acquisitions. And giving guys like you huge option grants, and holding weekly pitch days. It’s all because we’re loading up on founders.”

  “On…founders?”

  “You heard me! Everyone lionizes engineers these days. And sure, they should. They’re real tough to recruit, great ones can be worth several normal ones, and that’s all huge. But the true lightning in the bottle? It’s the great entrepreneur. That guy can be worth a thousand mere mortals! I mean, how many billions in liquid market value did the guy behind Gmail create? Thirty? Forty? However you cut it—traffic, locked-in users, data—Gmail has to be at least a tenth of Google’s total value. And the guy behind it was a founder, not a product manager! He recruited and led a big team of designers and engineers, rallied internal capital, launched a product, and scaled it to cover the Earth! So in addition to Larry and Sergey, Google had that founder—make no mistake, that world-class founder—working around the clock, and doing that stupidly rare, lightning-in-a-bottle thing that only great founders can do!

  “Now, founders get sucked into big companies constantly, whenever giants snap up startups. But most of ’em bail within a year! Why? Because buyers are stupid! They think the startup they just bought is a precious golden egg. But the goose who laid it comes with the thing! And that goose is almost definitely knocked up with the next egg. Which is to say, with the guy’s next startup idea! But these big-company…antibodies always figure out a way to mute, castrate, or otherwise piss off the geese as soon as they’re on board. So the geese’re outta there! Well, not at Phluttr. We’re goose-friendly.”

  “This is so much better than your peanut-shell pitch,” Beasley says.

  “Peanut-shell pitch?” Mitchell asks.

  “If you don’t ignore him, you’re just encouraging him,” Jepson snaps. There’s a knock at the door. “And with that,” Jepson says, drumrolling his desk like a Foo Fighter. “It’s time to bring full employment to our best acquihired founders. Let Pitch Day begin!”

  “So if the all-pervading gray dust that now surrounds us is not an ingenious weapon specifically engineered to terminate Man’s reign upon Earth, then what is it?” Hogan asked Dr. Phillips.

  “The ingenious yet grim harvest of what Science calls infrastructure profusion,” Phillips answered. “Omega is building out its core infrastructure with absolutely no consideration of its impact on us! Much as we developed our Interstate Highway System without regard to the impact upon local squirrels!”

  “But surely this…DUST cannot be meaningful INFRASTRUCTURE,” Hogan cried.

  “It is not mere dust, Hogan, but Computronium! A spectacularly advanced and forever-expanding powder-like intellect! That of Omega! Man’s digital spawn, and Final Invention! All that surrounds you; every speck of apparent dust; is a cog in a cognitive dynamo Omega devised, designed, and crafted to pursue matters of measureless import to it. Matters incalculably more gripping to its boundless intellect than the fussings of mere primitive bipeds, whose brainpower it eclipses by far greater margins than our own exceeds that of a base bacterium or potted plant…”

  Just then, Hogan felt the ground shudder, then crumble beneath his feet, as they both sank a foot deeper into the mysterious powder. “Dr. Phillips, we are now up to our very testes in this…what did you call it? ‘Computronium’? We must seek higher ground immediately!”

  “It’s hopeless!” Phillips cackled unhingedly. “Nothing can stand between Omega and its maximum objective. Nothing. Nothing! Not even the mighty Agent Brock Hogan!”

  “Nonsense,” Hogan retorted. Feeling another chunk of mantle crumble underfoot, he cradled Dr. Phillips snugly under his right arm’s smooth, yet sinewy deltoids, biceps, and flexor carpi radiali; then vaulted them both to the water tower’s ladder, and then, with a few impassioned thrusts, to the temporary sanctuary of its summit!

  “So what was your startup building before you got acquihired?” Kuba asks Tarek. They and Danna have now tucked in for a tasty free meal at the almost eponymously (and certainly moronically) named company cafeteria Phree.

  “A tool for Realtors and their clients to create navigable, 3D maps of residences. It’s pretty cool when it works. You basically wave an iPhone around your home, and it creates this immersive fly-through for potential buyers.”

  “And how’d Jepson find you?” Danna asks.

  “One of Phluttr’s board members went to the same law school as me, if you can believe that. So there’s my dirty secret: I was a lawyer before getting into startups. Between us, got it? Anyway—one day I’m at an alumni event, I meet this guy, and we stay in touch. A couple years later, my company’s struggling, and he pulls me into Phluttr. The guy’s name is Steven Conrad—though he’s just ‘Conrad’ to everyone. Heard of him?” Kuba and Danna shake their heads. “Well, he and Jepson go way back. He invested in Jepson’s first company, ePetStore.”

  “He must’ve been wiped out,” Kuba says. “All those pet companies failed, right?”

  Tarek shakes his head. “He actually squeezed out a profit somehow, so he and Jepson still get on fine. But rumor has it that the other investors got crucified. And one of them’s now a bit famous. Damien Kielholz.”

  Kuba arches an eyebrow. “You mean from DK-UK?” he asks. Danna looks at them both blankly. “A venture fund based in London,” he explains. “It’s run by Kielholz.” He turns to Tarek. “It’s like the venture gateway into Europe for startups, right?”

  Tarek shrugs. “That’s how they spin it. The backstory’s that Damien got into huge trouble with his family for blowing it with ePetStore, and they practically exiled him from Germany! So he got all obsessed with
making the money back. He had a bit of his own cash, something his granddad left him, I think. So he runs around in 2002, 2003, investing in any startup that moves—which turns out to be great timing! It’s post-Bubble, tech equity’s cheap, cheap, cheap, and big things’re coming. Still, he almost blows it by investing in all these crap companies. With one exception: Facebook. He gets into that super-early, and makes a fortune. Then, when the dust settles, everyone thinks he’s a genius.”

  “And still does, right?” Kuba asks.

  Tarek shrugs again. “The bloggers love him. But that’s because he throws an annual weekend in Napa called something goofy like ‘Journalism 3.1,’ and no one wants to be exiled from it. He hosts an even fancier one in Edinburgh for founders. He drowns ’em all in single malts and flies in these so-called spokesmodels from Russia and Poland to party. Any Kielholz investee is invited to that one for life! So lots of entrepreneurs with hot companies’ll sell him a sliver of their equity to lock that in. But I’ll tell ya, one guy Kielholz does not get on with is Jepson! Bad blood from the early days.”

  “Which is why it’s so ironic that we have the hottest intern in tech right here at Phluttr,” says a voice from behind Danna and Kuba. They turn around.

  “Ah, the jackass in the glasses,” Danna says. “I figured you’d show up eventually.”

  “Raj, this is Danna and Kuba,” Tarek says, making introductory gestures. “You, uh…met them a few nights ago, when we were testing out that hardware at Bourbon & Branch. As chance would have it, we just bought their company. Which is incredibly awkward.”

  “Right, right. And how’s Madison Parker?” Raj smirks at Danna, citing the college acquaintance he tricked her into thinking he knew.

  “You are a serious asshole,” she notes, in the flat, factual tone of a pharmacist announcing that a prescription’s ready.