Mack had moved to New York after getting a Facebook message from a college friend he hadn’t heard from in a while saying that he was looking for people to work for his startup. A couple years later, the startup failed, but Mack decided to stay. He bounced around a few other startups before finally landing on the idea for TakeOff one day when he was running along the Hudson River, and after three months of all-nighters he’d raised one million dollars.
“Let me ask you something. Do you think Wall Street would have started a game-changer like the New York Startup Series?” He paused for effect. “Here’s the answer: They had over a hundred years to do it, and they didn’t. We’ve gotten over two hundred companies funding through the Startup Series. Because we’re the visionaries in New York now. This is a new city. It’s not about who your parents are or what school you went to anymore. It’s about who you are and what you do, and what you can do for the greater good.” He’d given a version of this speech at least a dozen times, and it never failed to make him emotional. “This means responsibility—great responsibility. But what could be better than giving your life to something greater than yourself?”
The room broke into applause. A couple people whistled. He waited for it to die down and continued. “Of course, there will always be naysayers about the tech industry. That just comes with the territory. There are always going to be the finance guys who think they can keep pretending they still rule the world. Then there are those types on the opposite end of the spectrum—you know, the ones who barely even know what the internet is? Once your companies begin to get off the ground and you start looking for office space, you’ll understand this—there are people out there who will raise hell about a relatively small tax break for a tech company to stay in New York and create jobs.” He shook his head. What he always wanted to add, but didn’t, was how supremely annoyed he was by the entitlement of people who would fight tooth and nail to keep their rent-stabilized apartments even when they had country houses and sent their kids to private school. This was basically socialism. Meanwhile, his employees lived off subway stops in Brooklyn he’d never heard of.
“Now, look, I understand that there might come a time—well, let’s say, there will hopefully come a time—when I’ll find Wall Street and its access to capital markets extremely useful.” Peter, and a couple others, laughed. “But until then, I will continue to argue that the tech industry is the best thing to happen to New York City since a Dutchman bought this whole dang island.” The room erupted into applause.
Something else Mack always left out of his talk was how his dad had built an incredibly successful contracting company from nothing—but he had never forgotten that he’d been turned down by five banks in Dallas for a small-business loan when he was starting out. If he’d had the same access to capital that Mack had had, he’d probably be one of the richest men in Texas by now. But VC firms were built to understand and profit from this new world. So what if they ended up owning a chunk of your company? They knew that it took money to make money. In fact, it was considered a bad sign if your company was profitable too soon; you had to spend the money you were earning to build your business or else your investors would wonder if you were thinking big enough and taking enough risks. That was Startup 101.
Mack’s dad still didn’t totally understand what Mack did, or what the company did, or even really how VC funding worked or why Mack would take money from someone else and “let them get into your business like that,” but he loved to talk about how entrepreneurship was in the genes, and Mack had overheard his mother on the phone with one of her friends when he was home for Christmas last year bragging that he was going to be on the local news in Dallas talking about being a tech-company founder. What they really didn’t understand, though, was why he was single. His younger sister, Hailey, had gotten married three years ago, when she was twenty-three, to a guy she’d met at SMU, and everyone at the wedding had seemed surprised—Hailey’s single girlfriends, pleasantly—that Mack came unattached. He’d ended up hooking up with one of Hailey’s sorority sisters and her best friend from high school, and he was pretty sure that neither of them knew about the other and that Hailey knew about neither of them. He still occasionally got texts from the high-school friend; he responded if he knew he was going to be back home for a few days. She was always up for something fun.
His parents knew he dated around but didn’t ask too many questions. The closest they had come was when he was home briefly at Christmas; he’d been watching football with his dad and Hailey’s husband, Colton, and when Colton got up to get a beer from the kitchen, Mack’s dad had said, quietly, “Your mother’s worried about you.”
Mack’s response was to laugh, a little nervously, until he saw the dead-serious look on his dad’s face. “I mean it, son, she’s worried about you. I know things are going well with the company, but she is just worried that…well, she’d just really like you to meet someone, is all.”
Mack had to laugh again to break the tension. If only they knew…“Dad. Please, she has nothing to worry about. You have nothing to worry about. I do fine.” This seemed to do it; his dad clapped him on the back and said, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Still, they were old-fashioned in their way. They didn’t want to meet any of Mack’s girlfriends unless Mack felt like it was serious. And Mack would probably have to bring the girl to Dallas because his parents had yet to set foot in New York. Until very recently, he hadn’t been with anyone he’d even remotely considered taking to Texas. But lately, the thing—he hesitated to put a more concrete label on it—he had with his coworker Isabel seemed to be getting more serious. They’d been seeing each other secretly, and nonexclusively, for the past year, neither of them willing to articulate anything that suggested a desire for commitment, but now Mack was starting to think he was “catching feelings,” as they used to say in middle school. And he had probably felt this way for a while, if he was being completely honest with himself. Maybe the next time he and Isabel hung out, he would broach it.
He suddenly realized that the applause had died down and people were looking at him expectantly. “Are there any questions?” He took a sip of his coffee. In the back, Sunil raised his hand. “Yes?”
Sunil nodded. “First of all, thank you for coming today—your talk was truly visionary and inspiring. Second, my question has to do with scale and hiring. At what point did you need to add layers of, shall we say, administrative staff? You know, finance, HR, and the like. My company is obviously way too small to start thinking about this, but I’ve seen a couple of friends get tripped up by it and I was curious how you’d handled it.”
“Sure. To be honest, we’ve been winging that stuff a little bit. Investors don’t want to hear about you hiring a head of HR. They want to hear about you hiring engineers. So it’s on our radar, sure, but not totally a priority.”
“Thanks,” Sunil said. He didn’t seem totally satisfied with the answer but didn’t ask a follow-up.
“Any other questions?”
“Where do you see TakeOff going from here?” This was from a woman sitting near the door. He’d noticed her on his way in—she was a little chubby, with curly blond hair. He’d dated girls like her in high school.
“I was waiting for someone to ask me that question.” He smiled at her. Was she blushing? She was blushing. “What was your name?”
“Bella.” She smiled back at him. Maybe she was cuter than he had initially thought.
“So, Bella, the goal right now—and by now, I mean, let’s say, the next nine to twelve months—is to scale as fast as we can. We’ve got a new product that’s launching very soon that I can’t say anything more about, but as soon as that launches we’re going to be kind of in a new phase. We’re going to need probably a dozen new developers ASAP. And then, I mean, we’re looking at international expansion, we’re looking at a version for teenagers, we’re exploring partnerships with some major companies right now…there’s a lot happening. It’s a very exciting time.”
All of this was, of course, totally true, but also hugely exaggerated—but, he told himself, in a “fake it till you make it” kind of way. And it wasn’t completely faking it—so far, everything he had “faked” he had subsequently “made.” So he had no doubt that, even though it would mean everything going 1,000 percent according to plan, he would be hiring a dozen new developers, even if that depended on getting the money from Gramercy and being able to find a dozen developers. And he hadn’t exactly discussed the viability of international expansion or a teenage version with anyone on his staff, but these were things that certainly could happen. The two most important things anyone needed for success were vision and willpower. And he had both. Now he caught Peter’s eye, and Peter nodded imperceptibly.
“Okay, everyone, I think that just about does it for today,” Peter said. “Let’s give Mack another round of applause. And can people email you if they have additional questions?”
“Of course. I’m just Mack at takeoff.com. Thanks, Peter, and everyone, for having me.” The group filed out, Peter lagging behind.
“Thanks, man, that was really great.” He shook Mack’s hand again. “I’ll walk you out.”
“It’s a great space,” Mack said as they left the conference room. “Hey, would you mind taking a picture of me?”
“Sure thing.”
Mack handed Peter his cell phone and posed so that the entire office was visible behind him. He posted it on Instagram with the caption Amazing time speaking to the new companies being incubated at Startup Boot Camp! In the five minutes it took him to ride the elevator down to the lobby, go outside, and find his Uber, 46 of his 16,792 followers had liked it.
2
Drag City
KATYA PASTERNACK HAD been at her job as a reporter at TechScene (motto: “Tech news straight, no chaser”) since 8:00 a.m. and now, at 11:30, she realized she had been concentrating so hard that she hadn’t even taken a smoke break. “What the fuck,” she muttered to herself. No wonder she was starting to get a headache. smoke? she IM’d to Dan Blum. Dan was thirty-nine, with hair that was starting to gray at the temples and the stirrings of a belly under his rotation of plaid J. Crew shirts. He was the site’s managing editor, but more important, he was the only other person in the TechScene office who smoked. He didn’t respond. She stood up to try to catch his eye and noticed that he was wearing headphones and laughing at something on his phone.
It was probably that YouTube compilation of dog Snapchats that everyone had been tweeting about for the last four minutes. It was true that it was marginally better than most Snapchat compilations—because of the dogs, of course. There was, in particular, a six-second video of a black Labradoodle that looked exactly like Weird Al scarfing down its food while “Eat It” played, and at the very end, the dog looked up into the camera and howled joyously—perfectly in time with the music—in a way that Katya found almost poignant. dog Snapchat = best Snapchat, she had tweeted, with a GIF of the Labradoodle and a link to the post. It had already gotten seventeen retweets and forty-two likes. There were other species of internet-famous animals, of course—superstar cats like Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, and Maru, for instance—but dogs ruled when it came to the speed at which their antics spread online.
Stuff always spread through tech-reporter Twitter predictably: First, whoever posted it or found it would tweet it, and then, since everyone followed everyone else in the scene, Katya’s TweetDeck would get clogged immediately with the same dumb retweets. The worst were people who manually retweeted the initial tweet and then added some inane comment like Whoa! or, worse, Woah! Katya had no patience for people who misspelled whoa or couldn’t figure out the difference between its and it’s. She longed to mute them, but sometimes they were actually important people whose tweets she had to follow, so she kept them all in her main timeline but also put them into a TweetDeck column she had labeled “Grammar Idiots” that she occasionally scrolled through when she wanted to feel superior. She didn’t understand what was so hard about speaking English; she was an immigrant and she’d figured it out.
Janelle, her roommate in the Greenpoint railroad apartment where she’d lived since April, always laughed when she complained about stuff like this. “Katya, you gotta let it gooooo,” she’d say, and then half the time she’d launch into a deliberately off-key rendition of “Let It Go” from Frozen, during which Katya would ostentatiously cover her ears. She’d met Janelle through Janelle’s older brother, Trevor, the social media manager at TechScene. Growing up in a deeply Russian part of Brooklyn and living at her dad’s while at NYU had left Katya with few friends who weren’t still living with their parents and working as makeup artists or cocktail waitresses. Not that there was anything wrong with makeup artists or cocktail waitresses or living with one’s parents, but Katya had a different vision for her grown-up New York life, and Janelle—with her job as a marketing manager for an organic beauty company, her podcast (Say What!?, which she hosted with her friend Fiona), and her fastidiousness when it came to keeping the apartment clean—fit into it more than her high-school friend Irina, who had suggested the two of them move into an apartment in Bensonhurst owned by one of her boyfriend’s sketchy friends.
Katya went over to the desk across from Dan’s so she’d be directly in his line of vision and waved her hands until he finally looked up. She pantomimed bringing a cigarette to her lips, and he looked relieved. “Yes!” he said, too loudly. He still had his headphones on. No one around him looked up, though, because they all had them on too.
Katya enjoyed smoking so much that she could imagine quitting only if she essentially became a completely different person. She couldn’t imagine under what circumstances that might happen. She had made some small concessions to health in the last couple of years—going from a pack of Camels a day in high school and college to half a pack a day of Camel Lights—but now, smoking was as much a part of her as dyeing her hair platinum blond, wearing a nose ring, being rail thin, and speaking in a faint Russian accent that she could hear in herself only when she was transcribing interviews. And these days in New York City, smoking was an ongoing act of rebellion that she felt jibed so completely with her perceived and real persona that she never wanted to give it up. The smokers she knew—fewer and fewer these days—were, like her, stubbornly attached to this expensive, disgusting, delicious habit. Smokers had always set themselves apart, but now their numbers were so reduced and they were so beleaguered and resigned to their fate that she sometimes felt like they telegraphed secret, desperate messages to one another. She could immediately sense, if not smell, a real smoker nearby. The younger ones, like her, radiated a kind of jittery, nervous energy; she figured that at least half of the smokers she knew who were under twenty-five were probably also pill poppers of some kind. (She, of course, was not.) The older ones, like Dan, radiated a world-weariness she found comforting.
They weren’t supposed to smoke right in front of the building, so Katya and Dan moved exactly seven feet to the left and lit up. They smoked for a minute before Dan broke the silence. “You’re filing the Connectiv story this afternoon, right?” Katya was putting together a standard TechScene post called “Offices You Wish You Worked At,” about Connectiv’s new office, after getting an exclusive first look at the space. She was proud of the get; it signaled to the rest of the tech press that she, Katya Pasternack, was real journalist, as her father might say. TechScene was still in its relative infancy, launched a year ago by a now-twenty-seven-year-old media app entrepreneur named Rich Watson and a fired BizWorld editor, Deanna Stein, who immediately took what she’d learned at that site—a warp-speed aggregator and producer of business news of varying quality that got hundreds of millions of page views a month, thanks in large part to hundred-slide photo galleries—and applied it, hiring a gaggle of mostly inexperienced but hungry (often literally) reporters like Katya to produce content, and a couple of grown-ups like Dan to (loosely) supervise. As far as Katya knew, Dan was the oldest person in the n
ewsroom.
Katya loved her job, which she demonstrated by working long hours and writing more than any other reporter. But she considered many of her coworkers to have a larger sense of entitlement than was healthy. The things they complained about! Food, mostly. When it came to food, TechScene was just like any other startup: There was way too much of it. Her coworkers grumbled that the snacks at TechScene weren’t healthy enough and everyone was gaining weight, or that they were too healthy and people felt like they were being shamed into eating baby carrots and plain Greek yogurt. Or the brand of coffee wasn’t the right one, or they were always running out of organic almonds, or they should be allowed to order their free dinner at six thirty so that it would arrive by the time they were hungry instead of having to wait till seven, which meant they might not eat until eight. She watched them eat snacks and she watched them eat pizza and she watched them eat huge orders of Thai food and she watched them drink beer after beer after beer, and then she heard them complain that they had gained the TechScene Fifteen. Katya’s weight had stayed exactly the same during the ten months she’d worked there. She really cared only that the office fridge was kept stocked with Diet Coke and that there was coffee—any kind of coffee. She had also put in a special request with the office manager for Sweet’N Low.
Startup Page 2