Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  Katya took a long drag and exhaled. “Yeah. I’m still waiting for some numbers from their PR but if I don’t get them by tomorrow morning, I’m just gonna post. They’re being annoying.”

  “Shocker,” Dan said. She glanced at him as he took another drag of his cigarette. He was old, but it seemed like he still cared about how he looked—he made sure that he didn’t come to work in the same plaid shirt twice in a week and he wore tortoiseshell glasses that gave his clean-shaven roundish face a more distinguished air—and even though he wasn’t exactly her type (also, he was her boss), she could see how he would have been considered handsome at one point.

  He also had strong feelings about the right way to do journalism. He had taught Katya that you should never, ever hold your best stuff, especially anything big or remotely time-sensitive. She operated under the assumption that if she had had an idea or gotten a story or talked to someone important, then someone else had had the same idea, gotten the same story, or talked to the same person. It was a lesson she’d learned quickly, a couple months into the job, when she had proudly relayed to Dan that she was going to be able to break the news that the founder of Calendr had been forced out. She’d gotten the information from her NYU classmate Tom, the founder’s assistant, who had also reported that his boss was currently holed up inside his office and refusing to come out, which was made all the more awkward by the fact that his office was glass and in the middle of the room. But Katya had been slow to actually write the story; there were some details—what was he wearing? how had he been given the news?—that she was waiting to hear back from Tom about, and in the meantime, BizWorld published a post, and Dan had told her she was lucky he hadn’t mentioned anything to Rich or Deanna about the scoop because they would have flipped out that BizWorld had beaten them. She was determined never to let that happen again.

  So even though the Connectiv people had assured her that she was the only reporter they’d let into the building since they’d moved in two weeks ago—according to their head of corporate communications, “The Times was begging us for the story, but we decided to give it to you,” which Katya neither totally believed nor disbelieved—she was still worried she’d get scooped if she waited too long.

  “I mean, God forbid some idiot who works there tweets a picture of their new office. Good-bye, scoop! I love Twitter but, man, it really has ruined journalism.” This was a familiar rant of Dan’s, right up there with how young reporters today didn’t know how to pick up a phone and instead got all their information online, how pointless journalism school was, and how many résumés he got each week from people his age who had finally figured out that print was dead and they should jump on this newfangled internet train. He liked to print these résumés out and theatrically rip them in half. He considered it a therapeutic waste of paper.

  Katya secretly enjoyed listening to him talk like this; it made her feel like he was putting her in the category of “Not Completely Idiotic Young Person.” She also didn’t know anyone who worked in print or read anything in print beyond posting a copy of the Sunday Times or an image of an actual hardcover book on Instagram so that everyone knew how intellectual they were. She barely knew anyone who even read anything on a desktop outside of work. If it wasn’t on your phone, it might as well not exist.

  “Used to be, all you had to worry about was another site beating you by a few minutes on a story. Now, someone can ruin your scoop without your even having a story up. It’s complete madness.” Katya nodded as Dan continued. “That’s why you see so many half-baked stories out there. People who don’t have the whole story, just worried about getting scooped, putting some shell post up there and filling in the blanks later so they can say they were first. It’s ridiculous.”

  Her phone vibrated and she glanced down at it. A Venmo notification that Janelle had paid her for the electric bill, which she’d annotated with several lightbulb emoji.

  They took another few puffs in silence. “Actually,” he said, and he seemed to be weighing his words carefully. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Okay.” Hadn’t they already been talking? She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with her boot.

  Dan looked toward the door of the building as though to make sure no one was listening. He dropped his voice. “Rich and Deanna are going to do an audit.”

  “What kind of audit?” Katya asked.

  “They’re going to go through everyone’s stories and score them—not based just on traffic, but also on how deeply people read them and their impact. So, like, how long did people spend reading your story, how many times did it get mentioned on Twitter, did it get talked about in other publications, did you go on TV to discuss it…that kind of stuff.”

  Katya felt an unfamiliar sensation in her head—not panic, exactly, but unease. “But this whole time they were telling us that traffic was the thing that really mattered.” As she said this, she realized her voice was almost squeaking. Embarrassing.

  “Well, yes.” He was practically whispering now. “They’ve always said that traffic was the most important thing, but they also have always said they cared about who was reading and how they were reading. Now they’re just going to actually quantify it.”

  Katya gave him a sidelong glance. “But what are they actually going to do?”

  Dan sighed. “I don’t know; Deanna apparently read some study that said that the only real way to motivate people and get them to do their best work is to always make them a little bit afraid of losing their jobs. Not too afraid, but a little bit afraid.”

  “Wait. Are people going to lose their jobs?”

  “No.” Dan took one last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out. “I mean, not right away. At least, that’s what they say. But they also said something about how it’s good practice to always be getting rid of your bottom twenty-five percent of people.”

  “That seems harsh.” Katya had never been known for her sympathy, but she now felt herself indignant at this sudden change in the rules. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go! You had your job and people told you what it would take to succeed at it, and you did that thing and then everything was fine. “Why are you telling me this, anyway?”

  “They’re going to start doing the audit soon. I haven’t gone through your stories yet, and I don’t think you’re in danger, exactly—I mean, your traffic is very high—but I don’t know, Katya, we’ve talked about this, sometimes it can seem like you’re doing only the quick and easy stories. Like this Connectiv post—I mean, it’s great, but is it really going to move the needle?”

  “What do you mean, move the needle?” she said. “And I ran it by you last week—why didn’t you say anything then?”

  He ignored the second part of her question. “Like, is it going to get people talking. Is it going to change the way people think about something. Is it going to be something that people are talking about on Twitter all day. Is it going to—”

  “Okay, I get it. It seems like you’re really on my case today. Besides, people don’t talk about things on Twitter all day.” She knew she sounded bratty, but this attack was coming out of nowhere.

  “You know what I mean. I’m just saying, if there was any time to publish a big story, now would be that time.” Dan’s phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket, unlocked it, and read his screen. He rolled his eyes. “Worst decision of my life was telling my wife it’d be great if she got a job in the same building.” Dan’s wife, Sabrina, worked at TakeOff, three floors above TechScene. Katya had seen her only twice and from a distance; both times she seemed to be in a bad mood. Dan was typing something back to her as he spoke. “Unlike her, I actually have work to do during the day, I can’t just, like, drop everything because the nanny’s not feeling well. I don’t even know why she’s bothering to ask.”

  He read out what he was typing back to her. “‘Super…busy…today…can…you…handle.’” He put his phone in his pocket. “Let’s go, just in case s
he comes out while we’re here. She’s been on my back lately about the smoking.” Katya followed him wordlessly inside. Marriage seemed like a real bummer sometimes.

  3

  Just Breathe

  SABRINA BLUM WAS TIRED. Their three-year-old, Amelia, had, God knows why, toddled into their room at five thirty a.m., even though she’d been consistently sleeping until six thirty, which was at least tolerable. But this morning she wouldn’t stop whining about wanting to watch “toys,” which meant the videos on YouTube of people unboxing or unwrapping toys; there was one with a little girl unboxing My Little Ponys and their various accessories that Amelia had watched probably seven hundred times. So even though she and Dan had a rule that Amelia was allowed only an hour of iPad a day, Sabrina got out of bed, retrieved the iPad from the kitchen table, parked Amelia on the couch, and let her watch videos until seven. Then Owen woke up, saw Amelia on the couch with the iPad, and started screaming that it wasn’t fair that Amelia got to watch in the morning when Mommy only let him use the iPad in the afternoon after he’d had his snack. Her response was to stand in the living room of their Park Slope floor-through and let Owen scream until he finally just gave up and plopped down next to Amelia and watched with her until it was time to get ready for school. Dan usually got Owen dressed and made sure he had everything he needed in his backpack, and this morning he even poured Owen and Amelia some Cheerios and milk before giving each of them a kiss on the forehead and leaving on the dot of 7:45. “Have a great day, honey!” she said so forced-cheerfully that he jerked around at the front door and glared at her. The kids didn’t notice, probably because they had started throwing Cheerios at each other. “Asshole,” she muttered under her breath as soon as the door clicked shut.

  Sabrina, who was thirty-six, had long ago resigned herself to the idea that marriage was, inevitably, death by a thousand little cuts; the problem was that the cuts—strictly metaphorical, of course—weren’t as little as they used to be. They were more like gashes, deep wounds that required triage and left scars, and she and Dan both had become addicted to them.

  Once she’d finally dropped Owen and Amelia off—Owen at the elementary school and Amelia at the Montessori preschool she went to in the mornings—she realized that it was actually one of those October days that made everyone forget, for at least twenty-four hours, that living in New York City could be a real slog. The sun was shining, the leaves were starting to turn, the air was crisp. And as much as Park Slope sometimes felt claustrophobic, its familiarity was also comforting. She didn’t feel on display in the same way she did when she went into Manhattan, where suddenly her uniform of clogs and jeans and boatneck tees seemed woefully boring. When she got to the F train, she put her headphones on—she wasn’t actually listening to anything, but this ensured that no one would talk to her—and closed her eyes. Even though she was surrounded by people, her commute was the only time when she felt blissfully alone.

  They finally reached her stop, Twenty-Third Street, and Sabrina got off the train and emerged in front of the Best Buy. At 9:05 in the morning, standing at the corner of Twenty-Third and Sixth, she felt like everyone around her looked like a vaguely younger version of herself. Not that she looked old, of course—she credited her Korean genes and her mother’s fanaticism about night cream with keeping her skin smooth—but lately she’d been watching the stay-at-home moms in leggings and Warby Parker sunglasses in her neighborhood, the ones who had nannies so they could go to Pilates and have “me” time, with increasing amounts of envy. But she had been one of those moms and hated it. After four years, she had turned into the worst kind of stay-at-home mom, one who thought she was too smart to be a stay-at-home mom and secretly judged all other stay-at-home moms for not working. (A couple of years in, her therapist had told her, “But you know you’re really only judging yourself, Sabrina.” She stopped going to therapy a few weeks later.) When she stayed home, there were days where she completely missed everything that was going on in the world because she was schlepping from playdate to playdate.

  In her MFA program, Sabrina had been something of a golden child, winning scholarships and awards. It had not been hard to picture a fabulous literary future for herself. But everything changed after graduation, when Sabrina failed to sell her thesis, a novel about three generations of a wacky but endearing Korean American family living in Princeton, New Jersey, even though one of her professors, who had won a National Book Award, called it brilliant and masterful and a host of other adjectives that failed to move editors at every major publishing house in New York. (The feedback she got most consistently was that the family didn’t seem “realistic,” which she took to mean that they didn’t think a Korean family could be funny and weird. Of course, exactly zero of the editors who’d read it were even Asian.)

  So she’d abandoned fiction to take a string of increasingly grim magazine jobs for which she was both over- (she had a graduate degree!) and underqualified (she had no magazine experience!) and eventually quit altogether, after she had Owen, when the eco-crafting magazine where she’d been working suddenly folded with no notice and she didn’t even get her last paycheck. Because Dan still had a job, it had just made sense for them to ride out the still-not-great economy, especially since child care was so expensive, and then she’d had Amelia. She wrote the occasional freelance essay about parenthood, but finally it was all just too much. When she started looking at job listings, Dan had laughed (not nicely) when she asked what a social media manager did, but she began applying for jobs nonetheless.

  When she went in for the TakeOff interview, even though she had a pathetic seventy-six followers on Instagram and she didn’t even have an active Twitter account, she was able to show them the viral article she’d just written for Scary Mommy—it was one of the bigger parenting sites, but they’d never heard of it—about what she wished she’d known before having a second kid. Maybe it was the article, maybe it was some kind of sincere yet misguided attempt at affirmative action for older people, but she was hired.

  Sabrina was an Engagement Ninja—when she first applied, she’d thought this was a euphemism, not an actual job title—at TakeOff, whose offices were in a lofty Flatiron District building that a million years ago had been a garment factory and now housed, at any one time, approximately seventeen startups. They were mostly tech-related, but there was a smattering of other companies, like the bespoke-baby-clothing designer on the second floor. (She’d wandered in one day, thinking about maybe having something made for Amelia’s third birthday party, and had to pretend to be unfazed when the woman at the desk told her that their dresses started at two hundred and fifty dollars.) The entire building was run by ShareWork, a company that leased empty buildings around the city and then subdivided them into cool work spaces. Every office came with a customizable “employee-perks” package; standard was an iced-coffee kegerator, a Ping-Pong table, weekly chair massages, and building-wide lunchtime yoga classes in one of the shared conference rooms. When Sabrina had worked for the eco-crafting magazine, the break room was essentially a closet with a microwave, a dorm-size fridge, and a coffeemaker that you had to bring in your own coffee to use. At TakeOff, the employees had successfully rallied to get Stumptown back after the office manager had, out of nowhere, tried switching them over to Starbucks. After Stumptown returned, there had been an hour-long celebratory coffee break in the canteen, where a hired barista made espresso drinks for everyone.

  The office itself was a big room where everyone sat at long tables. There were huge windows on the south side that made everything very bright much of the time. The other three sides were lined by several meeting rooms, a canteen, and a lounge with couches; on the walls were prints with cheeky inspirational sayings like I’M NOT HERE TO BE AVERAGE, I’M HERE TO BE AWESOME and DO EPIC SHIT. The only actual office was a glass-walled room in the corner with a comfy velvet sofa; it belonged to TakeOff’s founder and CEO, Mack McAllister.

  Sabrina made her way to her workstation. She sat next to
an intern on one side and her boss, Isabel, on the other. At the eco-crafting magazine, they’d been in cubicles, and Sabrina had initially found the level of closeness in the TakeOff office oppressive—and she still hated the very word workstation, which always made her think of an assembly line. Forget about private phone calls; you could barely send private emails! But now she was used to it, and besides, hardly anyone ever made phone calls here. All of the people at the level above Sabrina were called Heroes—there was an Engineering Hero, a Product Hero, a Sales Hero, and a Biz Dev Hero. Isabel was twenty-six, exactly ten years younger than Sabrina, but she had been at TakeOff for two and a half years, almost as long as the company had been around; she had started as Mack’s assistant and been promoted rapidly.

  Neither Isabel nor the intern, who came in three days a week, was there yet. Sabrina got to work before almost anyone else so that she could leave at five, which was practically midafternoon for most people in the office, but that had been a condition of her hiring that she had insisted on: she needed to be home before six so that she could let the nanny leave and eat dinner with her kids. Dan, who worked three floors down from her, had asked for no such concessions and usually didn’t walk in the door before seven or eight.

  Sabrina put down her still-unfinished coffee and her bag, took off her jacket, and woke up her computer. She sat and closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She’d been skeptical when Mack brought in the meditation guru, a woman named Carly with impossibly long and shiny dark brown hair parted in the middle who was bicoastal and alluded to her celebrity clientele, but Sabrina had actually found some of Carly’s techniques useful, like just closing your eyes and breathing. “A little moment for your soul to heal,” Carly liked to say in her soothing voice. Sometimes that was all it took.