Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  He peered out into the office. Most people were at their desks, headphones on, staring at their two monitors. He felt a momentary swell of pride: I built this, he thought. All these people are here because of me. Then a thought occurred to him: Forget about sex; when was the last time Isabel had even texted him a nude? There wasn’t really any way to check on Snapchat because the photos self-destructed after a few seconds, and he was always careful not to screenshot them because then Isabel would get a notification that he had. But…hmm. He left his office and walked to the bathroom, being careful not to look over to Isabel’s work area, and locked himself in a stall. All he had to do was think about the last time they had fucked to get hard. He pulled out his phone, opened Snapchat, and took a picture. He was about to send it to her when he decided to write on it using the app’s pencil tool. We miss u, he scrawled in red, and sent it off.

  5

  Three’s a Crowd

  WHEN KATYA GOT to work the next morning and wiggled her wireless mouse to wake up her computer, her TweetDeck—which she always had open on her second monitor—was scrolling furiously. The TweetDeck never stops, she thought to herself. There was an AM news radio station in New York called 1010 WINS that Katya’s dad and stepmom always listened to in the car because it had traffic and weather on the ones. Katya had told them a million times that Waze was much better for traffic, but her dad’s car didn’t have Bluetooth and he found it distracting to have to keep looking at his phone all the time. One of 1010 WINS’ taglines was “The news watch never stops,” and Katya had updated the slogan in her head. And what the hell was a news watch anyway?

  She clicked on the browser tab that had the post about Connectiv’s offices that she had been working on. Did she really need to wait for their publicist to get back to her? She clicked over to Slack. The office was mostly empty, but Dan was already at his desk.

  Katya: yo

  Dan: hiya. long time no chat

  Katya: ha. so I think we should go ahead and pub that Connectiv post, i can just fill in the other stuff when they get back to me

  Dan: cool. anything you want me to look at?

  Katya: nah. i think it’s pretty straightforward.

  Dan: k sounds good

  Katya looked over her post one more time and then hit publish. As soon as it went up on the site, she tweeted it, then she pinged Trevor so he could tweet it from @TechScene and post it on TechScene’s Facebook page. np, he wrote back. tweeting now and will schedule for FB in a couple hours. Katya set a calendar reminder to tweet it again in two hours. Now began the briefly exhilarating period after a story was published when she noted with satisfaction how many people—particularly other tech reporters—had tweeted the story. The need for approval from Twitter users was something that her younger self probably would have sneered at, but now she saw it as the cost of doing business. It was fine to get likes, but what she really wanted was either a retweet or, even better, a completely original tweet commending her for a job well done, preferably one from someone in the tech world whose work she respected and who, ideally, had hundreds of thousands of followers. If the only people who liked the tweet were “eggs”—people whose Twitter presence was so lame that they hadn’t even bothered uploading avatars, or spambots, or both—she sometimes deleted the tweet.

  Just as she’d hit publish, her phone had vibrated, and she had ignored it. Now she looked to see who it was: her boyfriend, Victor. All the text said was sup. He never used to check in with her like this, but now that Victor was out of a job, he was bored and she got way too many texts from him all day. He was out of a job because his company, StrollUp—“like Uber for strollers,” she’d heard him say approximately five thousand times—had gone out of business last week. Like most company failures, it had happened slowly and then all at once. A few months after Katya and Victor met, StrollUp was part of a cover story in New York magazine about the city’s hottest startups; it included the company’s origin: how Victor’s business partner, roommate, and best friend, Nilay Shah, had heard a mom pushing a double stroller complaining about how hard it was to schlep it everywhere in the city, how her building wouldn’t let her park it in the lobby, how frustrating it was to fold it up to put it in the back of a cab, and he’d had an idea, which he’d eagerly relayed to Victor that night, that the two of them should start a strollers-on-demand company. (Left out of the story they told publicly was the fact that Nilay was eavesdropping because he thought the mom was really hot.) At the time of the New York magazine piece, it seemed like things were going well. At least, there was a warehouse somewhere in Long Island City with five hundred Uppababys that were supposed to be their beta testers, they had just gotten seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in angel funding (half of which was from Nilay’s parents), and they had six employees in an incubator in the financial district. Then one night a few weeks ago Victor had mentioned almost too casually that he and Nilay had had dinner with one of their investors recently—he was vague as to the exact timing—and it hadn’t gone so well.

  And now Victor was staying with her because he’d gotten in a fight with Nilay over this very dinner because Nilay had gotten drunk and, when the conversation had meandered to discussing other startups in New York, had referred to a startup founded by one of the investor’s best friends as “a seriously dumb idea,” even as Victor was trying to tell him with his eyes from across the table to shut the fuck up. Nilay clumsily apologized over email the next day, but the investor never responded. Finally they got a call from the investor’s assistant, who informed them that the investor was no longer interested in continuing the relationship, that he wished them the best of luck, and that they should cease contact immediately. And then the rest of the meetings they had lined up with VCs about their next round of funding were mysteriously canceled, and then suddenly they realized they wouldn’t be getting any more funding at all, and they had to sell the warehouse full of strollers to a guy with a knockoff Babies R Us store in Bensonhurst called We R Babies who took everything away in a U-Haul.

  But if she had to listen to Victor rant about Nilay one more time, she was going to tell him to find somewhere else to stay; Janelle had already not so subtly begun to hint that it was high time for Victor to either go back to his apartment or start paying rent. And preferably the former, because Janelle never would have agreed to move in with a couple.

  The thing with the dinner and the investors—it could have all just been a coincidence. Even Victor didn’t deny that StrollUp had been struggling, and they had started getting loads of contradictory advice about what to do. One of their advisers was pushing them to pivot to become a marketplace for secondhand baby equipment. Another wanted them to expand from strollers into other forms of transportation, like skateboards and bikes. Katya was pretty sure that their indecision over how to fix the business was probably what doomed them, but Victor was convinced it was the dinner with the investor, and he held Nilay almost entirely responsible.

  A Slack notification from Dan came up in the corner of her screen.

  Dan: so let’s talk today about what’s on tap

  Katya: ok. I have a couple stories on the lineup for next week

  Dan: yeah I know. but we need to get you on something bigger

  Katya: i know. i’m working on it

  Dan: ok

  Katya: what r u worried abt

  Dan: the fact that you say “r u” instead of “are you” ;)

  Katya: :-0

  Katya: seriously tho is there something YOU ARE worried abt

  Dan: thank u for using proper English

  Katya: ok now ur just fucking w me

  Dan: true story

  Katya: is there something ur really worried abt or can I get back to work

  Dan: no I’m not worried.

  Dan: btw…you’re the only person in the newsroom i’m giving advance warning about the thing we discussed yesterday

  Katya: ok. i’m on it.

  Dan: that’s what I like to hear. and of co
urse I’m around if you want to bounce any ideas off me. just think BIG.

  She needed a smoke, and she needed it alone. She got up from her desk and, without making eye contact with Dan, slipped out to the street. The whole situation with Victor and his company put Katya in an awkward spot. A potentially huge story, filled with conflict and intrigue, and she couldn’t write about it because Victor was her boyfriend and it would be the most massive conflict of interest, plus it would probably make him break up with her immediately. She scrolled rapidly through Twitter as she smoked, absorbing information and yet not totally processing it. There was one tweet, however, that caught her eye, from an account called @invisibletechman. She didn’t follow the account, but it had been retweeted into her timeline by a Mashable reporter she followed. The tweet said: News flash to all startup bros: actually, we can hear you. Your silence speaks volumes. What did that mean? Katya wondered. She clicked through to @invisibletechman’s profile. The profile picture was a black-and-white photo of a black man she didn’t recognize, and the bio said: Tryna make a dollar out of some 15-cent stock options. (For my white friends: That’s Stokely Carmichael in the pic.) invisibletechman@gmail.com. Katya googled Stokely Carmichael; her knowledge of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers was limited to Martin Luther King Jr. and a vague idea about why Malcolm X was important.

  Invisiblet Tech Man’s account seemed to have started within the past few weeks, and most of his (or, possibly, her) tweets were about what it was like to be black in startup culture. Things like Shit white founders say: “Stay humble.” Nah, man, I’m good and Poll: how many POC work at your tech company? (1) <5 (2) #1 is the only possible answer. He had around two thousand followers—respectable, but nothing mind-blowing. Clearly he (or she) was still trying to make a name for him- (or her-) self. She took a screen grab of the account and texted it to Janelle: you know anything about this? Janelle usually knew about anything on Black Twitter at least a week before Katya did.

  Janelle texted back right away: Yeah everyone’s talking about it & trying to figure out who it is…not sure if it’s someone in SF or NY or even if they actually even work in tech. Interesting, Katya thought. She followed the account. You never knew where a story might come from; sometimes Katya got tips from the most random places. And if no one had written about @invisibletechman yet, maybe she could be the first. That might be something Dan would think would “move the needle.”

  That night, she got home at nine and found Victor sitting on the couch watching South Park on his laptop and eating microwave popcorn. “Hi,” she said, plopping down on the couch next to him. “Is Janelle here?” He turned and gave her a kiss. “Hi,” he said. “Nope. Haven’t seen her all day.” Phew, Katya thought. One less time Janelle would be annoyed about Victor being in the apartment when Katya wasn’t there.

  “So what have you been doing all day?” She tried to keep her voice neutral.

  “You’re looking at it.” They were silent for a few moments. South Park blared from his computer. She found the characters’ voices especially irritating.

  “Mm-kay,” she said. “Well…I’m going to do a little work out here. Can you put headphones on?”

  “I don’t know where they are. I’ll just watch in there.” He gestured toward the bedroom as he hoisted himself off the couch, leaving crumbs of popcorn in his wake. He was still wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d had on when she’d left for work thirteen hours ago.

  “Hey,” she said just as he reached her bedroom. “What’s going on with Nilay? I mean…have you guys made up yet?”

  Victor rolled his eyes. “We’re done. That’s what’s going on with him.”

  “Okay,” Katya said. Was she going to have to spell everything out for him? “It’s just that…you know, you’ve been staying here for a while.”

  Victor bristled visibly. “I didn’t realize I was such an imposition. You know that if you were in the same situation I wouldn’t even think about saying something like that to you. Are you seriously telling me I have to leave and go back to the apartment where the guy who totally screwed me over lives? Because if that’s what you’re telling me…”

  She was starting to regret even bringing up Nilay. “I mean…” She tried to choose her words carefully. “Sorry if this is, like, awkward, but are you sure it was the dinner? I mean…are you sure that StrollUp was going to, you know, succeed?”

  Victor glared at her. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? You know we were close to getting that funding and then he just had to get wasted and run his fucking mouth. And really the worst part of it is he won’t even admit that that’s what happened. He thinks that we didn’t pivot fast enough. We were pivoting so fast that I almost got whiplash.” He shook his head. “It’s crazy to think that what he did at that dinner had nothing to do with it. You know that and I know that.” He went into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  Well, then, she thought, and once again rued the fact that she couldn’t write about it for TechScene. It had all the elements of a good story: a hot startup crashes and burns, co-founders not speaking. There was always the possibility that she could pass along the information to someone else, but she quickly dismissed that thought; she was ambitious, not psychotic, and besides, Victor would definitely know that she had been the one to tip off her coworkers. And if she was being really honest with herself, she didn’t want to give a scoop to someone else at work—especially not now.

  She and Victor had met in the line for a Vietnamese taco truck in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest, the tech industry’s five-day Super Bowl, prom, Oscars, and Coachella all wrapped into one, with breakfast tacos. By day, there were hundreds of panels inside the Austin Convention Center with titles like “Maximizing Mobile: The Next Frontier” and “Picturing the Future of Wearable Tech”; by night, the city’s bars and restaurants—really, any open space where alcohol could be served—were overrun by the conference-goers, mostly men, who spent a maximum of fifteen minutes at each party before heading off to the next. The most exclusive parties used an elaborate system of online RSVPs, wristbands, and secret locations, and yet the lines to get in still snaked their way around the block of wherever they were held, everyone desperately texting the person he knew inside, who inevitably didn’t have cell service.

  Katya was doing a post on, among other things, the most popular food at South By (calling it by its full name was a sure sign you were a newbie) and was taking a picture of the menu with her phone so she could refer to it later when she overheard the conversation of the two guys behind her. “Tonight there’s the Google Hangouts hangout, the Foodbox happy hour, the Spotify secret show, the BitForce party…am I forgetting anything?”

  The TechScene party, Katya thought to herself. But she didn’t even have to turn around to know that she didn’t want to tell these guys about her company’s party. They were clearly just your standard-issue startup bro dorks, the type who would obediently tweet from each party with the correct hashtag (#foodboxhappyhour, #bitforcesxsw, and so on) and get way too excited when they saw them show up on the real-time projection of everyone’s tweets on the wall. This was Katya’s first South By, but even before setting foot in Austin, she had already internalized a lot of the (exaggerated, she suspected) cynicism verging on outright disdain that so many people in the tech scene, particularly tech journalists, had for it. It was not cool to be a member of the media and be excited, in any way, by South By. The reasons were generally some combination of: it was the same damn story every year, no one besides the same two hundred and fifty people cared, there was no new way to cover things, there were too many journalists chasing too few stories about inherently boring startup people, and you got a distorted sense of what would excite real people in the real world because every single thing excited people in tech.

  Maybe their conversation was something she could include in an “Overheard at SXSW” post? She casually opened the Notes app on her phone and started jotting down what they were saying ju
st as one of them—she hadn’t really taken a good look at their faces, but there was one who seemed to be more concerned about where they would be spending the evening than the other—was concluding that part of the problem was that the Google Hangouts hangout was a couple miles away from the Foodbox happy hour, but they wanted to hit both because they wanted to meet people at Google and there was a greater chance that the Foodbox party would have food, and it was at that point that Katya decided that this conversation was in fact too inane to record for posterity and turned around and said, as fake-sweetly as she could, “I’m sorry that you have to rely on free party food to survive. I didn’t realize things were so bad out there.” One of the two—the Indian guy, who she now deduced had been doing most of the talking—looked stunned, but the other one burst out laughing. “Yo, this girl is the realest person in this whole city!” Then he had stage-whispered to her: “You should see us at a buffet.” Katya, who tended to be suspicious of most people’s motives but especially men’s, was unexpectedly charmed, and when he suggested that the three of them eat their banh tacos together, she agreed. By the end of the night, they had lost Nilay and were kissing in the back of a pedicab—which seemed to be the best way to get around Austin, at least until the driver turned to them with a flourish at the end of the ride and announced that their two-mile trip would be thirty dollars.

  And now, seven months later, those tacos and that pedicab seemed like they had happened a million years ago.

  After a few minutes, she went into the darkened bedroom and found Victor in the full-size bed lying on his side and facing the wall. She undressed to her underwear and got under the covers. She placed a hand on his naked back. “Victor?” she murmured, and it was then that she realized he was crying.

  Katya was silent. She was not herself a crier, and she generally found people who cried to be weak-willed and sentimental, and she was particularly disoriented by men who cried. She had never seen her father cry—not even when her grandmother died, hit by a car crossing Ocean Parkway when she was going to buy groceries—and she had long been comforted by the feeling that Victor was not someone who would cry, ever. So now she sat up in bed, hugging her knees to her chest, until finally his tears dried up. He still hadn’t said anything but turned to her and tried to get her to lie down and snuggle. She was stiff.