“Put what? Whatever it is, tell me. This is valuable feedback, Casper.” Even as he said it he could feel himself cringing inwardly. The only truly valuable feedback would be Casper deciding to stay.
“Well…it’s just that the tech problems we’re trying to solve here…” He paused. He seemed to be struggling with whatever he was about to say. “They’re not really interesting enough for me,” Casper finished.
What the fuck, Mack thought. And then before he could help himself, he actually said, “What the fuck does that mean?” And quickly, because he saw Casper’s face: “Sorry. I’m just a little surprised to hear you say that.”
“I like a challenge,” Casper said. “And what we’re doing now—it’s kind of…basic.”
“Basic.”
“Yeah. I mean, we’re essentially just gathering data at this point. From a product and dev perspective, it’s not particularly challenging.” Casper paused. “Congrats on the funding, though, that’s great news.” He stood up. Mack stood up too and stuck out his hand. No sense in burning a bridge. Then again, if ever a bridge deserved to be burned, it was probably this one. Leaving two months before the new beta was supposed to be released! Who did that? Assholes, that was who. Selfish assholes who only thought about themselves and not the good of the company that had supported them, not to mention paid them handsomely.
As Casper shook his hand, Mack said, “Well, like I said, thanks for the feedback. It’s…useful.” The fuck it is, he thought. “Actually…can you just do me one favor?”
Casper looked at him and didn’t say anything.
“Can you stay on for the month? At least help us get the new beta ready to ship.”
Casper sighed. “They want me to start December first, and I was really hoping to take a couple weeks off and go to India. Now that I’m into meditation, there’s this really cool-sounding retreat—”
Mack cut him off. “I get it. I really do. But—and pardon my language, Casper—we are utterly fucked if you leave sooner. I’ll…I’ll give you a bonus if you stay till the end of the month.”
“How much of a bonus?”
“Five grand.” It was a random number that seemed big enough to be enticing but also extremely reasonable, given how much he needed Casper to stay. “On top of your regular salary, of course.”
Casper sighed. “Fine. I’ll stay a month but not a day longer.”
“Thank you.” He simultaneously wanted to hug Casper and throttle him. “So let’s keep this quiet for now, okay? We can tell your team in a week or two and then make a broader announcement, but I don’t want to panic anyone quite yet.”
“Okay. That’s fine.” He turned to leave, stopped at the door, and turned back to Mack. “And, uh, thanks for everything.” He shut the door behind him.
“Fuuuuuuuuck,” Mack said under his breath. He wanted to scream. He wanted to punch something. But there he was, in his fucking fishbowl of an office, where even if no one was actually looking at him at that precise moment, it felt like everyone was looking at him. The glass had been his idea—he had read in some startup-management book that it promoted transparency. But right now he would have given anything for one of those offices behind opaque, solid walls with a thick door.
This was supposed to be a triumphant—euphoric, even—time for him, the day after a great meeting with Gramercy Partners. He was about to get a shit-ton of money for his company! He was about to be rich! On paper, but still. But no one really understood how hard—and how lonely—it was to be a founder sometimes. Sure, it was exciting to stand in front of a company that you had created and see all those eager faces looking at you, taking in your every word, feeling inspired and motivated. But whenever something like the conversation he’d just had with Casper happened, there wasn’t really anyone he could talk to, no one to whom he could explain how hard it was, day in and day out, to keep a smile on his face and a spring in his step and act like everything was just fine.
And he couldn’t stop thinking about what was happening—or not happening—with Isabel. The downside of work being life and life being work was that there was no shutting it off, and the downside with hooking up with someone at work was there was no escape. He’d never been in this position before; usually he was the one cutting things off with a woman he worked with, taking her out for a drink afterward just to make sure there were no hard feelings. Usually he was the one who caught an ex staring at him from across the room or heard that she had been crying in the bathroom. And now that it was happening to him, it sucked.
He knew he and Isabel weren’t exclusive. He knew they were allowed to date other people. He knew this was a casual thing. But the note sent to her at the office that she’d put on Snapchat—he was still looking at her stories on there; he couldn’t help himself—felt like she was just taunting him. She was the one who hadn’t wanted to be in a relationship, and now all of a sudden it was like she was fucking married. It was true that he had never actually said he wanted to be exclusive, but he knew that he was getting to the point where if it had come up, he definitely would have. And now she had to go and throw it in his face like that.
What made it worse was realizing how much Isabel’s cold shoulder bothered him. He was stung by the rejection and doubly stung and embarrassed by how much it had hurt him.
He had never wanted to be, or thought he would be, in this position. There was one night, not long after he’d gotten TakeOff’s first seed funding, that had seemed especially, exhilaratingly pregnant with the possibilities that were to come. He and Victor Vasquez and Nilay Shah, the StrollUp guys he’d met when they both gave presentations at the New York Startup Series, and a couple of their friends had gone to dinner in Williamsburg, where they had started off the evening with absinthe drinks and dozens of oysters. Mack had quickly arrived at a place of happy and confident drunkenness, and the five of them had heatedly debated whether New York or Silicon Valley was the best place to launch a startup. The other two guys at the table, Dinesh and Kyle, were friends of Victor’s, and were about to move their six-month-old company to San Francisco.
“You have to look at it this way,” Dinesh said. He was a cheerful, slightly overweight guy who was apparently some kind of programming whiz. Mack guessed he was around twenty-five. “The access to capital in the Valley is unparalleled. But the only way you can get that access, really, is by putting yourself in front of their faces. And they like to know that their investments are close by; they want to be able to keep tabs on you.”
Kyle jumped in. “Not only that, but the talent pool—there’s just no contest.” Kyle spoke with a flat Chicago accent, and Mack could tell that he would be bald by thirty. “You’re telling me that you can get the same caliber of engineers in New York as you can in SF? Bullshit.”
Victor smiled. “I like to think of it this way. Silicon Valley might be baking the cake, but we’re making the frosting. And everyone knows the frosting is the best part of the cake.” Everyone laughed. “And those people in the Valley…are they people you would want to have drinks and oysters with? We’ve all been to SF. We know what it’s like there. Everyone looks like they came right off the assembly line at the engineer factory. All anyone cares about, all anyone talks about, is tech. And don’t even try to tell me that the girls in San Francisco have anything on the girls in New York. That’s where there’s just no contest.”
As if on cue, two women appeared at their table. They were both short and skinny with long brown hair. One was wearing a crop top and high-rise jeans, the other was in a vintage-looking flowered dress. “Victor!” Crop Top gushed, enveloping him quickly in a hug. “We thought that was you.”
Victor paused just a millisecond too long and Mack realized that his friend had forgotten the girls’ names. “I’m Mack,” he said quickly, standing and offering his hand to the woman in the dress.
“Erika.” She shook his hand.
“And I’m Sam,” said Crop Top, extracting herself from the hug and shaking Mack’s hand.
As the seven of them stood around semi-awkwardly, Victor asked, “So what are you all getting into tonight?”
It turned out Erika and Sam had gone to Barnard—Victor, who had gone to Columbia with Nilay, had met them in an art history elective he took senior year—and they had just finished dinner and were about to meet up with a few of their friends, and then they were all going to head to a loft party in Bushwick, and would the boys like to come with? And thus, three hours later, Mack found himself making out with Erika on a worn velour couch, a familiar position even if the exact surroundings—a makeshift bedroom in a loft overlooking a noodle factory—were a little shabbier than he was used to. An hour after that, he was in a cab with Erika, Sam, and Victor (they had somehow lost the other three guys along the way); half an hour after that, Erika was pulling him into the back bedroom of a fourth-floor railroad apartment in the East Village and shutting the door. She had kicked off her shoes and proceeded to take off his pants and his shirt, so he took off her dress, and then he took off her bra, and then she had whispered, “Do you have a condom?” And, well, yes, he did just happen to have a condom—not that he necessarily made a habit of keeping a condom in his wallet, but he had, lately, figured out that it was always better to be prepared than, well, not. It took him a couple tries to get the condom on his penis, which was not really as hard as he would have liked, but Erika was lying on the bed, eyes closed, and kind of moan-laughing, and then she reached for his dick and with a couple of strokes had not only gotten him legitimately hard but also managed to slide the condom on, and then she guided him into her. He remembered she had surprisingly large breasts, big, fleshy orbs that lolled to either side of her body and jiggled manically as he thrust into her, and when he flipped her over—his preferred position to finish in—they’d almost touched the bed.
Early the next morning he woke up with one of the worst headaches he had ever had—ugh, absinthe—and Erika was still asleep, so he found his boxer-briefs on the floor of her bedroom and tiptoed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water and saw, through the open door to the other bedroom, Victor and Sam, both lying on top of a patchwork duvet completely naked, and he drank the water in one gulp and tiptoed back into Erika’s bedroom and pulled on the rest of his clothes and left. He’d gotten a text from Erika later that day—come back soon ;)—and meant to respond, but forgot. (He did, however, remember to add her to the list of women he’d slept with since moving to New York that he kept on his phone. She was number thirty-nine.)
That was—fuck, that was almost two years ago! Did he even keep condoms in his wallet anymore? He took his wallet out and looked into it: just a few singles and his credit cards and driver’s license. No condoms. Just one more thing he was going to miss about Isabel.
From his office he could just see Isabel’s desk. She was talking to Oliver from sales, who was leaning over her shoulder and pointing to something on her computer screen. He saw her laugh. His stomach felt hollow. Allow yourself to feel at peace, his meditation app always said, but how the fuck were you supposed to feel at peace when the world was conspiring against you?
10
The Hustle
KATYA YAWNED AND stretched and gave herself a minute before rolling out of bed. Victor lay curled almost against the wall next to her, still sound asleep; he probably wouldn’t wake up for another couple of hours. It was seven thirty in the morning and she was wearing only a pair of black lace boy shorts, and so when she opened the door of her bedroom and stepped into the living room, she almost screamed when she saw Janelle sitting at their two-person table, her phone set up on a tripod, an array of beauty products in front of her. Janelle’s head whipped around when she heard Katya, and then she sighed. “Damn it, Katya, I almost had it.” She looked Katya up and down. “And you need to eat a sandwich.”
“I’ll make a note of that.” She stood there, hip jutted out, not covering her chest. Janelle had seen her naked before—it wasn’t like Katya’s skinniness was any surprise to her. And, actually, it was kind of rude to tell her to eat a sandwich. She didn’t even like sandwiches. “What are you doing up so early, anyway?”
Janelle gestured toward the windows. “The light in this place is best in the morning. I gotta get this video up before I leave for work.” This was Janelle’s latest attempt at “building brand awareness,” or, as Katya thought of it, “trying to become famous.” She was posting videos to Facebook and her YouTube channel, Black Girl Beauty. “This is ‘the easiest smoky eye.’” She batted her eyelashes. “See?”
“Mmm,” Katya said.
“Oh, by the way, I asked around about your invisibletechman. No one knows who it is.” Janelle picked up her phone. “But he’s kinda funny. Like look at this one.” She held out the phone.
Founder: *pats my hair* I like the new ’do! Me: *quietly casts voodoo spell on him*.
“Like, that is real.” She shook her head. “You know that your founder or whatever he is patted my brother on the head?”
“Who, Rich did that?” Katya said. Janelle nodded and rolled her eyes. “Well, he probably just doesn’t know any better.”
“Well, that’s because he hasn’t made it his business to ever be around black people before.” Janelle had a point, Katya had to admit. Trevor was one of two black employees at TechScene; the other, Kiana, worked in sales. “And guess what, it’s not my brother’s job to teach him how to behave. So I don’t hate this invisibletechman, whoever it is, if it makes the Rich Watsons of the world stop petting my brother like he’s some zoo animal.” Janelle sighed. “Anyway. I need to see how this new lip gloss looks on camera.” She turned her phone around to look into the camera, pursed her lips, and snapped a photo.
Katya stared at Janelle. It was way too early for all of this. “The lip gloss is pretty. Um…I’m gonna take a shower.”
“Okay…but can you make it quick? Sometimes my phone picks up the background noise.”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” When they’d first met for a drink after work, Janelle had assured her that she “worked hard, played hard,” was rarely home, didn’t mind if Katya had overnight guests but personally preferred to “sleep out” if there was a gentleman or a lady in her life, and would pay her rent on time. Basically, the perfect roommate. Katya’s previous roommate, Alicia, was always asking Katya to hang out and seemed offended when Katya made plans with other people that didn’t include her. Katya had enough to worry about without having to wonder whether she was hurting her roommate’s feelings because she’d gone to a concert with someone else. It was, frankly, too much hassle. These were Katya’s first roommate experiences—she lived in her bedroom at her dad’s during college at NYU, which had actually been a better experience than she was expecting; her dad was so proud that his daughter had gotten a scholarship (partial, but still) that he and her stepmother, Larisa, pretty much left her alone, and she didn’t have to live in one of the overpriced, overcrowded dorms, and she still got to come and go as she pleased. It was a long commute into the city every day, but she always got a seat on the B train and used the forty-five minutes to study. She’d kept living at home for those first few months after graduation when she was interning at Mashable by day and bartending at night, trying to save enough money to move out. Finally one of her professors from NYU put her in touch with Rich, and after he’d canceled several times, they eventually met for coffee and she was hired on the spot. Two weeks after Katya moved out, her dad announced he and Larisa were moving to a nicer apartment in Brighton Beach because Larisa’s best friend and her hair salon were there.
Katya showered and got dressed quickly—Victor was still sleeping. Janelle paused her smoky-eye tutorial just long enough to remind Katya that Victor had officially overstayed his welcome, and so Katya left the apartment
feeling anxious and annoyed at the situation she now found herself in. As she walked down Greenpoint Avenue toward the G, which would take her to the L to get into Manhattan, she thought about whether she should tell her parents she was dating someone. Lately Victor had started dropping hints that he thought it was a little weird that Katya’s parents lived so close to them and he hadn’t met them yet, and she didn’t want to tell him that her parents didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. And the longer she waited, the more awkward it was going to be when she finally did tell them, because they’d ask her how long it had been and she’d have to answer truthfully, and then they’d wonder why she hadn’t introduced them, and then she’d have to tell them he was Mexican, and she didn’t want to see their faces fall when she said that. She didn’t want Victor to be exposed to their old-world racism. They didn’t seem to care that she was living with a black woman, probably because they weren’t sleeping together. When she was feeling generous toward them, she thought of it more as ethnocentrism than anything else. Almost their entire world—home, work, friends, the stores they shopped in, the restaurants where they ate, the newspapers they read, most of the TV they watched—was Russian. Her dad and Larisa, as well as her mom and her boyfriend, rarely ventured out of Brighton Beach, and when they did, it was to see friends in other Russian enclaves in Brooklyn and Staten Island. They disapproved of her living in Greenpoint, a Polish neighborhood, even though she had told them dozens of times that lots of different kinds of people lived there now, “even Russians!” They hadn’t believed her, and it only got worse the one time her father and Larisa had come to visit her and observed that the nearest bodega, coffee shop, grocery store, bank, and nightclub were all Polish-owned. “I don’t even go to nightclubs! And World War Two is over, you know,” Katya had hissed at them, and her father had shrugged, a shrug that implied that this was about so much more than World War II, it was about generations and blood and traditions that someone like Katya, raised as she was in the United States, could never hope to understand. It was then she realized that they were stuck in a Russia that they had psychically transported to Brooklyn, and introducing them to her Mexican boyfriend was only going to make things more complicated for everyone. So it had been easier to deflect their questions for the past few months about whether she was dating, and who, and try to avoid letting them set her up with one of their friends’ sons, who were invariably named Boris and had thick necks and vague jobs and drove their BMWs way too fast down Ocean Parkway.
Startup Page 10