Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  She got to work just as the weekly TechScene editorial meeting was about to begin. Everyone had taken a bagel and was standing in the kitchen expectantly, waiting for Rich or Deanna to say something. They had these meetings every Monday morning. When Katya started, they went through a dozen bagels in a meeting. Now, because they’d hired so many new people, they were up to three dozen, none of which Katya ever ate, although she would occasionally avail herself of a spoonful of scallion cream cheese and lick it surreptitiously at her desk later.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Rich said. No one responded, but the chatter gradually died down. “I said, good morning, everyone!”

  “Good morning, Rich,” everyone replied, a chorus of voices in various stages of enthusiasm. Katya glanced around at her colleagues. Dan was standing toward the back, looking at his phone.

  On Friday, the day after Andrew’s party, Dan had messaged her on Slack when he got into the office.

  Dan: sooooo…I heard you met my lovely wife last night.

  Katya: yup.

  Dan: she said she had fun talking to you.

  Katya: yeah she was cool

  Dan: what’d you guys talk about? just out of curiosity

  Katya: ummm idk, I don’t really remember

  It was at this point that Katya had a creeping sense of panic and stopped responding. Had Sabrina told Dan about seeing Mack’s dick pics? What had Sabrina said about her? Katya hadn’t yet decided what to do about the photo of Isabel’s phone screen that she’d taken, but she knew that the second she said anything to Dan, he’d want her to write something about it—and she figured that if Sabrina had said anything to Dan, then he would have said something to her. Katya decided that the best way to navigate the situation and buy some time was to try to avoid Dan as much as she could. It had almost killed her, but she’d taken only one smoke break that day, and she made sure to do it when he was in a meeting with Rich and Deanna. But today, he was probably going to want to smoke. And talk.

  Katya tried to turn off this line of thinking and pay attention to Rich. The co-founder of TechScene was a media-app prodigy who’d managed to find himself in several right places at several right times even as the wider media world was in various stages of collapse or, as people liked to euphemistically call it, “transition.” At Harvard, he’d started a company that sold online ads via an app, a business bankrolled in part by his dad, the formidable Silicon Valley attorney Chip Watson. He’d moved the company to New York right after college and sold it two years ago for a reported $235 million, taken a year off to backpack around Southeast Asia, and met Deanna Stein, one of the early proponents of the importance of teaching journalists to code, when he got back to New York. Deanna had been fired from BizWorld after clashing with the founder and was trying to launch her own media company, and Rich had the cash. Now Rich was generally the public face of the company, while Deanna was more reserved and more intimidating. As had been related in dozens of articles and blog posts about Rich and his new company, they ended up launching a few months ahead of schedule at SXSW, where they’d broken the biggest news of the conference, that Mack McAllister had just secured six million in funding for his workplace-wellness startup, TakeOff. Breaking that news had in turn led TechScene to attract more funding on top of what Rich had already put into the company, which Rich had strategically leaked to the tech gossip site Valleydirt just as he was trying to recruit journalists to come work for him.

  Now it seemed as though Rich spent just as much time on TV and giving speeches as he did at the company. In fact, Katya’s dad had been completely skeptical about TechScene altogether until he saw Rich as a talking head discussing Snapchat’s valuation on CNBC, which was on at all times on the TV in the kitchen in his apartment (the TV in the living room was usually on one of the Russian channels they got via satellite).

  As Katya watched Rich—clad in his standard outfit of an untucked button-down, dark jeans, and high-top Nikes—talk, she couldn’t stop thinking about the screenshot that resided in the Photos app on her phone. She hadn’t told anyone, even Victor, about what had happened at Andrew Shepard’s house. She was simultaneously thrilled by her daring and incredibly guilty about what she had done, and since Thursday, she had replayed that moment what felt like hundreds of times in her mind, along with the ways that things could have turned out differently if only one tiny thing had changed. Why had Isabel come over to talk to them? Why had she left her phone on the table? Why, why, why.

  But what she always kept coming back to was, if Mack McAllister weren’t a disgusting pig, he never would have sent that text in the first place, and then none of them would be in this position.

  Still. She may have been conflicted about what to do about the photo, but she knew she needed to safeguard it, so she had backed up her phone to her laptop when she got home from Andrew’s party, taking care not to let on to Victor that she felt the really urgent need to back up her phone on her computer at that moment. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it but she was sure that she didn’t want to decide right then or, worse, have Victor make the decision for her. There was no way he would be cool with her keeping the photo, let alone writing anything about it. He probably wanted to hit Mack up for funding for whatever his next company was. And that had been their deal: Everything at the dinner was off the record. And this wasn’t just off the record, it was private. It had not even been meant for her eyes. It had been an accident, a fluke.

  Katya had also thus far avoided thinking too much about the true ramifications of the photo and what could possibly happen if she did anything about it. There was something about speaking truth to power that had attracted her to the idea of being a journalist in the first place—wasn’t that a journalist’s job? To shed light on the nefarious, seedy underbelly of how the sausages of the world got made? And certainly, the Mack McAllisters of the world were the sausage kings, so secure in their positions that they felt it was within their rights to send pictures of their dicks to their employees. It was her job as a journalist to tell the world what a gross human he was. She had never given much thought to gender politics—she didn’t have time, she told herself, to worry about whether she was or wasn’t getting ahead in life because she was a woman—but for the first time she had the thought that maybe it was her job, as a woman, to expose him.

  “Deanna is going to say a few words about traffic and goals,” Rich said, as the room applauded, and Katya realized she had completely zoned out for the past few minutes.

  Deanna came to the front of the room. She was a small woman with frizzy black hair that she usually wore in a bun at the top of her head, and her outfits always looked like they could have walked off the set of Reality Bites. Today she was wearing a long-sleeved black baby-doll dress, purple tights, and black Doc Martens boots. Her nails were painted bright pink. She looked like a Goth elf. Deanna dressed like she had been shopping in Urban Outfitters since the early ’90s and just never saw the need to go anywhere else. She lived with her wife, a music teacher, and their two kids in a brownstone in Prospect Heights, where they’d hosted last summer’s TechScene barbecue in their backyard.

  “So, traffic.” Deanna’s voice was low and a little raspy. She was older than Rich, but no one knew exactly how old she was. Katya figured she could be anywhere between thirty-two and forty-two. “Great week. Overall we broke three million uniques, which was our best week since WWDC.” WWDC was the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the annual event where Apple unveiled new products and the tech journalism world exploded; it was an all-hands-on-deck situation, with everyone in the office covering various aspects of the conference. This year had been Katya’s first and she had written five posts in one day, more than anyone else on the team. “And we’re beating Mashable and BizWorld for the month on Twitter mentions and retweets.” The room applauded.

  “So. Yes,” Deanna said, trying to speak above everyone and mostly failing. “Good job, everyone, but the month’s not over.” The room quieted dow
n. Deanna smiled. “Thank you. I also wanted to say a few words about how we’ll be evaluating things going forward.” She cleared her throat. “Up until now, we’ve been primarily focused on traffic. And traffic’s good. Traffic’s great, in fact. We love traffic. But traffic can be cheap. Traffic can be fickle. Traffic is not always your friend.” The room laughed, a little nervously. “Along with Dan, Rich and I have been coming up with a new metric to measure success that takes into account not just traffic, but also things like Twitter mentions and inbound links. In other words, how influential is your work? How are you driving the conversation?” Dan caught Katya’s eye and raised an eyebrow as if to say, See?

  “So what does this mean for you?” Deanna continued. “Well, it means that original reporting, even if it doesn’t get as much traffic as, say, Thirteen Things You Never Knew Your iPhone Could Do—great post, by the way, Brian—is going to be more important. We want you on the phone, we want you meeting sources for lunch. We want to be breaking news all over the place. And when I say breaking news, I don’t mean being the first person on the internet to post news from a press release or a statement, or from a conference, or panel, or whatever. We’re talking something that you break yourself.”

  Rich spoke up again. “Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that things around here are going to change. We’ll still be the awesome tech news site we’ve always been.” He grinned, but Katya could practically see her colleagues’ minds racing. So many of them thought that news meant posting something that another site already had with the words slightly rearranged and a different headline. Well, they were in for a rude awakening. But how would Deanna and Rich assess impact, exactly? They hadn’t really addressed that. It seemed subjective in a way that made Katya nervous. At least with traffic, the raw numbers were right there for everyone to see; there was no questioning them, no way for someone to make the case that actually, no, they deserved another twenty thousand views or Facebook shares or whatever. The traffic was what it was. She didn’t even really understand how journalists functioned in the days before you could see exactly how many people were reading your stuff. If something was just buried in the middle of a magazine, who cared how many people subscribed to the magazine? You had no idea how many people were actually reading your story. Katya thought this would have driven her absolutely crazy. She also didn’t understand people—true, mostly old people—who bemoaned the quantification of journalism. If the whole point was to have people reading your stuff, wouldn’t you want to know how many people were doing that? They were just scared, she decided, to know how few people were actually reading their work, so it was easier just to criticize the whole endeavor.

  Maybe that was a good enough reason to go after the Mack story—to show everyone she worked with, and everyone in the industry, that she was not to be fucked with, that she would go after the tough stories even if they might make some people feel bad.

  “Thanks, everyone,” Rich said, and everyone started talking again, a low murmur that felt more charged than usual. And—fuck, this presented a whole host of other problems related to the picture on her phone. And what Sabrina had or hadn’t told Dan. She needed to be alone to think, but Dan was making a beeline for her.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  Ugh, I must look upset, she thought. She smiled quickly. “Yeah, everything’s fine, why?”

  “Just thought you looked a little…I don’t know. Never mind. Want a smoke?”

  “Yeah—just let me run to the bathroom,” she said. Dan nodded and walked toward the front door. Katya scurried to the bathroom and, once safely in a stall, pulled up the picture of Mack’s text again. She just needed to make sure it was still there.

  11

  House of Cards

  DAN TEXTED AT seven to say that he was working late, a text Sabrina didn’t see right away because she was giving Amelia a bath, and when they came out of the bathroom—Amelia in her pajamas with her dark brown hair combed back and ready for bed—Sabrina was confronted with an entire box of Cheerios whose contents were now on the kitchen floor, where Owen was sitting and shoving handfuls of the tiny Os into his mouth.

  Sabrina didn’t say a word, just yanked Owen up from the floor so hard that he immediately started crying and dragged him into his bedroom, where Amelia had retreated and was sitting on her bed with a slightly scared look on her face. Sabrina shoved Owen down on his bed and turned him over and spanked him, hard, on his bottom. He turned and stared at her and then started screaming even louder.

  Shit. Shit shit shit. Before her kids were born, Sabrina had lots of notions about good parenting, one of which included never, ever spanking her children. That had gone out the window around the time Owen turned three and was a complete monster, and she couldn’t figure out any other way to make him listen to her. Until the one time he got in trouble at nursery school and started crying and asked the teacher if she was going to spank him “like Mommy,” and Sabrina got a phone call from the school director reminding her that Slope Montessori had a no-physical-discipline policy, and that applied to what went on at home too, and so Sabrina had promised it would never happen again. She didn’t tell Dan about that phone call; he would have gone on a rant about how they were paying thousands of dollars a year to have someone who saw Owen for two hours a day, three days a week, tell them how they should be raising him, and even though she didn’t really disagree, she also couldn’t fathom not having those six hours a week, when Amelia was napping, to herself.

  Since that phone call two years ago, though, she had kept her promise—she hadn’t struck Owen or Amelia once. His sobs grew louder. “I was hungry, Mommy!”

  “If you’re hungry, you tell me.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Amelia lie down and turn away from her, putting her hands over her ears. “You do not try to get the box of Cheerios down from the cabinet yourself. Do you understand?”

  Owen just cried louder.

  “I said, do you understand?” He finally nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to read to Amelia now and you’re going to go into the kitchen and clean up all the Cheerios.” It was Owen’s turn to look confused and frightened. “Put all of the Cheerios into the garbage can. I don’t want to see even one Cheerio when I come out there or you’re going to be punished again.”

  It wasn’t until she’d read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Amelia, and Owen had cleaned up the Cheerios and brushed his teeth and gotten into bed, and Sabrina had turned out the light and gone back into the living room and poured herself a full glass of red wine that she finally checked her phone and saw the text from Dan. By now it was eight thirty, and she just texted back ok and turned on the TV, and so by ten, when she finally got into bed, she had gone through an entire bottle of wine. She passed out for half an hour or so and then woke up and realized it was now ten thirty and Dan still wasn’t home.

  Sabrina hadn’t told Dan about what she’d seen at Isabel’s party. When she’d gotten home on Thursday night, slipping through the door at midnight, he had been awake, sitting on the couch working on his laptop.

  “So, how’d it go?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Fine? Owen didn’t seem to care. Amelia seemed confused. She just kept saying, ‘This is Mommy’s job.’”

  “And they went to bed without freaking out?”

  “Yeah? They were probably asleep around eight thirty.” Okay, not terrible, Sabrina thought. “So does this mean you’ll be on daddy duty more often, then?”

  Dan laughed. “You act like it’s a choice! I’d be happy to put them to bed more, I just can’t. This job is only getting crazier.”

  “I met someone you work with, by the way.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Katya? Skinny girl, bleached-blond hair?”

  She could have sworn she saw Dan do a double take. But when he spoke, he sounded totally normal. “Oh, yeah, Katya. She’s great. One of our best reporters.”

  “Really?” Sabrina couldn’t picture this girl being a kille
r reporter. She was so…skinny. “How old is she? She seemed like a child.”

  “You know, twenty-five or something? They’re all like that. They’re not like how we were.”

  “How were we?”

  “I mean, we were ambitious. But not like them. It’s like they were born with their life goals already imprinted onto their brains.”

  Sabrina had snorted. “Yeah, I see that. Well, anyway, she seemed nice.”

  Now, as she lay in bed, vaguely wondering where Dan was but also not really caring, she thought back to this conversation. Truth be told, she hadn’t been able to shake what had happened at Andrew’s party. Not just the texts from Mack to Isabel—which she had yet to confront Isabel about—but also the way all the guests had seemed so convinced of their own importance. The party had dislodged something in her, reignited some long-dormant spark. She remembered that she used to think that if she wasn’t exactly destined for greatness, she was definitely at least destined for significance. And there was little, if anything, that felt important about what she was doing now. If she stopped tweeting for the TakeOff account, no one would miss her. No one would likely even notice. She just wouldn’t be getting a paycheck anymore.