Startup

by Doree Shafrir

  “Okay. Right.” Mack turned to his computer. “So how about…” He started typing. “‘When we launched TakeOff three years ago, our first goal was to build a product that people loved and kept coming back to. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Casper Kim, who shepherded our beta design to market and came up with some of the features—predictive mood analysis, social mood sharing—that are core to the TakeOff mission.’” He looked up. “How’s that sound?”

  Jason nodded, and cocked his head to the side. “Someone’s been lingering for a bit,” he whispered, and Mack peered around him and saw Isabel sitting on top of a desk a few yards away from his office, looking at her phone.

  “You ever get the feeling that people have overstayed their welcome? I just wish she’d take the hint and quit.”

  “You could fire her,” Jason said. “That is, in fact, allowed.”

  “It’s complicated.” Mack sighed. “I wish I could just fire her but…I don’t think I can, unfortunately.”

  “Then make her quit.”

  “How?”

  Jason shrugged. “Things could start getting uncomfortable for her around here. You know? I mean, look, Mack, she is definitely someone whose utility has diminished.”

  That was a bold assessment from someone who’d been there only a few weeks, but what Jason was saying was true—Isabel’s utility had diminished, and the fact that they were sitting here talking about her when they could be talking about something else meant that she was taking up way too much space in his brain. He hadn’t texted her since yesterday, when she’d told him she wasn’t feeling well and had gone home, and there was a tiny part of him that had been hoping she just wouldn’t show up today so he would have an excuse to be mad at her. Suddenly, he had an idea.

  “Sabrina,” he said. “She works for Isabel. You know who she is?”

  Jason looked out onto the office floor. “Oh—yes. Dark hair, Asian?”

  Mack nodded. “Right. That’s it. Let’s get her in here.”

  Jason smiled. “Shall I go get her?” He slipped out of Mack’s office. Mack wasn’t totally sure what he was going to do once Sabrina came in, but he wanted to make sure that Isabel saw Jason bringing Sabrina into his office. Two minutes later, they walked in. She was pretty, Mack thought, despite the fact that she looked tired—he usually didn’t like women wearing a lot of makeup, but as he noted the circles under her eyes and the general pallor of her skin, he thought she could probably use some. He realized he didn’t know much about her; she was one of the quiet ones, the kind who came in and did her work and left. There weren’t too many like her. Most people who worked at TakeOff were joiners, people who organized softball leagues and special T-shirt days. He had tried to encourage an atmosphere of extracurricular activities, and if the employees@takeoff.com email traffic was any indication, it was working. If you read any book on startups, you knew that the most successful ones had the strongest company culture. It started with a motto, something that told people why they were there, infused them with a sense of purpose. It had taken Mack a few months to develop his, but it was something he was proud of: “Do good work, and the work will help the good.” He had it printed on the TakeOff T-shirts and on the mugs in the kitchen, and every new employee got a little framed letterpress placard with the slogan to put on his or her desk. He had considered writing a longer mission statement but figured that if he could encapsulate what they stood for in a few words, then why not.

  “Sit down,” he said to Sabrina, gesturing to the chair next to Jason, who was still standing. Sabrina sat. She was wearing a gray wool sweater whose sleeves she kept tugging over her hands, and she was barely making eye contact. He smiled, he hoped reassuringly, and said, “It’s all good—you look nervous.”

  “Oh—I just…well, I’ve never actually been in your office,” she said. She looked around. “I mean, I’ve seen it from the outside, of course.” Mack smiled. Okay, she was calming down.

  “We just wanted to check in,” Jason said. He sat down on the couch. “You know, see how things were going.”

  She glanced at both of them. “They’re going well. I think? I mean, do you guys not think they’re going well?”

  Mack waved his hand. “No, no, they’re going great. Our numbers are up, we’re very happy with those. We just meant more like…how things are going. Are you happy here?”

  She smiled. “Oh yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve never been happier, in fact.”

  When Jason came by to bring her into Mack’s office, Sabrina had her headphones on and was deep in a series of retweets about the TakeOff app. This was part of her job: to retweet, sometimes with a funny comment, anything positive that people were saying about the app, and so she didn’t notice Jason was there until he tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped and took off her headphones. “Whoa, you scared me,” she said, and he smiled—a smile that she couldn’t tell the meaning of. Was it a wolfish “you had lunch with Katya Pasternack and we know everything” smile, or was it an “everything’s fine, I’m just randomly coming over to your desk to say hello” smile, or was it something else altogether?

  “Got a sec? Mack and I want to chat with you. In his office.”

  “Oh—sure, yes, of course.” She saw Isabel across the room, deep in conversation with someone who had his back to her. She put her headphones on her desk and followed Jason into Mack’s office.

  Sabrina had been hoping that everything that happened with Katya—from the moment she met her at Andrew Shepard’s party to the weird, uncomfortable lunch—would just quietly go away, that Katya would forget about the photo she saw or else decide that it didn’t matter. Because Dan seemed more interested in what was going on at work lately. Usually he barely asked her anything about her job, as though its very existence was beneath him, and certainly talking about it was not worth his time. But even just last night he had casually asked how things were going at work, and when she had replied, “The usual,” he had looked at her for a few seconds and tilted his head and seemed like he was about to ask her something else, but he didn’t. Then his phone vibrated and he sighed and started tapping away at it, and then Amelia had wandered into their bedroom and announced that she couldn’t sleep, so Sabrina had to go sit with her and read The Ugly Duckling—Amelia’s choice—twice and try not to wake up Owen, who was sound asleep in the same room. As she read the story, which was really a depressing and not-great-message story when you thought about it, she resolved to quietly remove the book from the shelf. She was supposed to be raising an empowered little girl, not someone who thought that people would be mean to you if you were ugly and the only important thing in life was to become a beautiful swan. Besides, Amelia was beautiful, she really was—she had a cherubic round face and bright green eyes—and the last thing Sabrina needed was Amelia worrying that she wasn’t pretty. Or thinking that it mattered. Because…of course it mattered, but Amelia had more than enough time to figure that out.

  Even though she could see Mack’s office from her desk, she’d never actually been in it, and it somehow felt brighter inside than she’d thought it would. There was a blond wood table that was his desk, on top of which he had his laptop and another monitor, but no photos or any personal paraphernalia save for the framed slogan—DO GOOD WORK, AND THE WORK WILL HELP THE GOOD—that all the TakeOff employees got when they started. No one had ever said, explicitly, that you had to have this on your desk. But everyone did. There was a turquoise velvet couch, the only burst of color in the space, and a clear acrylic chair that she was now sitting in. She was all too conscious of having her back to the rest of the office—undoubtedly, everyone had seen her come in. What were they thinking? Why was she in his office? Was she about to get fired? Had Isabel seen her come in?

  And now he was asking her if she was happy here. “Oh yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve never been happier, in fact.” She hoped her smile was convincing. Or at least convincing enough. She couldn’t remember, in her previous jobs, there being
such an obsession with happiness. No one at the eco-crafting magazine had cared whether she was happy; everyone seemed resigned to the idea that happiness was elusive, ephemeral, and, in any case, not suited to a life in New York City. But now, in front of her twenty-eight-year-old boss, she realized that he had only known a world in which his own happiness was of prime importance. “I love it here.” She smiled and made eye contact with Mack.

  “Good,” he said. He glanced up at Jason. “You’ve been doing a great job, and we’ve been thinking we’d like to give you more responsibility, something that’s more of a strategy role. I don’t know yet what the title will be but I wanted to gauge your level of interest.”

  “Um, yes, of course.” Strategy role? So she wouldn’t have to sit there retweeting all day. She would be freed from the tyranny of the TweetDeck. She would be able to tell her husband that what she did had value. “Of course.” She repeated it because she needed to believe it herself.

  “Wonderful.” Mack smiled and stuck out his hand. Sabrina stood up and shook it. “We’ll talk more very soon. And could you send Isabel in when you leave?”

  “Oh—sure,” she said. “And thanks. I’m excited.”

  Mack watched as Sabrina walked up to Isabel, who was still talking to Oliver Brandt. Sabrina said something to Oliver, who nodded and left the two of them, and then she said something to Isabel, and—did Isabel roll her eyes? He couldn’t tell. Sabrina walked back to her desk and then Isabel was standing in the doorway of his office. “Sabrina said you wanted to see me.” She looked Mack straight in the eye. “What’s going on?”

  Jason responded before Mack could say anything. “Yeah, come on in, Isabel. Do you mind shutting the door?” Isabel shut it but stayed standing in front of it. “Have a seat,” Mack said and gestured to the chair in front of him. Isabel stared at him a moment too long, and finally sat down.

  “So we’ve decided to promote Sabrina to a more strategic role,” Mack said.

  Isabel’s face was blank. “What does that mean, exactly.”

  “We’re still figuring out specifics, but we think for now it makes sense for her to report to me.” Mack hadn’t actually thought about this until just that second, but as soon as he said it, he knew it was the right move; Isabel scowled.

  “That’s crazy,” she said. “Sabrina…she’s, like, still learning stuff.”

  “We’ve been pretty impressed with her work so far,” Jason said. “We think she has a lot of potential.”

  “Oh, come on,” Isabel said. “Did you guys even know her name two weeks ago?”

  “That’s inappropriate,” Mack said. There was silence. “I’ll also need you to write me a memo about your team. If you’re going to continue to have direct reports, I need to have more of a vision from you about what that means and how your role could shift.”

  “Wait, what? Why is my role shifting?”

  “Isabel.” Jason sounded as though he were speaking to a small child. “We didn’t say that your role will shift, just that it could shift.”

  Isabel’s eyes went from Mack to Jason and then back again. “I just…I don’t understand. Is this all because of the meeting yesterday?”

  Mack tilted his head to the side, as though considering this. “Look, the meeting yesterday didn’t help, certainly, but we’ve been taking a hard look at all of our teams and we’re going to be making some changes. Casper’s last day is Friday and it just seemed like a good time to try to shake things up a bit. This is a startup, Isabel—things are always going to be changing and evolving and iterating. If one thing doesn’t work, we need to be able to pivot and start something new. You get it, right? It’s nothing personal.”

  “Of course,” Isabel said. Mack stood up, and then Jason and Isabel did too. Isabel was avoiding making eye contact with him. “Why would it be.” Was she…about to cry? Mack had never seen Isabel cry, now that he thought about it. He suddenly remembered when he’d hooked up with a woman who’d cried when they had sex a couple years ago. After the third or fourth time, he told her, while they were still both naked, that he didn’t really think this was going to work out and then she’d just started crying harder, and he’d rubbed her shoulders for a minute and then whispered into her ear, “I’m gonna head out,” and gotten dressed and left.

  Now he was feeling the same level of discomfort, and all he could think was Isabel needs to get out of my office. “Okay, then, we’ll talk. Thanks.” No one moved and he saw tears starting to well up in Isabel’s eyes. Why wasn’t Jason doing anything? He needed both of them out of his office. “Jason, would you and Isabel mind just…”

  Jason understood immediately what was happening. “Yes, of course. Come on, Isabel, let’s leave Mack alone.” Isabel sniffled and turned around and walked out of his office, Jason behind her. Right before Jason walked through the door he turned around and rolled his eyes at Mack. Women, he mouthed, and Mack had to stare very intently at the floor to keep from laughing.

  17

  No Children

  AS KATYA WAS about to leave work, her phone vibrated with a text from Victor: hey come meet me & nilay & some other ppl @ tippler? The Tippler was a bar in the basement of Chelsea Market popular with people who worked at Google, which had office space upstairs in addition to the company’s block-long building across the street. Nilay had worked at Google before he and Victor had started their company, and he was still friends with his former coworkers. Katya sighed. She didn’t particularly feel like spending her evening around a bunch of Googlers. They were a cultish, secretive group, always working on some new product within Google that they were sure was going to change the world, and yet she found them strangely risk-averse. If they really wanted to be revolutionaries, Katya reasoned, they wouldn’t be working for a gajillion-dollar multinational corporation; they’d be striking out on their own. But once you got used to in-house chefs and massage rooms, it was hard to give them up, and so there was also an edge to Googlers, a resentment that they were trapped by golden handcuffs. They all thought they had the potential to be the next Sergey Brin or Larry Page themselves, and that their genius had not yet been fully recognized. So even though she didn’t have a ton of respect for Nilay, this was one aspect of him that she did admire: he had walked away from Google and taken a leap into the unknown. It had failed, sure, but at least he had tried.

  She could already picture the scene at the Tippler: it would be crowded, and it would take forever to get a drink, and Victor would be off trying to network, and when she’d finally found a quiet corner she’d get hit on by a junior software engineer with bad breath. But it was eight p.m., the TechScene office was deserted, and she didn’t have anywhere else to be. yeah ok i’ll head over there, she texted back. He responded with the fist-bump emoji.

  It was about a twenty-minute walk from the TechScene office over to the bar, and Katya took the opportunity to smoke two cigarettes. She had a Google doc going with her notes about Mack and Isabel, but she’d read them over that afternoon and it felt like she didn’t have much to work with. She was starting to worry—not panic, but worry, just a little bit—that she wasn’t going to be able to get everything she needed to actually publish the article. Or at least, not the article that it seemed like Dan wanted her to write, which was essentially a takedown of Mack McAllister that would expose the hypocrisy of the tech world once and for all.

  She stubbed out her cigarette at the corner of Fifteenth Street and Ninth Avenue and put on some bright red lipstick. She rubbed her lips together and picked up her phone and turned the camera toward her so she could see herself. “Okay,” she said out loud. One block down, the Apple Store emitted a warm glow. She crossed Ninth, and halfway down Fifteenth Street, at the bottom of some stairs, there was a nondescript door that looked like the entrance to a store. There was a bored-looking guy guarding it.

  “Private party tonight,” he said, looking her up and down. She was in one of her standard outfits—black jeans, black Docs, leather jacket. Her nails had chipped
black polish on them. Was this inspection supposed to make her feel self-conscious? It made her feel defiant. Hey, fuck you, bouncer guy. This was uncharitable, she knew, but private party? Since when did the Tippler have bouncers and private parties?

  “Yeah, I’m here for that party. My boyfriend’s in there.” She said this as calmly as she could. He squinted and tilted his head at her, as though contemplating whether this could possibly be the case.

  “I’ll need to see some ID,” he said finally. She wordlessly fished her wallet out of her bag, extracted her New York State ID—she had never bothered to learn how to drive—and handed it to him. He looked it over and gave it back to her. “All right, Katya.” He moved aside to let her through.

  She didn’t respond, just walked into the bar. Asshole, she thought as she scanned the room. The bar was decorated in a kind of cozy-library-chic, with books on display above the bar, Persian rugs on the floor, and low-light Edison bulbs. Right now it was packed full of people, mostly guys. Katya took a deep breath. How was she even supposed to find Victor in this crowd? She looked at her phone—no service. “Great,” she muttered. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Isabel Taylor and Andrew Shepard. Isabel was looking at her phone in one hand, even though there was no service down here, and holding a drink in the other. Andrew was talking animatedly to the guy next to him, someone Katya didn’t recognize. Should she go up to Isabel and try to talk to her? Victor would probably be pissed—he hated it when Katya did anything that seemed like she was using their relationship for work—but, fuck it, he was nowhere to be found. She took a deep breath and sidled up to Isabel, away from Andrew. Neither of them noticed her approach.

  “Hey, Isabel,” she said. Isabel didn’t look up from her phone. Katya cleared her throat and said, louder, “Hey, Isabel.” Isabel turned to her with a Do I know you? look on her face. “It’s Katya.” Isabel still looked like she wasn’t sure who Katya was. “From Andrew’s party the other week? I was there with Victor Vasquez?”