“The leprechaun.”
“What do you think?” Cyrus asks. He holds up his notebook, and on it is our logo, three small capital letters inside three concentric circles. WAI.
Six
GROWN-UPS
I wish Gaby, our new CFO, would stop wearing designer suits to Utopia. He doesn’t even do it ironically, he just gets up every morning, puts on many layers of expensive clothing, and rocks up to the office.
“That’s what CFOs are like,” Jules tells me. “They’re uptight. Don’t suit-shame him.”
“That’s a thing?”
“I’m making it a thing.”
Until Gaby arrived, I was tabulating our expenses on a spreadsheet, and I’d programmed it to beep loudly if anything went over five hundred dollars. But now that we have eleven people on payroll and we’re starting to upload the platform onto our servers, the money is dribbling out like drool from an overly bred pug, and Gaby is in charge of all the numbers.
Gaby is a grown-up. His sideburns are dusted with gray, and he has a square jaw and one of those long wallets that men like to slide in and out of their coat pockets. He was the CFO of a hardware startup that went public last year and made him very rich, and now he is here to do the same with WAI. There’s nothing mean about him. He has kind, crinkly eyes and he is always super nice to me, but even so I find myself a little embarrassed whenever he’s around, like I just got caught picking my teeth.
Gaby is here to make sure we don’t squander the two million dollars in our bank account. This seems like a stupidly large sum. The money was given to us by Rupert, a person I’ve met twice: first when we visited the offices of Sloane Management and Cyrus presented on the two-hundred-inch screen in the conference room, and then again when the money landed in the bank and he took us all out for drinks at Soho House. Rupert is tall, skinny, Indian, and likes to hook his thumbs around his belt loops. I hated him on sight, mostly because he started talking to me in elaborate sports metaphors and also because my parents have always told me to be skeptical of brown people who change their names to sound like white people, but he loves the platform, loves Cyrus, and treats me with an acceptable amount of respect for being the brains behind the operation. Plus, he was one of only two people willing to write a check for WAI, a fact he reminds us of repeatedly, telling us that he knows our chances of succeeding are zero, that it’s not even a moon shot, more like one-putting into a black hole the size of a penny.
Rupert and Cyrus meet every week for mentoring sessions. Rupert appears high whenever he is near Cyrus. I overhear them talking about the Assyrian Empire, about Sikhism and astrology and arcane subplots from The Lord of the Rings. I know Rupert without asking him a single question—growing up in Jersey in a two-story house not unlike my parents’ in Merrick, playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement, and turning the volume down on his Wu Tang Clan lest his mother call down, “Rupinder, you’re finishing your maths homework or what, beta?”
Rupert has divided us into teams. There is a leadership team, an executive team, a product team, and a marketing team. We are a board of directors—Cyrus, Jules, me, and Rupert. And titles. Cyrus is CEO. Jules is COO. And I am Chief Technology Officer. I’m going to write all the code, and Cyrus is going to lend me his brain while keeping Rupert happy, and Jules is going to take care of everything else: the team we’re going to hire, the way we’re going to run those teams, the deadlines and the deliverables and the mess of running a company.
Jules is in a perpetual state of nervous excitement. He uses a standing desk so he can type things into his computer while bouncing on his heels. Instead of using Slack, he likes to shout across the room whenever he wants to tell us something. He kicks off every day with an all-hands meeting in which he leads us in singing “WAI is the word” to the tune of Grease. Everyone on the team adores him.
Cyrus, on the other hand, is disciplined and reserved. He takes the 7:13 train in every morning; I have to shower the night before and skip breakfast to keep up with him. He wears his signature white linen shirts and ankle-length trousers and barricades himself behind a desk and works intently, hardly ever looking up from his screen or the piles of books open in front of him. Whereas Jules is everyone’s best friend, Cyrus inspires more of a hushed reverence from the team, starting with Rupert and Gaby right down to the intern who is going to run our socials, a woman called Gina whose college thesis was titled A New Media of the Social: Networks of Power in the Era of Post-truth.
* * *
We did not meet Rupert at the speed-dating event. Instead, Cyrus joined something called Venture Shorts, where people post two-minute Instagram stories of themselves and their ideas, then get anonymous invitations from VCs to come and pitch. Cyrus’s video was one long iPhone shot of him looking deep into the camera and telling the story of how he came to believe that ritual was the central act of human life, and how, thus far, all of our technological innovations had ignored this fact. “We imagined,” he said, “that we could supplant the role of meaning with other things—with advancement, with speed, with pixels and processors. But we cannot deny our essential humanity, our souls, if you want to call them that, which yearn not just for the superficial connection of social media, the followers and the followed, the influencers and the influenced, the likes and the dislikes, but for the deeper connections, enabling us to ask the questions we have pondered for millennia. Why are we here? What is our purpose? And how can we come together in our inquiry as communities of belief, human-made groups of people who commit ancient and modern acts that frame the pivotal moments of our brief time on earth, our births, our marriages, our deaths? We at WAI believe that community is about shared beliefs, whatever those may be, and that technology can help us to strengthen those ties, rather than leaving us atomized by the pull of technological progress.”
Cyrus’s pitch received two bids: one from a small family office run by the errant son of a Texan oil magnate, and another from Rupert. No question where we chose to get our money from, even though the magnate, Ed Junior Jr., promised us more money on better terms. No, we chose Rupert, who, after a bit of negotiation with our new lawyer, agreed to 25 percent equity and wired the money to our bank account exactly six weeks after Cyrus posted his video.
Jules now talks about time in terms of runway, “runway” being the amount of time we have until our money runs out. “We have twelve months of runway,” he keeps repeating. That’s six months to launch the product and six months to make it financially viable. He wants me to hurry up and hire someone to help me design the platform, but I haven’t found the right person yet. The people who roll up are too young and look like they haven’t left their parents’ basement for the duration of their short lives. I complain endlessly to Destiny and Li Ann, but I’m feeling the pressure now, because even I’m not fast enough to get the code written in time for our launch, not without help.
* * *
One day, after four brain-numbing interviews, a man in a Mohawk shows up and introduces himself as Ren. His English is imperfect but his portfolio is stunning, and soon we are talking about the beta launch, about attach rates and UX and UI. “When can you start?” I ask, and he says, “After lunch?” I stick out my hand and take deep satisfaction in saying “You’re hired!”
“You can’t do that,” Jules tells me later. “Did you log the interview on HireMonkey?”
“What’s HireMonkey?”
“Our API. Where have you been? I did a whole workshop on it last week.”
“I’ve given Ren all the passwords and set him up next to me.” I point to my new best friend, who has headphones on and is already deep in the system.