Jules and Cyrus go on a road show. They take their decks, their projections, Gaby’s financial models, and they fly back and forth from the West Coast and return with stories about all the boardrooms they pitched at, Prets they ate at, rooms they shared at Holiday Inns. Now that Cyrus has signed off on our plans for WAI, he’s as ready to pitch it as the rest of us. That doesn’t mean he sticks to the script—part of the Cyrus/Jules routine is that Cyrus goes off book and behaves and speaks as if he has wandered off a mountaintop and into a boardroom. There’s the time he leads the partners of Steiner Jenkins in a group meditation in which they sit facing the wall of their boardroom and chant “om” in three-part harmony. There’s the other time, when someone asks him while scrolling through a phone, why on earth anyone would rather talk to people about how we die rather than to their friends about how to make homemade yogurt, and Cyrus reaches across the table, puts his hands on the man’s shoulders, and looks so deep into his eyes that the guy starts crying right there in front of his boss.
On neither of these occasions are they invited back for a second meeting.
Then there is the usual party trick, of which Cyrus appears to never tire, when someone volunteers their three deepest commitments—a partner from Van Dreeson Janowicz said his father was a lapsed Mennonite and that he was obsessed with The Sopranos and that he was starting classical guitar lessons and that he thought he was really, really good. What would Cyrus recommend for his fourth marriage, which was actually his second marriage to his first wife?
The way this used to work was that Cyrus would close his eyes or walk around the room for a few minutes, but now he just asks the platform and WAI gives up its answer. Sometimes the partners ask Cyrus if he agrees with what the algorithm produces, and Cyrus always says yes, of course, he wouldn’t change a thing, but I wonder if he occasionally thinks he’d do better if left to his own devices, or if it annoys him that I’ve burrowed so deep into his thoughts that I’ve actually transplanted his brain to a code that is now replicating him to thousands of people around the world.
Despite Cyrus’s winning eccentricities, Rupert’s assurances, and the sheer success of the platform, three months before we are about to run out of money, we get interest from only two firms: Accelerate Capital and Play Ventures. Cyrus says we have to go back in and give presentations and that this time I have to come too.
* * *
Destiny has hired a small army of very young, very cheerful people to continue to spread the word about WAI and its many virtues. Whenever I’m online, I get chased around with ads telling me I need to bring meaning back to my online experience, that ritual, community, and contemplation—the pillars of WAI—will bring joy and sustenance to my otherwise empty shell of an existence.
Whatever they’re doing, it’s working. People are piling on like it’s the last express train to Bushwick, and Ren and I are working around the clock to keep it all running smoothly and with the speed that users now expect of every other device in their lives.
Destiny seems to have been born for this. She barks sweetly at her charges, waking them up in the morning with pallets of lattes, showering them with praise, posting their numbers on a giant billboard, taking them to late showings of Hollywood classics and then dragging them back to the office for one last push/sprint/stab.
She spends marketing dollars we don’t have on T-shirts for the whole team. WAISER, they say, with the three-circle logo underneath. I wear mine till it nearly dies. Destiny is magnificent; just looking across the room at her gives me a thrill. We stick to our eleven a.m. donut habit and high-five each other all day long.
One day she asks Li Ann and me to meet her in the cafeteria. Rory is there, having a meeting with his team, a group of somber scientists staring into their laptops. His vegan superfoods grace the menu at the cafeteria, and occasionally, Li Ann will talk about how Rory is going to disrupt the way we consume everything, but I’ve hardly spoken with him since we moved in—I can’t shake the feeling that he knows something I don’t, something dark and groundbreaking that makes whatever I’m doing totally irrelevant.
Destiny tells us she wants to take the sisterhood to the next level. “I want to start a thing for female founders.”
“There are already things like that,” Li Ann says. “I’m in the 24/7 Club, the Women@work collective, the Google Women working group. You can join if you want.” She scrolls on her phone.
I’m not sure the title applies to me. “I don’t know if I want to call myself a female founder.”
“Which part are you not sure of, the female or the founder?”
Li Ann takes something out of her bag. It’s about the size of a small tablet or a large phone. She opens it, and inside, there are five long metal cylinders that look like cigars except they are bright blue, purple, and orange.
“What’s that?”
“A hundred percent pure oxygen,” she says. “Little miniature oxygen tanks. You get high from the purity.” She passes them around and I take a blue one. “Tap twice to turn it on,” she says. I do and then inhale, and a cold hit of—well, air—flows into my mouth.
“I liked the other one better,” I say. “This one doesn’t have any flavor.”
“Yeah, but it’s better for you. And if the apocalypse hits super-suddenly, you can have twenty minutes of oxygen to get to your panic room.”
Destiny pulls hard on hers. “It’s like a blow job without some guy’s hand on your head.”
“Or the warm spunk.”
“That too.”
“Get this,” Li Ann says. “Smoking is out. Breathing is in. Breathe Life.”
“I’m in,” Destiny says. “So will you join Fucking Female Founders?”
“What?”
“Yeah, the 3Fs club.”
“It sounds like you’re pimping female founders.”
“Female Founders Say Fuck You? Fuck You We Are Female Founders?”
“How about just Female Founders Club?”
“That doesn’t have a fuck-you in it.”
“Does the rage have to be in the acronym itself? Can it come later, like in the press release?”
Destiny rolls her eyes. “We need to bring this shit down, all of it.”
“First we have to raise funds for WAI, and then I will join your revolution,” I say.
“How’s it going?” Li Ann asks.
“Cyrus and Jules are on the road. Every few weeks Gaby joins them and they send me selfies from VC parking lots.”
“You don’t go with them?”
“I gotta keep my head down and make the magic.”
“Asha’s good at following orders,” Destiny says. She waits for about three seconds, and then she’s all over me apologizing. “I’m sorry, that was shitty.”
I find myself getting a little tingly around the eyes. “It really was.”
“I guess I just don’t want you to get overshadowed by the boys.”
“It’s Cyrus, for God’s sake. He couldn’t screw me over if he tried.”
“But he’s a man.”
“It’s real between you two, isn’t it?” Li Ann says.
“I’ve been in love with him for as long as I can remember.”
“Then you just have to keep it all going, the marriage, the business, it’s all one messy thing.”
“I see it more as a happy symbiosis. Imagine if I had to go home and explain what I was doing all day.”
“Now that would be fucked up,” Destiny says. “Oh, I know! How about Female Founders Society?”
“FFS. I like it.”
Li Ann, Destiny, and I tap our oxygen cigars together. “Here’s to us. May we take over the world.”
* * *
Cyrus picks me up at the San Jose airport on a Sunday night in September. It’s cool out and he’s wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap. His skin has a reddish tint that makes him look like he’s been out surfing all week. I don’t realize how much I’ve missed him until we’re walking toward the parking lot and he stops to kiss me.
“I don’t want you to go anywhere ever again,” I say.