When we arrive at the offices of Play Ventures, at the top of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley, we are given electronic bracelets and asked to surrender our shoes, then led through a corridor, beyond which is a trampoline the entire width and breadth of a high-ceilinged room.
A small man hands us each a pair of socks with little plastic buttons on their soles. We understand that we are meant to jump up and down on the trampoline in order to cross over to the other side of the room, beyond which is our meeting. We step onto the trampoline with our bags. The small man, whose name is Craig, leads the way. He is clearly practiced. He leaps, flips, lands on his feet, and leaps again. He apparently feels no need to explain. I attempt a medium-size jump. Craig does a somersault in the air with his hands clasped under his knees. Cyrus dumps our stuff on one corner of the trampoline and starts to jump quite high. Jules just stands there, wobbling with the ripples of other peoples’ jumps. Our bags wobble too. Cyrus attempts a flip and lands on his butt. He laughs, gets back up. I’ve found a comfortable rhythm with my medium-size jumping and try not to think about how much longer this will continue. Cyrus keeps attempting the flip until he gets it right, then he does it again and again.
Finally, it ends. Craig crosses over to the other side of the trampoline and takes us through another hallway, this one with green lights running along at floor level. He turns and opens the door and we are in a boardroom, which, by contrast, is rather normal, a corner of the building with panoramic views, a large oval table, and the requisite pair of screens at one end.
I’m surprised to see Craig taking a seat at the table. I thought he was a kind of acrobatic house butler, but it appears he’s the investor. We make our pitch. Cyrus talks, Jules reads out the numbers, I follow up with the technical details. Craig is on his phone. He occasionally looks up, smiles, gives us a thumbs-up, and then continues to do stuff on his phone. It’s obviously nothing important; I can tell he’s just scrolling his Instagram.
When we are finished, Craig stands up and applauds. “That was great, guys,” he says. “Really great.”
Jules asks Craig if he has any questions.
Craig rubs his chin. I wonder if he thinks this gesture makes him look older. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it’s great, I mean, I think it’s fantastic. But the question is: are you going to kill everyone?”
Cyrus, Jules, and I glance at each other. Is it the liberal thing again? Is he worried we’re a bunch of socialist murderers?
“I mean, are you going to kill everyone?” Craig asks again.
“We’re not sure—” Cyrus begins.
“You gotta be sure. You gotta be one hundred percent abso-fucking-lutely sure you are going to totally crush-kill everyone out there.”
“We really don’t have any competitors in the marketplace,” Jules says.
“You have to crush the church, and you have to kill Facebook. You’re like a church/Facebook mash-up. You gotta kill both of those guys.”
“I think, realistically, we would get a decent amount of growth even if we didn’t try to compete with Jesus or Zuckerberg.”
Craig springs toward Cyrus and eyeballs him. “I always check for the killer in everyone. The assassin. Are you an assassin?”
I see Jules give Cyrus an imperceptible nod. “I most certainly am, sir,” Cyrus pledges.
“Fuck yeah!”
“I will kill everyone and anyone.” Cyrus’s tone is like the EKG of a dead person. “I will assassinate all my enemies, and I’ll even kill a few friends while I’m at it.”
“I knew it!” Craig says. “You look like a hippie, but you’re a fucking ninja.”
He leads us out, back through the green hallway, across the trampoline, and to reception, where we surrender our bracelets and retrieve our shoes.
“Thank you for your time,” I hear Cyrus and Jules say, and then I shake little Craig’s hand and we’re back in the parking lot, falling over ourselves.
For weeks, we pretend to be Craig. “What do you want for dinner, Cyrus?”
“I want to kill everyone and eat their eyeballs.”
“Should we hire the very serious woman from Vassar to do our accounts?”
“I don’t know. Is she an assassin?”
“Can we please talk about runway?”
“Nope. I’m too busy killing everyone. Every fucking one.”
The joke never gets old.
Ten
BRINGING UP BABY
Finally, Cyrus agrees to an interview for an online magazine. He asks me to come with him. They’ve said something about a photo shoot in a disused church. On the way, we consider all the angles the story might take. “What if they secretly hate me?” he says. “What if they don’t put it in the tech section or the business section but in the sexy-minister section?”
“They could call it Missionary Style.”
“Hey, maybe they’ll let us borrow one of the outfits and we can go home and play nuns and priests,” he says.
“Totally. But only if I can be the priest.”
“That would be super sexy.”
“I guess your suit won’t fit me,” I say. Suddenly, I’m annoyed at having to accompany him. “Why isn’t Jules here?”
“He said he wasn’t going to stand around and watch me tell everyone how important we are.”
“Guess that makes me the sucker.”
The taxi swerves and he slides toward me. “Let’s ask them if we can do the interview together,” he says. “I would love that.”
Now I feel ridiculous. “No, don’t be silly. They want you.”
“It’ll be even better,” he insists. “I’ll call them right now.”
“Why didn’t you ask in the first place?” I say.
The taxi swerves again and this time it’s me sliding over to his side.
“I guess it didn’t occur to me. That’s shitty, I’m sorry.”
By the time we roll up to the address, I’m in a foul mood. “I’m going to get a coffee,” I say, and disappear for an hour. When I get back, he’s in full Cyrus mode, talking Rubik’s cubes around the poor interviewer. The guy can’t get a word in edgewise, but instead of being offended, he is rapt, listening to Cyrus riffing on everything from climate change to online privacy. Lately, I’ve realized that because of the popularity of the platform, and because of what it is—a replacement for religion—people are looking to Cyrus for answers to the questions they ask themselves all the time. And the most we can hope for is that Cyrus will tell them he doesn’t have the answers, only his own opinions, which they should take as the thoughts of one man with a limited understanding of what is beyond the horizon.
We all think a little press will help us get our funding back on track—unsurprisingly, neither the khaki triplets nor the trampoline assassin came through. Rupert is getting nervous, calling Gaby every week and demanding to know how much money we have in the bank. He’s suggested we make cuts, maybe take a few of the devs off the team, but Cyrus has refused to fire anyone. “Asha and I will hold our salaries,” he volunteers. “Jules too.”
Jules, Cyrus, and I meet every morning to figure a way out. We call it Bad News, Good News.
Jules begins by writing the bad news on the whiteboard. A list of investors who have said no.
“Rupert sent me a new list for outreach,” Jules says. “I’ve drafted all the emails—Cyrus, you just have to review and press send.”
Cyrus reads through the list. “How evil are these people?”
“Just your average evil funds.”
“Rupert says these guys are all tier three.”
“What happened to tier two?” I ask.
“They rejected us. I’ve made a word cloud of the reasons.” Jules turns his computer to me. The word VERTICAL is the biggest, followed by UNUSUAL and then RISK.
“They didn’t give us money because we were too vertical?”
“Our business didn’t fit into any of their verticals.”
“What were their verticals?”