Katya: nah. i think it’s pretty straightforward.
Dan: k sounds good
Katya looked over her post one more time and then hit publish. As soon as it went up on the site, she tweeted it, then she pinged Trevor so he could tweet it from @TechScene and post it on TechScene’s Facebook page. np, he wrote back. tweeting now and will schedule for FB in a couple hours. Katya set a calendar reminder to tweet it again in two hours. Now began the briefly exhilarating period after a story was published when she noted with satisfaction how many people—particularly other tech reporters—had tweeted the story. The need for approval from Twitter users was something that her younger self probably would have sneered at, but now she saw it as the cost of doing business. It was fine to get likes, but what she really wanted was either a retweet or, even better, a completely original tweet commending her for a job well done, preferably one from someone in the tech world whose work she respected and who, ideally, had hundreds of thousands of followers. If the only people who liked the tweet were “eggs”—people whose Twitter presence was so lame that they hadn’t even bothered uploading avatars, or spambots, or both—she sometimes deleted the tweet.
Just as she’d hit publish, her phone had vibrated, and she had ignored it. Now she looked to see who it was: her boyfriend, Victor. All the text said was sup. He never used to check in with her like this, but now that Victor was out of a job, he was bored and she got way too many texts from him all day. He was out of a job because his company, StrollUp—“like Uber for strollers,” she’d heard him say approximately five thousand times—had gone out of business last week. Like most company failures, it had happened slowly and then all at once. A few months after Katya and Victor met, StrollUp was part of a cover story in New York magazine about the city’s hottest startups; it included the company’s origin: how Victor’s business partner, roommate, and best friend, Nilay Shah, had heard a mom pushing a double stroller complaining about how hard it was to schlep it everywhere in the city, how her building wouldn’t let her park it in the lobby, how frustrating it was to fold it up to put it in the back of a cab, and he’d had an idea, which he’d eagerly relayed to Victor that night, that the two of them should start a strollers-on-demand company. (Left out of the story they told publicly was the fact that Nilay was eavesdropping because he thought the mom was really hot.) At the time of the New York magazine piece, it seemed like things were going well. At least, there was a warehouse somewhere in Long Island City with five hundred Uppababys that were supposed to be their beta testers, they had just gotten seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in angel funding (half of which was from Nilay’s parents), and they had six employees in an incubator in the financial district. Then one night a few weeks ago Victor had mentioned almost too casually that he and Nilay had had dinner with one of their investors recently—he was vague as to the exact timing—and it hadn’t gone so well.
And now Victor was staying with her because he’d gotten in a fight with Nilay over this very dinner because Nilay had gotten drunk and, when the conversation had meandered to discussing other startups in New York, had referred to a startup founded by one of the investor’s best friends as “a seriously dumb idea,” even as Victor was trying to tell him with his eyes from across the table to shut the fuck up. Nilay clumsily apologized over email the next day, but the investor never responded. Finally they got a call from the investor’s assistant, who informed them that the investor was no longer interested in continuing the relationship, that he wished them the best of luck, and that they should cease contact immediately. And then the rest of the meetings they had lined up with VCs about their next round of funding were mysteriously canceled, and then suddenly they realized they wouldn’t be getting any more funding at all, and they had to sell the warehouse full of strollers to a guy with a knockoff Babies R Us store in Bensonhurst called We R Babies who took everything away in a U-Haul.
But if she had to listen to Victor rant about Nilay one more time, she was going to tell him to find somewhere else to stay; Janelle had already not so subtly begun to hint that it was high time for Victor to either go back to his apartment or start paying rent. And preferably the former, because Janelle never would have agreed to move in with a couple.
The thing with the dinner and the investors—it could have all just been a coincidence. Even Victor didn’t deny that StrollUp had been struggling, and they had started getting loads of contradictory advice about what to do. One of their advisers was pushing them to pivot to become a marketplace for secondhand baby equipment. Another wanted them to expand from strollers into other forms of transportation, like skateboards and bikes. Katya was pretty sure that their indecision over how to fix the business was probably what doomed them, but Victor was convinced it was the dinner with the investor, and he held Nilay almost entirely responsible.
A Slack notification from Dan came up in the corner of her screen.
Dan: so let’s talk today about what’s on tap
Katya: ok. I have a couple stories on the lineup for next week
Dan: yeah I know. but we need to get you on something bigger
Katya: i know. i’m working on it
Dan: ok
Katya: what r u worried abt
Dan: the fact that you say “r u” instead of “are you” ;)
Katya: :-0
Katya: seriously tho is there something YOU ARE worried abt
Dan: thank u for using proper English
Katya: ok now ur just fucking w me
Dan: true story
Katya: is there something ur really worried abt or can I get back to work
Dan: no I’m not worried.
Dan: btw…you’re the only person in the newsroom i’m giving advance warning about the thing we discussed yesterday