James interrupted him. “Mack, my obvious concern is, this seems like an awful lot of information to ask of your users. I want to hear more, but I’m already skeptical about privacy issues.”
Mack smiled. He had been anticipating this. “Of course,” he said, clicking to the next slide. “So, two things that I think are important to keep in mind that I was just about to get to. First, when I say that our access is read-only, what that actually means is that we are simply scanning all of this data for keywords and, often more crucially, emoji that we will be constantly tweaking as we get more data. So we look for words or phrases like pissed off, annoyed, bummed, and shitty, and any emoji that indicate sadness, anger, or frustration. We don’t store people’s data, nor do we allow our employees to access people’s data. It’s entirely algorithmic.” He paused and looked around the room. They seemed attentive so far. “Second, and this is just the reality of the world we live in, but we are accessing barely more data than what Facebook or Google, just to give a couple of examples, already have access to. And the data shows that consumers prefer convenience over privacy.” Click. “A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that when an app asks for access to social media accounts, only three percent of consumers decide not to download the app because of privacy concerns. Three percent! That’s down from fifteen percent a year ago and fifty percent three years ago. And the generation that’s in their teens right now—whatever we’re calling them—their only concern is that they maintain control over the people they know who get to see their accounts. They’re worried about their parents seeing the picture they just texted their girlfriend, not about whether an app knows too much about them.” Mack paused again. “Does that address your concern?”
James nodded and smiled. “I hadn’t seen that Michigan study, but that’s a great data point,” he said. “Continue, please.”
“So let’s go back to Uber in the rain,” Mack said. “Before you even thought about calling Uber, TakeOff would process that, one, it’s roughly around the time that you typically leave work; two, that it is raining in New York City; three, that you have a dinner on the Upper West Side in twenty minutes; four, that you just texted your wife ‘Looks pretty brutal out there’; and, five, that half an hour ago you tweeted about how New York shuts down in the rain. We would send a notification that says something to the effect of ‘Hey, it’s raining out there—you should probably get that Uber now. And by the way: Take a deep breath. You’ve got this.’ And we’d put a smiley emoji at the end of it. It makes people feel like there’s someone looking out for them.”
“A question,” James said. “Won’t constantly scanning people’s feeds take a huge amount of server capacity?”
“Correct, it would,” Mack said. “Right now, we have it set up so that it checks in with people five times a day: when they usually wake up, an hour before they typically get lunch, midafternoon, right before they leave work, and about an hour before they go to bed. We’ve found that those are the most common pain points.”
“When people wake up?” Teddy asked.
“That’s right,” Mack said. “We’re able to look at data from their sleep apps, so we’ll know if they had a good night’s sleep or if it was more restless. And we can see if any texts or emails came in overnight that they’d see first thing that might cause stress—say, something from the boss asking why the TPS report wasn’t done.” A few people chuckled at the Office Space reference. After all, Office Space was the ultimate movie about office drudgery, about working somewhere that offered you zero intellectual or creative fulfillment. For people like him and, he assumed, everyone in the room, work was usually the most rewarding part of the day. “Just think about how life would have been different at that office if they’d had TakeOff,” he said, to laughter.
“TakeOff started by wanting to help improve people’s lives at work, and we’ve succeeded.” He clicked to the next slide, showing a chart of the app’s month-over-month growth in the past six months. “As of today, the hashtag workmoremindfully has been tweeted one hundred seventeen thousand, three hundred and forty-eight times, and that’s in just six months of the app being available.” He paused to let that sink in. The men around the table were all scribbling in their notebooks; Teddy gave him what looked like it could have been a wink. “And our research shows that eighty-five percent of TakeOff users report that their workdays have improved since they got the app.