TakeOff had started as a company that promoted workplace wellness; at any point in the day, you could open the app and tell it what your mood was, and it would immediately give you something to help improve how you were feeling (Mack believed that even if you were in a great mood, you could always feel better). Sometimes it was a cat picture or a funny meme, sometimes it was an instruction to take a walk around the office, sometimes it was a song. Now he and his team were working on developing something even cooler, a new version that would go beyond the workplace and would anticipate your mood at any time of day or night, based on your past inputs but also on sentiment analysis from your social media accounts, emails, text messages, and IMs. TakeOff didn’t actually read your emails, texts, and IMs or store them, of course; it just combed them for keywords and relevant emoji. Like if you were using the sad-face emoji too much or if you had the word pissed in your emails or texts more at a certain time of day, the app would take all of that into account and send you a notification when it perceived that you were feeling bad.
Even if TakeOff wasn’t a unicorn quite yet, six hundred million dollars would be nothing to sneeze at. Six hundred million dollars would make his remaining 23 percent stake in the company worth approximately one hundred and thirty-eight million dollars. He said that number to himself a few times, just to get used to the sound. One hundred and thirty-eight million dollars. One hundred and thirty-eight million dollars. One hundred and thirty-eight. Million. Dollars. What would he even do with that much money? Maybe he would hire a personal chef and finally start that gluten-free paleo diet everyone was talking about. Actually, fuck it, if he had a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars, he could afford to buy a private plane and staff it with the personal chef.
“Take a long, slow, deep breath in through your nose.” Pause. “And now release that breath out through your mouth. In and out. In and out. Slow your mind down and guide yourself into a new state of awareness.” He had learned through meditation that it was important not to think too much about worst possible outcomes, because then that was what you ended up manifesting into existence. Instead, as his Uber picked up speed a bit, he brought himself to that new state of awareness in which he was a multimillionaire and he was the one turning down meetings with VCs.
“Sir?” He opened his eyes, startled. They had stopped in front of a glass-and-steel tower. “This the place?”
He hit pause and removed his earbuds. “Yes, sorry about that.” He got out of the car quickly and, after handing over his ID at the security desk, took the elevator to the eighth floor.
“Hi,” he said to the woman at the reception desk. “I’m here for—”
“I know who you are!” She stood up to shake his hand. He sized her up quickly: She was probably around twenty-two or twenty-three, wearing a floral dress and tights and bright red lipstick. Her light brown hair was in a bob with bangs. Not his type, exactly, but cute. “It’s so great to meet you, Mack. We’re so happy you’re here! I’m Gina, I’m the office manager. I’ll take you to the conference room! There’s breakfast and some drinks all set up.”
He followed her back through the open-plan office. It was a large room, packed with desks and computers. Small signs indicated each company’s name at its workspace, most of which had three or four desks. People looked up as Mack walked by. Most of them smiled. A few stood up and followed him and Gina to the conference room, where there were already five or six people seated at a long table, including the guy who’d invited him, Peter Fernandez. Peter stood up as Mack came in. “Mack!” He made his way over and shook Mack’s hand. “So glad you could be here this morning. Help yourself to a bagel or coffee.” Peter was a former venture capitalist who had left the VC world two years ago to start this incubator. So far, seven of the incubator’s companies had been bought, netting Peter around twenty million dollars in the process.
Mack poured himself a cup of coffee. “How’s everything going?” he asked Peter.
“You know, Mack, everything is going great. We have a killer class right now—I’m just really psyched about the potential everyone brings to the table.” He glanced around the room, which had filled up. “You ready to do this?”