He didn’t notice anyone else in the office when he got in at eight thirty the next morning, but he’d barely turned on his computer before getting an email from Casper Kim asking to talk. Casper had been working on the new version of TakeOff. He’d been expensive and had insisted on a vested stock grant—ballsy for someone so young, but Mack had decided he was worth it. Mack messaged him on Slack that he could come by any time before nine thirty, and within one minute, he was standing at the door. He seemed to be dressed as a unicorn, in a plush onesie with a hood hanging down his back that had a big unicorn horn on it. Was this some kind of sick prank? Like Casper throwing it in Mack’s face that TakeOff was not yet, in fact, a unicorn? Before Mack could ask him why the hell he was dressed as a unicorn, Casper sat down and said, “Mack, you know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and how great an experience I’ve had at TakeOff,” and then Mack thought: Is he quitting? And then he thought: No no no no no, please don’t be quitting, and then Casper said, “And I’m really proud of everything we’ve built here and feel like we’re in such a great spot with the new version,” and Mack thought, Fuck, don’t be quitting in a unicorn onesie, and then Casper said, “Which is why I feel like it’s a good time for me to be moving on. I got a job offer and I know this is a cliché but it’s really an offer I can’t refuse, and I want you to know that I wasn’t looking to leave TakeOff at all, this just happened to land in my lap and, really, I can’t refuse it,” he repeated.
Be calm, Mack thought. Stay cool. If Casper Kim quit—right when they were on the cusp of getting new funding and hiring a shit-ton more people and launching new versions of the app—they would be not completely and utterly fucked. But they’d be pretty fucked, at least temporarily. He didn’t even want to contemplate the possibility that Casper wasn’t telling the truth, that he actually had been looking for another job because he was for some reason dissatisfied with TakeOff. Could that be a possibility? Mack thought he did a pretty good job of realizing when people were unhappy, and he did everything he could to prevent that. It was of course important that you felt fulfilled at work and felt like you had a good work-life balance. But the way people, Mack included, worked now, work was life. They expected their work to be fun and their fun to be work, and they didn’t differentiate between “work friends” and “real friends”; they assumed that the way things had been in college was the way things were in real life. So he gave his employees money for a kickball league in the summer—Casper was a team captain—and sponsored a bar trivia team and paid for happy hours and free lunches and snacks, so many snacks, and in the midst of all that, they were supposed to also be getting work done, which, for the most part, they did.
“I’m sorry, I want to talk about this, but—are you dressed as a unicorn?”
Casper glanced down at his outfit as though noticing it for the first time. “Oh! Yeah. It’s Onesie Day in product.”
“Onesie Day? Did I know about this?”
Casper shrugged. “Maybe? Was I supposed to tell you?” I guess not, Mack thought. “Anyway, it’s just, like, a fun team-bonding thing, you know? We’re going to take pictures in Madison Square Park at lunch.” So it wasn’t a comment on being a unicorn? This made it somehow worse. “Chelsea got a Pikachu one. I think Joe is going to be a kangaroo—”
He seemed like he wanted to keep going but Mack cut him off. “That’s…great. Really, great idea.” He hated that he actually meant this—it was a smart team-bonding exercise—even while he wanted to rip that dumb unicorn horn right off. “Are you unhappy?” he asked. “Is there something we can do to make you happier here? I guess I’m just confused—like, doing Onesie Day doesn’t really seem like something that someone who’s unhappy at work does, you know?”
Casper shook his head. “No, really, I love it here,” he said. “It’s just that, you know, sometimes things come along that you feel like you can’t say no to.” He added, “I’m only twenty-three.”
“Right,” Mack said. Was he just playing hardball? Could he be seduced with more money? “Well, can you tell me a little more about the offer?”
“Umm,” Casper said. “Not really. I signed an NDA.”
Casper signing a nondisclosure agreement didn’t necessarily mean anything. At some companies, hell, you had to sign an NDA if you were just visiting a friend there. But if Casper wouldn’t even tell him what company had made the offer, Mack wouldn’t really be able to get a sense of whether the offer was from a place that Mack could theoretically compete with or if he was going to be completely outgunned. This job offer could be a lot of things—it could mean a new product at a Google or a Facebook, or that a new company was bringing him on as a founder, or something in between.
“Casper,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I almost took a job at Facebook?” Casper shrugged noncommittally. Mack knew Casper must have heard this story—it was part of TakeOff lore—but he kept going. “I’d started TakeOff a few months before and things weren’t great. We had some funding, but it was disappearing real fast, and I was beginning to worry that I was either going to have to lay some people off, borrow money from my dad, or do something pretty drastic that I didn’t want to do.” Casper was staring at the ground, but he nodded. “So one day, I’m out for a run and I start thinking about how we could do certain things so much better.” Casper nodded again. “I had been thinking of TakeOff as a general improve-your-workplace company. And I realized it needed to be more focused. So I stayed up all night writing a new business plan, and literally not a day later, I get an email from a Facebook recruiter. I’d sent them a résumé months before, when I had been out of work for a while, for a job I didn’t even remember applying for, and so just when I had come up with the idea that would ultimately save us, now they’re contacting me.” He paused. “So you know what I did?”
“You…didn’t take the job at Facebook?” Casper said.
“Well, right, I didn’t. But I took the meetings and I got the job offer, and it seemed like the least risky option. We didn’t have that many employees yet—maybe ten or so—and for a few days, I really debated taking the job and winding down the company. It would have been the safe thing to do. But I decided, you know what, I want to build something. And that something became TakeOff. If I had abandoned ship then, I would’ve just been another cog in Facebook’s machine, and none of this”—he gestured to the rest of the office—“would have happened. None of this”—he pointed to his wall, where he had several framed, letterpress prints of positive comments they’d received about the app—“changing people’s lives for the better, would have happened. None of—”