“Okay, everyone, I think that just about does it for today,” Peter said. “Let’s give Mack another round of applause. And can people email you if they have additional questions?”
“Of course. I’m just Mack at takeoff.com. Thanks, Peter, and everyone, for having me.” The group filed out, Peter lagging behind.
“Thanks, man, that was really great.” He shook Mack’s hand again. “I’ll walk you out.”
“It’s a great space,” Mack said as they left the conference room. “Hey, would you mind taking a picture of me?”
“Sure thing.”
Mack handed Peter his cell phone and posed so that the entire office was visible behind him. He posted it on Instagram with the caption Amazing time speaking to the new companies being incubated at Startup Boot Camp! In the five minutes it took him to ride the elevator down to the lobby, go outside, and find his Uber, 46 of his 16,792 followers had liked it.
2
Drag City
KATYA PASTERNACK HAD been at her job as a reporter at TechScene (motto: “Tech news straight, no chaser”) since 8:00 a.m. and now, at 11:30, she realized she had been concentrating so hard that she hadn’t even taken a smoke break. “What the fuck,” she muttered to herself. No wonder she was starting to get a headache. smoke? she IM’d to Dan Blum. Dan was thirty-nine, with hair that was starting to gray at the temples and the stirrings of a belly under his rotation of plaid J. Crew shirts. He was the site’s managing editor, but more important, he was the only other person in the TechScene office who smoked. He didn’t respond. She stood up to try to catch his eye and noticed that he was wearing headphones and laughing at something on his phone.
It was probably that YouTube compilation of dog Snapchats that everyone had been tweeting about for the last four minutes. It was true that it was marginally better than most Snapchat compilations—because of the dogs, of course. There was, in particular, a six-second video of a black Labradoodle that looked exactly like Weird Al scarfing down its food while “Eat It” played, and at the very end, the dog looked up into the camera and howled joyously—perfectly in time with the music—in a way that Katya found almost poignant. dog Snapchat = best Snapchat, she had tweeted, with a GIF of the Labradoodle and a link to the post. It had already gotten seventeen retweets and forty-two likes. There were other species of internet-famous animals, of course—superstar cats like Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, and Maru, for instance—but dogs ruled when it came to the speed at which their antics spread online.
Stuff always spread through tech-reporter Twitter predictably: First, whoever posted it or found it would tweet it, and then, since everyone followed everyone else in the scene, Katya’s TweetDeck would get clogged immediately with the same dumb retweets. The worst were people who manually retweeted the initial tweet and then added some inane comment like Whoa! or, worse, Woah! Katya had no patience for people who misspelled whoa or couldn’t figure out the difference between its and it’s. She longed to mute them, but sometimes they were actually important people whose tweets she had to follow, so she kept them all in her main timeline but also put them into a TweetDeck column she had labeled “Grammar Idiots” that she occasionally scrolled through when she wanted to feel superior. She didn’t understand what was so hard about speaking English; she was an immigrant and she’d figured it out.
Janelle, her roommate in the Greenpoint railroad apartment where she’d lived since April, always laughed when she complained about stuff like this. “Katya, you gotta let it gooooo,” she’d say, and then half the time she’d launch into a deliberately off-key rendition of “Let It Go” from Frozen, during which Katya would ostentatiously cover her ears. She’d met Janelle through Janelle’s older brother, Trevor, the social media manager at TechScene. Growing up in a deeply Russian part of Brooklyn and living at her dad’s while at NYU had left Katya with few friends who weren’t still living with their parents and working as makeup artists or cocktail waitresses. Not that there was anything wrong with makeup artists or cocktail waitresses or living with one’s parents, but Katya had a different vision for her grown-up New York life, and Janelle—with her job as a marketing manager for an organic beauty company, her podcast (Say What!?, which she hosted with her friend Fiona), and her fastidiousness when it came to keeping the apartment clean—fit into it more than her high-school friend Irina, who had suggested the two of them move into an apartment in Bensonhurst owned by one of her boyfriend’s sketchy friends.