The Startup Wife(37)
“I found a possible bug,” I reply, not looking up from my screen. “A giant pothole in the middle of the road.”
He offers me a sip of his drink, and it’s every bit as rank as I’d imagined. “Is it going to affect the launch?”
Ren gives Cyrus a look that only I can decipher. I explain, “If too many people log the same interest at the same time—say, two thousand people watch an episode of Peaky Blinders and decide that they want to get married running through the streets of Birmingham dressed like Ada and Freddie—the system crashes. It’s not made for high volumes of people wanting to do the same thing, it’s optimized for individual algorithmic outcomes.”
“We didn’t factor in the group mentality,” Ren says.
“The herd will kill us if I don’t fix this.”
Cyrus crouches down beside me. He has started shaving more regularly, and now I can see the lower half of his face darkening with stubble. He puts his hands on my knees, and I have to stop what I’m doing and pay attention to him. “Let’s take a moment,” he says. Cyrus always wants to take a moment.
“I don’t have time,” I complain. “The platform has to be stable, otherwise we’re finished.”
He closes his eyes. “It’s going to be fine.”
“No, it’s not. I mean, it might be, but then again it might not, and I’m the only thing between possible disaster and definite disaster.”
Cyrus rises. “Okay my dear,” he says, planting a kiss on my forehead and retreating. I barely have time to register his disappointment before I get back in, trying to chase down the lines of code that might sink us.
* * *
I sit out most of the party, although Jules and Destiny interrupt me every few minutes to tell me what I’m missing. “Rory’s lecturing everyone on plastic use. Says he’s trying to get Li Ann to ban products that have any form of plastic in them.”
I nod, making it obvious that I don’t care.
“He’s projecting enormous photos of the whale that was caught with garbage for guts.”
“Li Ann’s giving out free Breathe Life vapes and the room’s getting cloudy.”
“It smells like Whole Foods in there.”
“I’ve always wanted to smell like Whole Foods. She should bottle that shit.”
“Cyrus is making a toast and he asked if you wanted to join.”
“Sure,” I say. I wonder why lately I’ve had this small urge to roll my eyes every time Cyrus opens his mouth. I tell myself I need to stop, plaster on my most encouraging smile, and waltz into the room with it.
Cyrus is holding the same pink kombucha cocktail, and I’m able to catch most of the speech. He spends some time thanking everyone by name, making Jules, and Li Ann, and Rory all blush, making the rest of the team, Gaby, the devs, Destiny, cheer and clap for him and for the promise of WAI, and then finally, he thanks me, an elaborate, giving-me-all-the-credit kind of thank you that has everyone in the room turning toward me, glasses full of funk raised in the air, thinking, God, that girl is lucky.
* * *
The party breaks up at 11:23 p.m. I know this because I’m back at my desk, and so is the rest of the team, and we’re about to press the go button for launch. Ridiculous to launch something at midnight, I’ve told Cyrus. No one will be paying attention. But he’s looked up all sorts of arcane books and star charts and decided nope, midnight it’s got to be.
At midnight, we go live. At this point we’re just a bunch of slightly drunk people hovering around a computer. At 12:04, the algorithm gets its first request, a bar mitzvah for a person who is not Jewish yet is interested in marking a moment in her child’s life. She’s a single mother. She once traveled extensively throughout Australia. She makes hats for a living. She likes Daft Punk.
The platform welcomes this woman—she calls herself Alanna, but we know that’s not her real name—and then asks her a series of questions. After only 2.3 seconds (which is as fast as I could make the algorithm run), it presents her with a possible ritual she might enact to mark this moment in her son’s life. Then it connects her with two other people—by now, seven minutes in, we have passed the hundred-user mark—who also love Daft Punk and Australia. It’s up to her whether she wants to form a micro-community with these two strangers. Six minutes later, we have our reply: she does. Twelve minutes after that, the others have accepted her request.
* * *
At 12:26 we have 2,893 users. At 12:58 we have 6,147 users. We are all transfixed by the rising numbers; only Ren appears impervious. I take this as a signal that I’m allowed to remain calm, knowing he’ll raise the alarm if anything goes wrong. Destiny makes coffee. When dawn breaks over the Hudson, we’re into the tens of thousands. Jules and Gaby are in a corner, whispering to each other. I think Jules is panicking and Gaby is trying to get him to calm down, or maybe it’s the other way around. Cyrus dozes in a chair.
We debate whether to go home and sleep for a few hours, but then Cyrus’s phone buzzes and it’s Rupert and he wants to come over right away and take us out to breakfast to celebrate. Gaby makes his excuses and heads home while the rest of us take a taxi uptown. At the upscale twenty-four-hour restaurant perched on the top floor of a skinny skyscraper in Chelsea, we order champagne and Rupert insists we all get the duck waffles, even though the thought of food is making my stomach do somersaults. Everyone seems to be talking at the same time, Rupert the loudest, but I can’t concentrate because Destiny is sending me updates by the minute. The numbers are rising and so is my panic.