The Startup Wife(47)
Cyrus doesn’t see it this way. The platform is built around him—and the community, by extension, is also a part of him. Believing that the people who join WAI are inherently good is important to Cyrus—or, rather, imagining that people might do terrible things to each other in his name is admitting a personal defeat. He can’t do it. Now Jules has to recalculate all the numbers and claim we can monitor the site with half the staff and half as much money devoted to customer support.
“Did you know,” Jules tells us, “that there are entire warehouses full of people in the Philippines who are hired just to sift through the human trash that’s put out on Facebook? I mean, all day long people have to look at photos of the kinds of dark shit you and I don’t even have the words to describe, and they have to scrub all of it from the pretty blue-and-white-bannered site so that we can believe we live in a world of unicorns and cupcakes.”
“That’s never going to be us,” Cyrus says. “Asha would never let that happen, would you, Asha?”
I’m touched that he thinks I can solve the problem of human degradation with an equation. “Sorry, love,” I say, “my genius has its limits. Or rather, people are so fucked up that even I can’t build a code to fix them.”
Jules glances at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s not that we think anything terrible is going to happen. It’s that when it does, we need to be prepared.”
* * *
When we arrive at the offices of Play Ventures, at the top of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley, we are given electronic bracelets and asked to surrender our shoes, then led through a corridor, beyond which is a trampoline the entire width and breadth of a high-ceilinged room.
A small man hands us each a pair of socks with little plastic buttons on their soles. We understand that we are meant to jump up and down on the trampoline in order to cross over to the other side of the room, beyond which is our meeting. We step onto the trampoline with our bags. The small man, whose name is Craig, leads the way. He is clearly practiced. He leaps, flips, lands on his feet, and leaps again. He apparently feels no need to explain. I attempt a medium-size jump. Craig does a somersault in the air with his hands clasped under his knees. Cyrus dumps our stuff on one corner of the trampoline and starts to jump quite high. Jules just stands there, wobbling with the ripples of other peoples’ jumps. Our bags wobble too. Cyrus attempts a flip and lands on his butt. He laughs, gets back up. I’ve found a comfortable rhythm with my medium-size jumping and try not to think about how much longer this will continue. Cyrus keeps attempting the flip until he gets it right, then he does it again and again.
Finally, it ends. Craig crosses over to the other side of the trampoline and takes us through another hallway, this one with green lights running along at floor level. He turns and opens the door and we are in a boardroom, which, by contrast, is rather normal, a corner of the building with panoramic views, a large oval table, and the requisite pair of screens at one end.
I’m surprised to see Craig taking a seat at the table. I thought he was a kind of acrobatic house butler, but it appears he’s the investor. We make our pitch. Cyrus talks, Jules reads out the numbers, I follow up with the technical details. Craig is on his phone. He occasionally looks up, smiles, gives us a thumbs-up, and then continues to do stuff on his phone. It’s obviously nothing important; I can tell he’s just scrolling his Instagram.
When we are finished, Craig stands up and applauds. “That was great, guys,” he says. “Really great.”
Jules asks Craig if he has any questions.
Craig rubs his chin. I wonder if he thinks this gesture makes him look older. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it’s great, I mean, I think it’s fantastic. But the question is: are you going to kill everyone?”
Cyrus, Jules, and I glance at each other. Is it the liberal thing again? Is he worried we’re a bunch of socialist murderers?
“I mean, are you going to kill everyone?” Craig asks again.
“We’re not sure—” Cyrus begins.
“You gotta be sure. You gotta be one hundred percent abso-fucking-lutely sure you are going to totally crush-kill everyone out there.”
“We really don’t have any competitors in the marketplace,” Jules says.
“You have to crush the church, and you have to kill Facebook. You’re like a church/Facebook mash-up. You gotta kill both of those guys.”
“I think, realistically, we would get a decent amount of growth even if we didn’t try to compete with Jesus or Zuckerberg.”
Craig springs toward Cyrus and eyeballs him. “I always check for the killer in everyone. The assassin. Are you an assassin?”
I see Jules give Cyrus an imperceptible nod. “I most certainly am, sir,” Cyrus pledges.
“Fuck yeah!”
“I will kill everyone and anyone.” Cyrus’s tone is like the EKG of a dead person. “I will assassinate all my enemies, and I’ll even kill a few friends while I’m at it.”
“I knew it!” Craig says. “You look like a hippie, but you’re a fucking ninja.”
He leads us out, back through the green hallway, across the trampoline, and to reception, where we surrender our bracelets and retrieve our shoes.
“Thank you for your time,” I hear Cyrus and Jules say, and then I shake little Craig’s hand and we’re back in the parking lot, falling over ourselves.