The Startup Wife(48)
For weeks, we pretend to be Craig. “What do you want for dinner, Cyrus?”
“I want to kill everyone and eat their eyeballs.”
“Should we hire the very serious woman from Vassar to do our accounts?”
“I don’t know. Is she an assassin?”
“Can we please talk about runway?”
“Nope. I’m too busy killing everyone. Every fucking one.”
The joke never gets old.
Ten
BRINGING UP BABY
Finally, Cyrus agrees to an interview for an online magazine. He asks me to come with him. They’ve said something about a photo shoot in a disused church. On the way, we consider all the angles the story might take. “What if they secretly hate me?” he says. “What if they don’t put it in the tech section or the business section but in the sexy-minister section?”
“They could call it Missionary Style.”
“Hey, maybe they’ll let us borrow one of the outfits and we can go home and play nuns and priests,” he says.
“Totally. But only if I can be the priest.”
“That would be super sexy.”
“I guess your suit won’t fit me,” I say. Suddenly, I’m annoyed at having to accompany him. “Why isn’t Jules here?”
“He said he wasn’t going to stand around and watch me tell everyone how important we are.”
“Guess that makes me the sucker.”
The taxi swerves and he slides toward me. “Let’s ask them if we can do the interview together,” he says. “I would love that.”
Now I feel ridiculous. “No, don’t be silly. They want you.”
“It’ll be even better,” he insists. “I’ll call them right now.”
“Why didn’t you ask in the first place?” I say.
The taxi swerves again and this time it’s me sliding over to his side.
“I guess it didn’t occur to me. That’s shitty, I’m sorry.”
By the time we roll up to the address, I’m in a foul mood. “I’m going to get a coffee,” I say, and disappear for an hour. When I get back, he’s in full Cyrus mode, talking Rubik’s cubes around the poor interviewer. The guy can’t get a word in edgewise, but instead of being offended, he is rapt, listening to Cyrus riffing on everything from climate change to online privacy. Lately, I’ve realized that because of the popularity of the platform, and because of what it is—a replacement for religion—people are looking to Cyrus for answers to the questions they ask themselves all the time. And the most we can hope for is that Cyrus will tell them he doesn’t have the answers, only his own opinions, which they should take as the thoughts of one man with a limited understanding of what is beyond the horizon.
We all think a little press will help us get our funding back on track—unsurprisingly, neither the khaki triplets nor the trampoline assassin came through. Rupert is getting nervous, calling Gaby every week and demanding to know how much money we have in the bank. He’s suggested we make cuts, maybe take a few of the devs off the team, but Cyrus has refused to fire anyone. “Asha and I will hold our salaries,” he volunteers. “Jules too.”
Jules, Cyrus, and I meet every morning to figure a way out. We call it Bad News, Good News.
Jules begins by writing the bad news on the whiteboard. A list of investors who have said no.
“Rupert sent me a new list for outreach,” Jules says. “I’ve drafted all the emails—Cyrus, you just have to review and press send.”
Cyrus reads through the list. “How evil are these people?”
“Just your average evil funds.”
“Rupert says these guys are all tier three.”
“What happened to tier two?” I ask.
“They rejected us. I’ve made a word cloud of the reasons.” Jules turns his computer to me. The word VERTICAL is the biggest, followed by UNUSUAL and then RISK.
“They didn’t give us money because we were too vertical?”
“Our business didn’t fit into any of their verticals.”
“What were their verticals?”
Jules runs down the list. “Fintech, agritech, real estate, cloud, and gaming.”
“I have some good news,” I announce. I always have the good news. The good news is that the community continues to grow. Every day there are new people joining the platform. They chat, share photographs, form little groups, call one another family. Recently, there was a cat funeral, and the cat’s mother, someone by the name of Rose, live-streamed it to two hundred thousand other cat lovers. “In fact,” I said, “the Cat Lovers are the biggest group.”
Cyrus rolls his eyes. “No surprise there.”
“Also on the good-news front,” Jules says, tapping a pen against the side of the table, “I’m seeing someone, and I need you not to judge.”
Cyrus and I both sit up and say, “YOU’RE SEEING SOMEONE?” at the same time.
Jules clears his throat. “It’s Gaby,” he says.
“Gaby?” I ask. “But we’ve been making fun of him for months.”
“You’ve been making fun. I’ve been secretly dating. And now we’re moving in together.”