The Startup Wife(54)
Destiny shoulder-bumps me. I look over and I see that her eyes are shining because Manishala has put the same fire into her as she has into me, and she’s thinking about Consentify.
After it’s all over, I grab Destiny’s hand and push us to the edge of the stage. The speakers are gathering their things, taking off their mikes. “Ms. Brown?” I say. She looks up, smiles. “You can call me Manishala,” she says, though I can tell she liked that I didn’t presume to use her first name.
“This is my friend Destiny. She had an idea, but like you, she hasn’t found funding.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She fumbles with her handbag. She’s heard a thousand sob stories.
“It’s technically sound,” I say. “But the narrative didn’t sit well with most investors. I can vouch for it—I programmed the algorithm that powers WAI.”
“You built WAI? You’re Asha Ray?”
It has only just started happening to me, that thing where people I have never met have an opinion of me based on things they’ve read or heard. Six months ago I never would’ve approached Manishala, and she never would have given me that look she’s giving me now, like I’m a person to notice and be reckoned with. I earned that. I give myself a silent high five.
“So what’s this thing?” she asks.
Destiny explains. “It’s called Consentify. It allows partners to pre-agree to their sexual activity.”
Manishala laughs. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope.”
Destiny hands over her phone. Manishala swipes, scrolls, presses a few buttons. “Interesting.” She clicks open her bag, takes out a business card. “I’m not making any promises,” she says. “But send me your deck and I will take a look.”
* * *
Cyrus, Ren, and Destiny are crowded around a screen. Cyrus is pointing and gesturing. I haven’t been called in, but I can see through the glass that there are moments of conversation and then long periods when no one is saying anything. Cyrus has his own office now, a glassed-in section on the fourth floor. We’ve talked about moving—Utopia is an incubator, and WAI’s incubation is definitely over. But Cyrus wants to stay, and he convinces Li Ann to let us. We take the top two floors, raise the ceilings, create an internal staircase, and rebuild the roof garden. It looks like the old Utopia, but there is more steel than exposed brick, and everywhere you look, there are people on their laptops and hunched over desks, all in the same pose of self-satisfaction, because they are doing their dream jobs at a place that inspires envy. And there are other benefits besides the bragging rights: excellent health care and paid maternity leave, karaoke Tuesdays (led by Jules), the I Think Therefore I Am Club (led by Cyrus), and the “How to Make Your Robot Joke Authentically Club” (led by me).
Jules has tried to get me to take my own office—he and Gaby have side-by-side ones downstairs—but I want to be with my team, so I just perch wherever suits me. Right now I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing, but I keep looking over and wondering what Cyrus is up to. I have a bad feeling. Finally, I decide I can’t wait.
“Sorry to disturb,” I say, knocking on the glass door. “May I borrow you for just a minute?”
“Sure, we’re done here.” Cyrus turns to Ren. “So send me those mock-ups by lunchtime.”
Ren nods, drifts away. I see a large drawing pad on Cyrus’s desk. He’s attending to it with a thick pencil. “What’s that?” I ask.
“The redesign of the platform,” he says.
“Which platform?”
He looks up from his drawing. He is not smiling.
“It’s cluttered,” he says, turning his screen toward me. “I don’t like the copy at the top. The messaging part is buried below the line. And the colors don’t work.”
It takes me a moment to realize what is happening, and once it dawns on me that Cyrus wants to redesign the entire platform I built, I have to try very hard not to throw a chair against the glass wall of his office. I take a deep breath. “Maybe you could’ve run this by me?”
He pauses. “Right, yes. I’m sorry. But I want it to happen before the raise, and there’s not a lot of time.”
As it turns out, even though we have real people sending us real money every month, if we want to keep growing, we have to raise funds. This time Cyrus isn’t opposed; in fact, he’s the one driving things. Gaby and Jules have drawn charts, and all the arrows are pointing up—more users in more countries doing more things with WAI—but we can go further, reach more parts of the world, if we pour money into the platform. And Cyrus wants to get to everyone.
Now that we have a steady source of revenue, investors want a piece of WAI. Woke VC is only one of the funds that come calling, except they don’t call, they send texts, emails, emissaries, and sometimes flowers. One offered to set up a meeting with the pope. Would Cyrus be interested in meeting His Holiness? The only His Holiness Cyrus is interested in is the Dalai Lama, and they will be appearing onstage together in two months, at a conference in Aspen. We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC?