The Startup Wife(76)
There’s a small rumble in the audience, and then a few people clap. “Woo-hoo!” someone shouts.
“So which came first, the marriage or the business?”
“The marriage, actually,” I say. “But the business followed shortly after. It’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart now.”
More laughter and applause. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but then I feel my phone buzzing in my handbag and I remember Cyrus’s article.
“Your office is in an unusual setting, isn’t it?”
“We beta-launched the product, and the team at Utopia invited us to join them. That was three years ago, and we’re still headquartered there.”
“What is Utopia like? I think some of our audience members are pretty curious.”
Destiny winks. “What happens at Utopia stays at Utopia.”
I gesture to her. “It’s been great to have a friend to share the experience with.”
I get a few more questions about Utopia, which I dodge, all the while resisting the urge to steal a glimpse at my phone. Then the conversation circles back to Cyrus.
“Asha, tell us about the challenges of working with someone and living with him at the same time.”
“Well, there’s not a lot of work-life balance,” I say. “But we like it that way. We’re committed to WAI and we’re committed to each other.” I knit my hands together. “It’s an integrated whole. Like our platform.” I smile, wishing this line of questioning would end.
Satisfied, she moves on to Destiny. Destiny entertains the crowd with a graphic description of how she came up with the categories for Consentify. “The anus is a very contentious area,” she says. “People want to be touched there, but they don’t want to admit wanting to be touched there. So we had to deal with it quite delicately.”
After that point, no one is interested in me anymore. The audience is invited to participate, and Destiny is showered with questions.
“What happens when people consent to being touched, does the consent expire after a certain period of time?”
“What if you are in the middle of sex and you end up doing something you didn’t explicitly consent to?”
“Do men hate it?”
There is a lot of laughter and whooping.
“Any more questions?” the moderator asks.
Someone in the back raises a hand. “My boyfriend and I are about to become co-founders. Do you have any advice for us about how we can keep our relationship and our business together at the same time?”
I decide to play it for laughs. “When Cyrus and I first started WAI, our lawyer told us our marriage wouldn’t survive, so we fired him.”
“Do you feel like people give Cyrus more credit than they give you?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head as if to mean Why would you say that? when really, I’m thinking, Yes, yes, of course, what planet do you think we live on?
“Not a lot of people know that you built the platform,” she says. “Does that bother you?”
The blood rushes to my face. “Not at all,” I say, attempting to cover up the fact that it bothers me like a mosquito bite on my eyelid. “Cyrus was and remains the inspiration for the algorithm. It’s his mind, his way of connecting ideas.”
The moderator says, “I think what our guest is trying to say is, do you feel like maybe he’s hogging the limelight? He does talk about you a lot in this article that just came out, doesn’t he? About how crazy he is about you. But not as much about how you built the tech.”
“We don’t want to be defined by the men in our lives,” Destiny announces. “If there’s a tiny amount of wisdom that Asha and I can impart, that would be it.”
* * *
Afterward, Destiny and I make the minimum amount of small talk, get a handful of business cards shoved into our palms, and we’re out of there and in a West Village café by nine, sharing a plate of truffle fries.
“I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “?‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’
“He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.”
“To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.”
I keep going. “?‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’?”
Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.”
I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper.