An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(55)
Miranda kept telling me she was a shit coder, and honestly it really wasn’t her area of expertise, but as we tossed around this idea, it was Miranda, over and over again, who would say, “No, that’s not feasible” or “Yeah, that will take like fifteen minutes.” She knew the difference between a hard problem and an easy one in a way that perplexed the rest of us. And when we brought on our first programmer, Andy’s roommate, Jason, Miranda was the person who understood both the vision and the practicality enough that it made sense for her to be managing Jason.
And that’s how we (and by “we,” I mostly mean Maya, Miranda, and money) created the Som.
The Som was a centralized location for Dreamers to share their skills, their projects, their theories, their failures, and their successes. It started out just as a website, but Jason coded it so that it could easily be integrated with an app. We started poaching people from my old job.
Soon, a Som app could be set to notify a user instantaneously if someone was looking for their skill set or if a comment was added to a theory thread they were following. By the end of a month, the whole thing was so interconnected and bloated with features that it was impenetrable to the average user. But it wasn’t for average users; it was for hard-core Dreamers, and it may have been a little glitchy, but it was better than any of the other cobbled-together solutions by a wide margin.
Plus, we just kept throwing money at it as the user base grew. Every time I mentioned the Som in a video, the influx bumped exponentially. And whenever that happened, we needed more help to keep the site running, not to mention just the cost of the servers. Luckily the cost didn’t matter much. Robin and Jennifer Putnam had landed me a ridiculously large advance for my book and I got a quarter of it on signing.
As the Som got bigger (and it got bigger fast), Miranda just kept being in charge. She was managing Jason, and then she was managing Jason and a couple of app engineers, and then she was bossing around user interface people, data engineers, stack developers, database designers, graphic designers, mobile app developers, and even a couple of accountants. Miranda, it turned out, was not one to focus her expertise. She knew a lot about a LOT.
Whenever I hung out with Miranda, she never felt like a very confident person. It wasn’t that she was shy; it was more that she was deferential. So the fact that she somehow wrangled this mess together, becoming the twenty-five-year-old CEO of a pretty large tech start-up, astounded me even more than it astounded her. When she was dealing with people who weren’t me, she was friendly and thoughtful, but she was also firm and authoritative. Turns out, she could manage the fuck out of a project. And by working closely with Maya—who was extremely well respected in the Dreamer community and had a huge amount of insight into the kinds of tools they’d need—the Som became the most-used hub for Dreamers within weeks. Peter Petrawicki’s pathetic plan to wrangle secret sequence solutions was also constantly messed with from within the Som. Whenever people were bored, they just went into a private chat and churned out a fake sequence solution.
By the end of March the Dream had taken over so much of our life that the Carls mostly dropped off our radar. But we rented office space across 23rd from Carl to keep an eye on him anyway. It was amazing how fast we spent money. We weren’t really in danger of running out, but it also didn’t take long to realize that “rich” is very relative. I maybe had $2 million in the bank at that point, and we burned through a full $300,000 of that in the first month of development. The money was officially going out faster than it was coming in, but everyone seemed confident that that would change as soon as the book came out, so that’s most of what I was focusing on.
The good news was there was a solution to the money problems just on the horizon.
April 24
@AprilMaybeNot: When did “makin’ love” become “makin’ love” because they talk about makin’ love in lots of old songs and I don’t think they’re talking about fuckin’.
My brother has gotten me and two hundred of his closest friends to fly back to Northern California so we can watch him get married. I wanted to drag everyone with me, but the development of the Som has become more than a full-time job. Only Robin came with, as it is his job to make my life easy. He is good at it.
To tell you the truth, I resent this wedding. It’s beautiful, picturesque, even. They’ve rented out a venue in the woods surrounded by old-growth trees. Tom has made a lot of money at his job, so it doesn’t seem they spared much in the way of expenses. I’ve only hung out with his fiancée a couple of times, but she’s lovely and I’m honestly very happy for them, but I have work to do back in New York.
I know that makes me sound like an ass, but I’ll remind you that there was a space alien and it had infiltrated our dreams. In fact, you probably don’t remember this, but this is the week when we found out a bit more about how the Dream worked and everyone freaked out.
I was one of the bridesmaids, so I had to be there for the rehearsal, and of course there was a rehearsal dinner and there were toasts and it was really touching but took a really long time. Halfway through the rehearsal, the news broke. The US government had found some people who hadn’t been exposed to the Dream yet and begun to study them under quarantine. They had determined that the Dream did indeed pass from person to person exactly as if it were an airborne disease. More than that, the infection (they tried to not let this word be the word everyone used, but it was the one that fit best) was being spread by a physical thing. It could be filtered out. And the thing made measurable changes to people’s brains; fMRI scans of people with and without the “infection” were distinctly different.