by
Josh Riedel
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He cracked open a Red Bull. “The VCs want us to hire more engineers, maybe a designer. But we might be able to bring on a contractor to help you for a few months.” He took a swig and switched into his friend voice, the looser cadence I remembered from our early days together, right out of college, before he’d written a line of code for DateDate. “A new roastery just opened on 7th and Folsom. A kiosk out of a garage, nothing flashy, but the coffee is superb.”
We’d met in a café in Palo Alto, where the owner, an old man from Trieste, introduced us as espresso purists. “No nonsense with the two of you,” he’d said, waving a hand at the flavored syrups that lined his bar, a compromise he made to compete with the Starbucks down the street. When I learned that the Founder dropped out of Stanford as a junior, I immediately respected him. He had edge. It was one thing to find success as a Stanford grad, and another thing entirely to find success as a dropout. Plus, I was excited that I finally had someone to talk coffee with, even if I was ashamed of my bougie interest.
incredible writing
At the bar, someone was singing Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” a song I would never stream on Rdio because it wasn’t compatible with my publicly visible aesthetic preferences, but which I secretly loved. The mood of the song made me feel expansive.
????
It seemed Allie didn’t know many people at the meetup, either. Her roommates were alums of Ivy League universities, and most of the people here were recent transplants from “back East,” thrilled to be in “San Fran.” Allie suggested we take a walk. On our way out of the apartment, I overheard one guy attempting to impress someone by explaining that he’d passed on an offer from McKinsey in order to come out west and “risk everything.” The company he named employed more than five hundred people, hardly a startup.
like if you're going to make this banal point at least leave it as an exercise to the reader!!! dont spoon-feed us that final clause
After a few minutes of browsing, the tell-us-about-yourself questions took over the screen; answering a certain number allowed you to browse again. DateDate defied all rules about how to make an engaging app—“so much friction,” one early reviewer in TechCrunch stated—and yet our userbase continued to grow, and hardly anyone left. The Founder compared this friction to opening a good bottle of whisky—the slow process of removing the wax seal made you more desirous of what was inside. No need to rush. We were crafting the perfect experience of love.
maybe inspo? [the joke: doesn't know anything about whiskey]
I’d visited the Founder’s old apartment, in the Castro. But his first startup’s acquisition allowed him to upgrade. He moved to a multimillion-dollar penthouse in the Millennium Tower, a luxury condo building of blue-gray glass that has begun to sink into the young bay mud. An engineering problem, or an omen.
ok you gotta make this funny
That one of the ocean,” she said, referring to the photo I’d taken in Bolinas, “is that the default desktop photo from the last OS?”
“No, I took that.” I pointed to the speck of a person visible at the photo’s edge. “That’s my friend.”
“It looks exactly like that one default photo. You know which one I’m talking about? You’d walk into the Apple Store and the computers would have it set as their background.” She pulled up the photo on her phone. She was right: the photo looked like mine, or mine looked like it. My Bolinas photo, the one I was most proud of, was an unintentional replica.
this has humorous potential
At the overpriced Mexican restaurant run by a white guy who’d spent three months in Oaxaca, we took complimentary shots of mezcal while waiting for tamales. It’d been a particularly rough morning in the content review queue, and I was feeling grateful for Noma. Since she’d come to work with us, she helped another part of me, one I tucked away at work, come out of hiding. “I feel more dimensional around you,” I said, which made her spit out her mezcal.
oh my god lol
Noma lived in the Haight, home of the Grateful Dead, of Janis Joplin and the Summer of Love and Joan Didion. As I climbed Haight Street on my bike, a man with a long gray ponytail and tie-dyed sweatshirt crossed the street without looking. I veered around him. A hookah bar was blasting Jefferson Airplane. Outside a corner store, a guy with an acoustic guitar grumbled out a Bob Dylan song in front of a Bob Marley mural. I admire the San Francisco neighborhoods, like the Haight and North Beach, that refuse to change at the same velocity as the rest of the city. San Francisco is always zooming ahead at warp speed, light-years ahead of anywhere else in America, and yet there remain pockets of the city where everyone is content to live decades in the past.
what tense is this book written in???
Noma was right. At the Corporation, I would lose myself in a sea of other people like me. Liberal arts grads searching for meaning through work. Some, exposed to the evils of the dark web, convinced themselves it was their responsibility to keep the internet clean: not just from dick pics, but from more serious offenses, like hate-group schemes and child pornography. Honorable work, but psychologically damaging. And to what end? So the Corporation could serve ads to preteens? Corporation employees lined Valencia Street each morning, waiting for the shuttle, united by their miserable but well-paid vibe. They upgraded their hotel rooms and their plane seats to counteract the misery, bought two-hundred-dollar T-shirts and bamboo sunglasses in failed attempts to block out the voices in their heads that screamed, Get me the fuck out of here, this isn’t what we agreed, and on the shuttle they stared wistfully out the window, at the sign that says “Santa Cruz This Way,” dreaming about being on the beach, reading a novel they had so far only photographed and shared, never opened.
oh my god
The Founder, on the other hand, granted himself accelerated vesting. His shares in DateDate were awarded the day the company was acquired. He believed in the primacy of the inventor. No one else was entitled to anything. Not even me, a friend. Noma informed me that accelerated vesting was common. Usually founders grant the same rights to their team, especially if the team is small. It had happened to her at a couple of other startups; her promised equity had been converted into a decent nest egg, allowing her to drift from startup to startup without worrying about a consistent source of income. I’d assumed she had family money, like so many other Stanford people I knew, and admired her for earning her own way. Of course, she’d been lucky to work for founders who looked out for their employees. The Founder would not be leaving me with a nest egg. I knew better than to compare, but my earnings were a thousand times less than what he would receive. I felt cheated, robbed of the potential to earn more, and also dismayed by these feelings of capitalist greed rising within me.
earning her own way