Destiny nods. “True.”
“It’s got all the good stuff—vitamins C and D, a bit of collagen, some vaporized A, antioxidants—you can customize it. It’s called Breathe Life.”
“Breathe Life?”
She does a toothpaste-commercial smile and says, “Do something great with your mouth!”
Li Ann sounds crazy, but in a year we’re probably all going to have those things sticking out of our mouths.
“Rory’s doing all the testing in the lab, and we’re sourcing some great ingredients, you know, oils from the best organic farms.”
“Great!” Destiny cheers, putting her thumbs up. We polish off our faux fish and make our way upstairs.
“Well, I’ve officially forgiven her for being way hotter than me,” I say.
“Some people have it all. Every time she has a new idea, she gets to do the prototyping for free. Imagine knowing you could build anything you wanted.”
“I would put a hipster café on every street east of Bayside,” I say.
“Suburbs getting you down?”
“I had to get on my bike this morning and stand outside Starbucks till it opened. Starbucks in a strip mall. That’s what turns you on in Merrick.”
* * *
We have no leads either, despite Jules exhausting his admittedly not very long list of contacts from his Sellyourshit.com days. I have taken to borrowing money from my parents, which makes me feel like I’m permanently wearing an itchy sweater. And we haven’t been able to hire anyone, not even the person who is going to design the platform.
Then Jules walks into Utopia one day with the chinless investor. He brings him over to our desks, and I frantically try to hide the evidence of my four p.m. french fry habit. “Frank wanted to meet again,” Jules announces.
It takes me a second or two to wipe the grease from my fingertips. “Nice to see you,” I say, wondering if he can sense that I’ve been sticking virtual pins in him.
“I have to say, folks, I’m intrigued.”
“Intrigued is good,” Jules says. “We can intrigue you more.”
Frank pulls up a chair. “How do you see this thing working?”
Jules gestures toward me. “Asha’s the expert.”
I talk him through the basics of the algorithm. He asks a few not totally idiotic questions. “This is pretty impressive,” he says. “Do you have a business plan? And who’s on the leadership team?”
I tell him it’s just us.
“We’re going to build it out, of course,” Jules says. “We think a team of about twenty pre-launch, and then depending on engagement, we can grow proportionally.”
I nod as if we’ve had many meetings about team size.
“Have you thought about roles?”
“We’re all co-founders,” Jules says.
“One of you has to be CEO.”
“We assumed it would be Asha,” Jules tells him, although, again, we have never talked about it.
“Or Jules.” I shrug.
“All the technical aspects of the platform have been developed by Asha,” Jules says. He shoots me this look that I think means Stop making it sound like we don’t have our shit together.
Frank leans back in his seat and regards us, doing whatever mental calculation people like him do at times like these. Even before he starts talking, I know what he’s going to say. It comes together in my mind the way things do when they’re inevitable—like they’ve been there all along.
“Look,” Frank says, “it’s not up to me. But if I were you, I would make your guy—what’s his name?”
“Cyrus.”
“Yeah, Cyrus, the CEO. Because someone has to represent the idea—it’s woo-woo enough as it is, and if you’re going to pull in seed money, the person at the heart of this whole thing should represent you.”
“What do you mean by woo-woo?” I ask, even though I can’t say I disagree.
“He means it’s going to be difficult to raise money,” Jules says. “But we already knew that.”
“I thought that’s why you were here.”
“Frank is just here to give advice,” Jules says.
“Not necessarily,” Frank says. “I’ve been doing little investments here and there. You know Countify?”
“No.”
“It’s a SaaS company, they do cloud-based storage for cloud-based services. IPO’ed last year, and I got in early, so I’ve got some funds for seed stage investments.”