“The speed-dating thing is tomorrow. Should we do a run-through together?”
Cyrus is holding open a large notebook. He starts to draw with a Sharpie. “Nope,” he says.
“You don’t want to practice?”
“It’ll be better if it’s fresh,” he says. He draws a series of concentric circles. The Sharpie makes a squeaking sound on the paper. I look at Jules. Jules shrugs.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Cyrus says, not looking up from his notebook. “I’m going to go in there alone, and you two can wait at the bar across the street. And when I come back, we are going to have an investor.”
I can’t decide if that would delight me or annoy the shit out of me. “Jules and I have been working twenty-four/seven, and it’s really not that easy.”
He stops drawing and looks at both of us. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I don’t mean to make light of all the things you’ve already tried. That’s why I’m so confident—the pitch is amazing, the platform is great, I just have to sell it. I was hesitant at first, but then I realized I just have to talk about it in a slightly different way.”
“You’re the golden goose,” I say.
“The champion prizefighter,” Jules nods.
“The leprechaun.”
“What do you think?” Cyrus asks. He holds up his notebook, and on it is our logo, three small capital letters inside three concentric circles. WAI.
Six
GROWN-UPS
I wish Gaby, our new CFO, would stop wearing designer suits to Utopia. He doesn’t even do it ironically, he just gets up every morning, puts on many layers of expensive clothing, and rocks up to the office.
“That’s what CFOs are like,” Jules tells me. “They’re uptight. Don’t suit-shame him.”
“That’s a thing?”
“I’m making it a thing.”
Until Gaby arrived, I was tabulating our expenses on a spreadsheet, and I’d programmed it to beep loudly if anything went over five hundred dollars. But now that we have eleven people on payroll and we’re starting to upload the platform onto our servers, the money is dribbling out like drool from an overly bred pug, and Gaby is in charge of all the numbers.
Gaby is a grown-up. His sideburns are dusted with gray, and he has a square jaw and one of those long wallets that men like to slide in and out of their coat pockets. He was the CFO of a hardware startup that went public last year and made him very rich, and now he is here to do the same with WAI. There’s nothing mean about him. He has kind, crinkly eyes and he is always super nice to me, but even so I find myself a little embarrassed whenever he’s around, like I just got caught picking my teeth.
Gaby is here to make sure we don’t squander the two million dollars in our bank account. This seems like a stupidly large sum. The money was given to us by Rupert, a person I’ve met twice: first when we visited the offices of Sloane Management and Cyrus presented on the two-hundred-inch screen in the conference room, and then again when the money landed in the bank and he took us all out for drinks at Soho House. Rupert is tall, skinny, Indian, and likes to hook his thumbs around his belt loops. I hated him on sight, mostly because he started talking to me in elaborate sports metaphors and also because my parents have always told me to be skeptical of brown people who change their names to sound like white people, but he loves the platform, loves Cyrus, and treats me with an acceptable amount of respect for being the brains behind the operation. Plus, he was one of only two people willing to write a check for WAI, a fact he reminds us of repeatedly, telling us that he knows our chances of succeeding are zero, that it’s not even a moon shot, more like one-putting into a black hole the size of a penny.
Rupert and Cyrus meet every week for mentoring sessions. Rupert appears high whenever he is near Cyrus. I overhear them talking about the Assyrian Empire, about Sikhism and astrology and arcane subplots from The Lord of the Rings. I know Rupert without asking him a single question—growing up in Jersey in a two-story house not unlike my parents’ in Merrick, playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement, and turning the volume down on his Wu Tang Clan lest his mother call down, “Rupinder, you’re finishing your maths homework or what, beta?”
Rupert has divided us into teams. There is a leadership team, an executive team, a product team, and a marketing team. We are a board of directors—Cyrus, Jules, me, and Rupert. And titles. Cyrus is CEO. Jules is COO. And I am Chief Technology Officer. I’m going to write all the code, and Cyrus is going to lend me his brain while keeping Rupert happy, and Jules is going to take care of everything else: the team we’re going to hire, the way we’re going to run those teams, the deadlines and the deliverables and the mess of running a company.