“You’re ready to launch in twelve weeks, right, Marco?” Cyrus prompts.
“That’s right, Captain.” Captain is Marco’s new nickname for Cyrus. This does not irritate me at all.
“There are some amazing synergies between the two companies,” Cyrus says. “Death rites are our most requested rituals, making up twenty-three percent of all queries on the platform.”
“What’s Obit.ly actually going to do?” Rupert asks.
“You give us permission to access all your social media accounts in the event of your death,” Marco says. “We close things down, write to all your friends, inform everyone about your final wishes. It’s like a will, except for your online presence.”
“What’s the market size?”
“Well, so far there’s no competition—no one else is trying to do this. But dead people are going to outnumber living people on social media within ten years. You obviously don’t want to give anyone access to your accounts while you’re still alive, but once you’re dead, there needs to be a way to put an end to your online presence.”
“I don’t know,” Rupert says. “You’re dealing with a lot of sensitive information.”
Craig loves it. “This is awesome,” he says. “I get so freaked out when a dead person suddenly appears in my feed.”
“Have you done a risk assessment?” Rupert asks. “What’s the tech behind the security?”
“Asha’s in charge of that,” Cyrus says. He turns to me.
“Ren and I will run all the stress tests,” I say. Then I turn to Marco, “Tell us what inspired you to start Obit.ly,” hoping that he’ll tell some kind of creepy story about keeping his mother’s corpse locked in the attic.
Marco looks down at his shoes and then up at the ceiling. “My mother passed away when I was very young. And my family—my father and my grandparents—thought it would be better not to tell me the truth until I was older. I can understand where they were coming from—it wasn’t a pleasant story—she took her own life. But I’ve always been haunted by those years of secrecy.” He clears his throat. I can’t help feeling a surge of sympathy for Marco; it’s impossible not to be moved by a grown man standing up in front of a roomful of strangers to talk about his mother’s death.
Craig is shaking his head. “This is mind-blowing.”
“And there’s more,” Marco says. “I think the world is going to have a different relationship to death in the next ten, twenty years.”
I perk up. Here comes the crazy.
“Climate change is going to create events that wipe out large portions of the human population. Pandemics, natural disasters. Our sense of safety is going to collapse around us. Obit.ly is about confronting that inevitability, about using tech to help us prepare for what’s to come.”
I look around the room to see where this last statement has landed. Rupert looks a little worried, but no more than usual. Craig is practically drooling with excitement.
“Thank you, Marco,” Cyrus says. “That was illuminating.” He shepherds Marco out of the room, telling him, “We’re going to talk and get back to you later today.” After closing the door with a swoosh, he says to us, “Well, I think you can all see that Marco’s product is revolutionary. He’s built it all himself, the team is basically just him and a CFO and a marketing person. They’ve taken almost no funding to date and are ready to beta-launch in twelve weeks.”
“How much does he want?” Craig’s voice is faint and breathy, and the screen has gone blank.
“Craig?” Jules says. “Is your video working?”
“Yeah, but I’ve switched to my treadmill desk, so I’m gonna keep it to voice for now,” he says, panting. “How much does the guy want?”
“He wants ten, but I can probably get him down to six or seven maybe a mix of cash and shares.”
“I don’t think we should pay more than five,” Rupert says. “He hasn’t even got off the starting block. No users, no data.”
“But the tech is solid. Asha, did you want to speak to that?”
“It’s good,” I admit. “Relatively bug-free, although I’d want to stress-test it a little because there’s so much sensitive information going through the system.”
“So there are no major problems with the tech,” Cyrus underlines.
“That was kind of a crazy story about his mom, wasn’t it?” I say.