“Welcome, Asha Ray, we are delighted to have you here,” the moderator says. She’s the same woman who interviewed Manishala Brown all those months ago, a kind of Smart Barbie, bleached-blond hair, big smile, oversize glasses. Right now she’s in millennial-pink everything and holding on to a set of index cards with her gleaming manicure. She introduces me, pointing out all my excellent accomplishments: “Your platform needs no introduction. Many of us have become frequent users of WAI. Tell us, how did you and your co-founder Cyrus Jones come up with the concept?”
“WAI was totally Asha’s idea,” Destiny says. “She’s a genius, plain and simple. For the rest of us, things aren’t as straightforward.”
I shoot her a grateful smile. “Destiny is being overly generous. I’m here because my friends and I decided to take a chance on a crazy idea,” I say. “Cyrus, Julian Cabot, and I were just experimenting with the idea of using AI to give people a different social platform—we never thought we’d end up here.”
Pink Fingernails asks a few more questions about how we got started. I tell her about the s’mores, about working long nights at Julian’s house, about dropping out of Dr. Stein’s lab. Then she flips to a new index card. “And do you personally come from a business background? Are your parents entrepreneurs?”
“They are, actually. They came over here from Bangladesh in their twenties, right out of college. And now they run a small chain of pharmacies.”
“What a sweet story. So I guess you’re used to mixing business with family life? For those of you in our audience who don’t know, Asha and her co-founder Cyrus Jones are married.”
There’s a small rumble in the audience, and then a few people clap. “Woo-hoo!” someone shouts.
“So which came first, the marriage or the business?”
“The marriage, actually,” I say. “But the business followed shortly after. It’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart now.”
More laughter and applause. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but then I feel my phone buzzing in my handbag and I remember Cyrus’s article.
“Your office is in an unusual setting, isn’t it?”
“We beta-launched the product, and the team at Utopia invited us to join them. That was three years ago, and we’re still headquartered there.”
“What is Utopia like? I think some of our audience members are pretty curious.”
Destiny winks. “What happens at Utopia stays at Utopia.”
I gesture to her. “It’s been great to have a friend to share the experience with.”
I get a few more questions about Utopia, which I dodge, all the while resisting the urge to steal a glimpse at my phone. Then the conversation circles back to Cyrus.
“Asha, tell us about the challenges of working with someone and living with him at the same time.”
“Well, there’s not a lot of work-life balance,” I say. “But we like it that way. We’re committed to WAI and we’re committed to each other.” I knit my hands together. “It’s an integrated whole. Like our platform.” I smile, wishing this line of questioning would end.
Satisfied, she moves on to Destiny. Destiny entertains the crowd with a graphic description of how she came up with the categories for Consentify. “The anus is a very contentious area,” she says. “People want to be touched there, but they don’t want to admit wanting to be touched there. So we had to deal with it quite delicately.”
After that point, no one is interested in me anymore. The audience is invited to participate, and Destiny is showered with questions.
“What happens when people consent to being touched, does the consent expire after a certain period of time?”
“What if you are in the middle of sex and you end up doing something you didn’t explicitly consent to?”
“Do men hate it?”
There is a lot of laughter and whooping.
“Any more questions?” the moderator asks.
Someone in the back raises a hand. “My boyfriend and I are about to become co-founders. Do you have any advice for us about how we can keep our relationship and our business together at the same time?”
I decide to play it for laughs. “When Cyrus and I first started WAI, our lawyer told us our marriage wouldn’t survive, so we fired him.”
“Do you feel like people give Cyrus more credit than they give you?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head as if to mean Why would you say that? when really, I’m thinking, Yes, yes, of course, what planet do you think we live on?