The Start-Up Read online

  Even though there wasn’t much chatter, there was camaraderie among the engineers. When someone finished a major code pattern, it was normal for him to throw his arms in the air and yell, “I am awesome!” and everyone would wildly applaud and respond, “You ARE awesome!” On the occasional instance when someone’s computer crashed and they lost their work, the whole room felt the devastation. Those were the worst possible moments for an engineer. It wasn’t just the fact that countless hours were for nothing, but that you had to retrace your steps, take a break from the momentum you were building for the next thing, and go back and reprogram something from the past. At moments like those, no call was necessary to alert the room about what was going on at your station; the person next to you would realize it and send an instant message to everyone in the room. Then everyone would stop, gather around the computer scientist in crisis, and repeat the mantra, “If your computer never crashes, you’re not working hard enough. Or you’re an idiot.” Everyone would then pat the crash-victim on the back and he’d laugh and sigh and get back to work.

  It was in this room that Amelia felt, for the first time in her life, really at home. The sound of tapping computer keys and the sight of line after line of zeroes and ones and Courier typeface up and down the screen and the steady heat and buzz of computers running were all familiar and good.

  Her favorite computer stall was in the far left corner, at the end of the table, number eighteen. The front and right side of the desk were enclosed in a cubicle divider, but the left side was open to a floor-to-ceiling window that looked down from the third floor to the street below, and across to a popular campus café.

  Whenever she got stuck on her code, Amelia would gaze out the window and people-watch. She liked to observe how they behaved, how they interacted. She’d watch how walkers bumped into each other because they were looking down at their phones, punching text messages or trying to surf the web. She’d note the annoyance of a girl waiting for someone at the café across the street, checking her watch incessantly, or the nervous twitch of a student dressed awkwardly in a suit, interviewing for a job at a table inside.

  And every Friday at one o’clock, she’d stop to watch a Chinese couple that met every week for lunch, always at the same table. He was slim and tall, always dressed in khakis and a Polo shirt. The woman was petite, with long black hair, always carrying a pretty purse and wearing oversized sunglasses that she never removed. Amelia felt close to the couple, having watched them through various phases of joy and argument (they’d been arguing a lot lately), and gained a certain comfort in the steadiness of their routine. Today he’d brought her flowers and she’d hugged him with delight, but when she received a call midway through lunch, she’d left him sitting alone with the flowers at the table.

  That was almost twelve hours ago, before Amelia had made her breakthrough on this code. She’d taken an iPhone application class during her first quarter at Stanford and had been addicted to programming little games and shortcuts ever since. But this was the first time she’d tried to create a program that was totally original.

  Amelia paused. It was the end of her marathon programming session, when weariness ordinarily overtook her, but instead she was filled with a surge of energy. It came all at once, like a sudden break of sunlight in a cloudy sky, the awareness of just what she was trying to accomplish. To create something out of nothing, to forge a path through the frontier of Silicon Valley that nobody before had even considered.

  It’s the new things that change the world.

  “Hey, Amelia?” George, a junior, popped his head over her cubicle.

  “Just a sec, George.” Amelia didn’t look up as she typed furiously, squinting at the screen in front of her.

  George waited for several minutes while Amelia finished a line of code.

  When he saw she was slowing down, he went on. “I’m going to go grab a slice of pizza and wondered if I can get you anything?” George was tall and lanky, with a mop of curly brown hair and wire frame glasses. He almost always wore brown corduroys and a Google t-shirt he’d gotten for free during his internship there last summer. He’d been hugely kind to Amelia since she’d arrived on campus, showing her where everything in the lab was, and even taking her as a date to his Kappa Phi fraternity mixer.

  “George, I’m almost there! Ahh! I think I’ve got it!”

  “What? What have you got? Let’s see!” George hurried around to stand behind her chair.

  At 1:34 in the morning, with George standing over her shoulder, Amelia held her breath and pressed the “Enter” key to run the program from beginning to end to check it for bugs. At 1:37, the “ACTION COMPLETED” message popped onto her screen, indicating that no bugs were detected. She plugged her phone into the computer and downloaded the program.

  By 1:53, Amelia and George were both holding their breath. Amelia cradled her iPhone in one hand as her other hand hovered above the button on her new program.

  Amelia thought about the past year and all the changes she and Adam had experienced. They grew up together in Indiana and were everything to each other. They had never met their parents, didn’t even know anything about them. For as long as they could remember, they had been “juvenile dependents,” cared for by the state. Their only family, their real family, was each other. They bounced around foster homes and formed fleeting friendships, but they always returned to one truth: that they were twins, and they were inseparable.

  They called themselves the Doriis, the plural of their last name that they’d made up during a pact that they’d always stick together. Only once were they separated, when they got caught doing something wrong and Amelia went to a juvenile detention center for a little while, but they never talked about what happened. A year ago, when they applied to college, despite the odds and expense, they agreed that they would only go if they were both admitted. They would never separate again. Now they were here and Amelia was free to do nothing but code and code all day long, indulging in her one true passion, free from the responsibilities and fears of their old life.

  At last, Amelia had built up the nerve to press the button on her iPhone.

  It was an ambitious and risky experiment, almost doomed to fail...but it didn’t. It worked perfectly. Amelia had a way of beating the odds, always.

  Like a kid on Christmas, Amelia squealed with delight, throwing her arms around George in an ecstatic hug, not noticing how much it made him blush.

  “It works, George! Oh, it works!”

  “Say it, Amelia!”

  “Oh, I can’t, George. It’s not that big of a deal.” George turned to the room and yelled, “Hey guys, Amelia is awesome!” The whole room turned to look at her, and she felt her face turn red but couldn’t hide her smile. “Amelia, you’re awesome!” they all cheered.

  George lowered his voice, hoping to have a moment alone in a very public place.

  “Amelia, this is really huge. What you figured out with this . . . What you got the iPhone to do . . . I think it can make something big.”

  “I’m so relieved, George! I knew there was a way to do it, and it’s been bugging me for, like, an entire week.”

  “An entire week?” George was dumbfounded. “You mean you started this a week ago?”

  “Well, yeah. I started it on Sunday. What is today? Friday? Yeah, a week.”

  George looked at her in astonishment. “Amelia, there are PhD students who couldn’t do cross-signal programming of this complexity if they spent an entire year on it. You seriously did it in a week?”

  “That’s not true. It wasn’t that complicated. You just had to figure out the—”

  “The signal frequency algorithm of multiple devices cross-coordinated with the Apple platform and unpublished cell tower proxies—that is incredibly complicated, Amelia. You’re not just awesome, you’re, like, the next Sergey and Larry.”

  Amelia shrugged, embarrassed by the comparison to the Google founders, Stanford graduates who were revered as Gods around campus. “I just
made an iPhone application, George. I didn’t invent Google.”

  “Whatever you did, it’s incredible.”

  “I’m just glad it worked.” Amelia smiled. “I’m also exhausted. I’m going to go home and go to bed!”

  “Do you want some pizza first? Let me grab my jacket.”

  “Don’t worry about it, George. I’m super tired. Just need to get to bed.”

  “At least let me walk you home?”

  “I’ve got my bike. Thanks, though! I’ll see you around.” Amelia practically skipped down the stairs and out of the Gates building. As she crossed the courtyard she pulled out her cell phone to text Adam the good news.

  Back in the dorm, she scooted past a group of dorm mates playing Ping-Pong and drinking from a keg in the lobby. She grabbed her shower caddy and headed down the hall to the bathroom. She stood under the hot water and breathed in the smell of her orange ginger shampoo. She let herself stay in the shower for a good twenty minutes, treating herself after a job well done. Then she patted dry and pulled on her pajamas— a pair of sweat pants and a cozy t-shirt —and smiled at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. Today was a great day, the kind of day Stanford had promised to make possible, and she felt deeply grateful.

  It was 3:20 in the morning when she finally shut off the light and crawled into bed, whispering, “Thank you,” to no one in particular. Closing her eyes, she drifted off to sleep.

  Amelia awoke with a start as the door flew open and Patty stumbled in.

  Amelia held up a hand to shield her eyes from the hallway light filling the room. She blinked with confusion.

  “Ameeeelia!” Patty groaned drunkenly. “Amelia, I am in soooo much trou-ble,” she said, accentuating every syllable.

  Amelia sighed as she pulled her legs out from under the covers and sat up on her bed. Patty shut the door with unintentional force. She stumbled toward Amelia’s bed and climbed on top of the covers, letting her head fall against the pillow.

  “Can I get you—?”

  “No. No. No,” Patty mumbled, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t need anything. I’m just in . . . I’m in so much trouble, Amelia. I really, really did a really not-good thing. Like, a really not-good thing.”

  “What happened? What’s the matter?”

  “I hooked up with . . . ” Patty took a deep breath and sighed. “I hooked up with . . . Chad.”

  “Who’s Chad?” Amelia asked.

  “I mean, I didn’t really hook up with him. We, like, well, we made out a lot and did . . . other stuff. A lot of other stuff. But we didn’t have sex.” Having never kissed anyone, Amelia knew Patty had more experience with boys than she did, but she didn’t know what sorts of things were defined as “hooking up.” Patty’s confession to her was a little startling and very embarrassing.

  “Oh, Amelia. He is sooo hot and it was sooo good making out with him and he is soooo . . . ”

  “What?”

  “He’s soooo Shandi’s fiancé.”

  “Who’s Shandi?”

  “Shandi?” Patty sat up and stared at Amelia. “My sis-ter!” she shouted, and then fell back on to the pillow with a groan.

  “Oh, wow,” Amelia said under her breath, but Patty picked up on it.

  “I know! Annnnd Shandi’s coming home next week and we’re having a big family dinner to welcome her home and I just hooked up with her fiancé. Oh, Amelia. This is not good.” Amelia took a deep breath and switched into solution mode. “Well, let’s think about this rationally.”

  Patty giggled. “Yes, let’s do. Let’s think about this ra-tion-al-ly.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “At T. J. Bristol’s party. Oh! Your brother was there, by the way. I think he has a crush on my friend Lisa.”

  “What? Adam was . . . Okay, that’s not the point. Did anyone see you with Chad?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “It’s all a little fuzzy, Amelia. I mean, we had tequila shots and then there was some announcement and everyone was cheering and I went to the bathroom and Chad was there. Where did he come from? I’m not sure how he got there, but he was there when I came out and then we were outside and then we were in a car. Wait . . . How did we get in a car?

  Ohhhh . . . ”

  Patty groaned again. “I need to go to sleep.” She rolled over and shut her eyes right as her phone rang, indicating a text message. “Will you get that?” she mumbled to Amelia before drifting off into a heavy snoring slumber.

  Amelia picked up Patty’s pink bejeweled iPhone and tapped the text message that had just come through.

  “FYI. More where this came from. You are such a naughty girl.” The message was from T. J. Bristol and came with a video attachment.

  Amelia looked at Patty, who was dead asleep, then back at the phone before tapping to open the attachment. A twenty-second video clip played, showing a guy and a girl—oh my God, it was Patty—on top of each other, aggressively making out, in the front seat of a Lamborghini. The guy in the video pulled off Patty’s shirt and the clip cut out.

  Amelia felt her jaw drop as she looked at her sleeping roommate. Not good, indeed. She tucked the phone next to the pillow and gently removed Patty’s shoes, bracelets, and earrings and pulled a blanket over her. She brought the trashcan next to the bed in case Patty woke and threw up, and filled a glass of water to place on the dresser. Then she turned out the light and crawled into Patty’s bed, exhausted.

  Chapter 5

  Information Gathering

  The bright California sun streamed through the window and woke Amelia early. She got out of bed to head to the hall bathroom, and, when she opened the door, found Adam passed out in the hallway. He was cradling something in his arms, like a teddy bear. It was a Tupperware container full of the dessert he promised Amelia.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or scold him as she shook him awake.

  “Wha . . . ?” he said as he blinked open his eyes. “Ohhhh . . . ” He moaned and put his head back down on the floor. “Do you want some cake?”

  “Adam, what on earth? Did you sleep here all night?” Amelia couldn’t conceal a smile at her brother’s rough-and-tumble state. His dirty-blond hair was shaggy across his forehead, his dark green eyes puffy and a little bloodshot.

  “Umm . . . ” Adam looked at her but didn’t make any attempt to lift his head from the floor. “I must have. Oh, wow. I do not feel well.”

  “Come on, let’s get you out of the hallway.” Amelia giggled as she helped him into her room. “Quiet, though. Patty’s sleeping.” Adam took a deep breath, shook his head and blinked his eyes, and snapped back to life, crawling up from the floor and into Amelia’s room.

  “Man, have I got a lot to tell you. I’ve had a total breakthrough, Amelia.”

  “Me too! You won’t believe what I did at the computer lab last night.”

  “Why is Patty sleeping in your bed?” he whispered, noticing that Patty was still clad in the dress she’d been wearing the night before.

  “Long story,” Amelia said as she walked over to her computer. “Come here; let me show you —”

  “What time did she get home?” Adam was still stuck on Patty. “Amelia, you would not believe this party. I have never seen so much booze. And all the kids were drinking with their parents like it was totally natural.

  But here’s the thing, Amelia, these millionaires— no, billionaires—they’re smart, they’re super smart. But you know what? They’re no smarter than you. And I realized last night, Amelia, that you could program something and we could get a venture capitalist to invest. We could be one of them, Amelia. We could start a tech or Internet or computer or whatever company and be freakin’ millionaires.”

  Amelia looked up from her computer. “What are you talking about?

  Why on earth would we start a company?”

  “To make money, Amelia! And ge
t out of the shit life we’ve been living.

  Why should we be on scholarships, riding our bikes around because we can’t afford a car, when you’ve got all the brains— probably more brains—

  than any of these guys that are making billions off of deals like Gibly?”

  “What’s Gibly?”

  “It’s the software behind mobile payments, like for the iPhone. Gibly makes buying stuff with your phone easy; that’s why they do the voice-to-text software, so you can just speak and buy. Last night, Gibly was sold to some company in England for like 3.8 billion dollars and all these guys at this party made crazy money off of it.”

  “That doesn’t sound so complicated. Why did someone pay so much for it?” Amelia went back to her computer and started typing something.

  “Exactly! It’s not that complicated.” Adam’s hangover was replaced by excitement as he leaned against his sister’s desk. “It’s not that complicated for someone like you. You could do something like that in your sleep, and we could build it into a company and make a killing and never have to worry about anything again.”

  “Adam.” Amelia stopped typing and took a long look at her brother.

  “Money causes problems. The pursuit of money causes problems, and I don’t like the way you’re thinking.”

  “But . . . ”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. Adam looked at his sister, stunned. “We haven’t had the best luck, Adam. The way you’re speaking, the way you sound . . . You sound like . . . ” She trailed off. “This type of thinking has gotten us into trouble before.” Amelia turned back to her computer and lowered her voice so as not to wake Patty. “In our new life, I program because it’s the one thing in the world I absolutely love doing. It’s interesting and inspiring and occasionally creates something that makes the world an easier place to live in. Money ruins everything. It will ruin our lives.”