Maren
As soon as I saw the tweet, I knew I wanted to help,” Evan said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. I mean I will be.”
“Because I’m sorry to tell you this, but you look like shit,” he said and we both laughed. I had to laugh. In a couple of weeks, Evan and I would be in back-to-back meetings with VCs. “Sleep-deprived teen goth who swears these jeans must have shrunk in the wash” was not the best look for me to deliver our value prop. Male founders could get away with a sloppy genius aesthetic, but I had to be a brand ambassador for self-care.
“So take the weekend—take the whole week if you need it. My parents hardly ever go up to the house anymore. Put your phone on airplane mode, light a fire, take a bath, whatever you need to get back in fighting shape. And most importantly?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t read the comments.”
“Too late,” Devin and I said at the same time.
Evan’s penthouse on Rivington was all high ceilings and right angles and cold daylight. The open kitchen had a distressed reclaimed wood light fixture with vintage Edison bulbs hanging from it, the exposed filaments like fairies trapped upside down in jars. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a wraparound terrace and views of Lower Manhattan. Evan had made a small fortune while he was still at Wharton, when the mobile-friendly cryptocurrency trading bot he built was acquired by one of the world’s largest banks. But more people knew him as the Bachelorette runner-up who abandoned the bachelorette during the rose ceremony of the fantasy suite episode in a radical protest of the show’s amplification of toxic masculinity. “I will no longer be complicit,” he said, before ripping off his mic and riding off into the tropical night, shirtless, on a motorcycle. Girls at home, gripping their third goblets of rosé, lost their minds, googled toxic masculinity, started petitions for Evan to become the next bachelor, even as he told TMZ he was done with the franchise.
He was our first investor and one of our most trusted advisors, the guru behind our exit strategy. Through his connections, he’d helped us raise five million in our series A.
“Alexa!” Evan yelled in the direction of the living room. “Play the Julie Ruin.”
“Shuffling songs by the Julie Ruin on Amazon Music,” a pleasant woman’s voice answered and a bouncy keyboard intro sounded through the speaker.
It was only polite to stay beyond the length of a single song, let Evan show us how he synced all his home furnishings to voice-activated electronic devices.
“Siri. What. Do. I. Have. In. The. Fridge,” he said, and photographs of a milk carton, a hunk of cheese, and a six-pack of Stella scrolled across the screen of his iPhone. “This has integrated functionality with synchronous voice activation and live feed from the interior cameras. I get notifications when I’m out of beer. My boy Jay? He’s at Samsung now. I get beta versions of everything.”
“Is it just me or is the future men yelling at computers named after women? And the woman always answering with a smile in her voice?” I said.
“Who’s yelling?”
“You’re commanding,” Devin suggested.
“I’m sure there’s a setting to change the gender of the AI.”
I didn’t think he was right, but I also had to be careful about how many times a day I told other people they were wrong. I had to give Evan credit—he was one of the first people to really get what Devin and I were trying to do. A couple of years before, we were naive and arrogant enough to think that our idea would be a no-brainer for female angel investors, but we got no after no after no. Their wellness portfolio was full, or they didn’t see the need for yet another social media platform they would have to check and monitor (no, it’s a community, we insisted), or we couldn’t convince them that self-care was a concept that could be packaged, marketed, sold. We lost one pitch competition to an app that would tell you how long the line was for each women’s restroom at a venue like Madison Square Garden; their “revenue model” was to run ads for antiperspirant and low-cal Moscato. The founders were two energetic white guys wearing short-sleeved shirts buttoned up to their necks and Clark Kent glasses. If you really want to disrupt women’s restrooms, I thought, just add more fucking stalls.
Along the upstairs hallway Evan had a series of framed movie posters: Kill Bill, Mad Max: Fury Road, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, Erin Brockovich. I could almost hear the ghostly cries of all the girls Evan led down this hall: OMG, I love that movie.
“Bedroom TV up!” he yelled and I watched from the doorway to the master as a flatscreen rose slowly from the bench at the foot of the bed.
Devin raised her eyebrows at me, trying to encourage more enthusiasm on my end. Don’t you want to be rich, rich like this? This was an aspirational field trip, to show us what was possible, if we kept up the grind.
My fantasies were almost too boring to put on a vision board: Pay off $68,000 of student loan debt from NYU. Get my mom a new car to replace her 2002 Saturn. Buy an item from Duane Reade that cost more than twenty dollars without first checking my bank account balance.
Richual was making money, but we were putting it all back into the company. “You have to spend money to make money!” Evan liked to remind us; he was always getting on my case for trying to cut costs in any way. “This isn’t a 501(c)(3), Maren. You’re in the weeds again.”
But I liked being in the weeds. There was no vertigo down in the swamp, no sense of falling off a high cliff of unrealistic projections or expectations. Running a function on a column of cells was my style of self-soothing. If I could isolate the point at which our social spend stopped effectively acquiring users, didn’t they want to know? And were we worrying enough about providing value to our current users? Even when I wasn’t staring at a timeline of key performance indicators on my laptop screen, numbers and words scrolled through my brain like a Jenny Holzer installation of my own self-loathing: “BEING A GOOD GIRL IS WORTH NO MORE THAN $50,000 SO ADJUST YOUR EXPECTATIONS OR BEHAVIOR.” That’s what Devin and I were each making—a childless millennial living wage in any city but New York—but I had a pile of credit card debt ($4,000 dental implant; $1,000 for new clothes, produced at ethical garment factories that comply with all labor laws, to upgrade my ill-fitting thrift store “here’s a woman who is so body positive she doesn’t own a mirror” wardrobe; $1,200 for a weekend in Miami because what’s another $1,200 when you’re already $5,000 in the hole?) on top of my student loans.
Meanwhile, Devin had a multimillion-dollar safety net—her inheritance and the life insurance from her dad’s sudden death, plus the money from the sale of the apartment she’d grown up in. I waffled between resentment (Couldn’t she see how much of a difference an extra ten grand would make in my life? Why did it have to be fifty-fifty?) and pity (Both her parents died when she was only in her twenties).