The Anti Social Network (3 page)

“Just one more question: where’d you come up with the name?” the guy asked.

“It’s kind of a play on our last name and the ‘eye’ of the product,” Amelia said, a little sheepishly.

“Our?”

“My brother, Adam, and I. Adam’s the head of business development.

I’m just the engineer,” she said.

“So I think that gives you a sense of what Doreye is all about … ” Tom said.“Yes, Mr. Fenway. This has been really helpful. We’ll definitely get a blurb out about the company over the next week.”

“Excellent! Just let us know what else you need.” Tom stood up to shake the journalists’ hands and Amelia followed suit.

Amelia shot a quick text to Adam: “Just had our first interview with TechCrunch! Doreye’s going to be in it this week … ” Tom ushered Amelia toward the door and whispered, “Hold onto your seat, Amelia. Things are about to get big.”

A
melia felt surprisingly light and happy as she rode back to the Incubator with Tom.

“See, Amelia?” said Tom. “I told you starting a business with your idea wasn’t such a bad thing.”

“Maybe you were right,” Amelia said.

Tom turned up the radio. “Do you like the Grateful Dead?” Amelia cocked her head. “Um … I don’t think I’ve ever heard them.” Tom almost stopped the car. “You’ve never heard the Dead?! Oh, Amelia. We’ve got to get you educated. Let’s start with ‘Ripple’.” He flipped through tracks on the dashboard and started singing along to a song. The sound of the guitar was pretty and mellow; it made Amelia think of floating along a river in a canoe.

Sundeep was outside the office talking on his cell phone when Tom and Amelia pulled into the lot. When he saw them, he hung up and shouted,

“How’d it go?”

Tom glowed. “Amelia was perfect. Completely nailed it.” Sundeep held the door for her. “I want to hear all about it.”

“So long as you both get some work done today. Remember, I’m paying you kids … ” Tom joked as he headed in the opposite direction, toward his office.

Sundeep smiled broadly as he walked with Amelia back to her office.

“So, it went well?”

“Yeah, I think so. They really seemed to like the idea, and, you know, I’m starting to think this business thing might not be so bad after all. If we get a lot of users on this, it’ll actually give me more bandwidth to do more interesting coding I’d never really thought about how much more complex and exciting the engineering gets when you have a lot of users.”

“Totally! That’s how I feel about these lenses. If I can get them to market and get a lot of people using them, that gives me a channel to get people other things they need, like food and dental care and access to information.

Business gets a bad rap, but really there’s a lot of good and exciting stuff that can come out of it.”

Amelia bit her lip as she looked at his smiling eyes. Sundeep blushed.

They stood like that for a moment, not knowing what to say, when Amelia’s phone rang. Startled, she looked down.

“It’s Adam, I’d better take this,” she said to Sundeep.

“Of course, I’ll … see you later then.”

“Hey Adam!” Amelia answered cheerfully as she watched Sundeep walk through the playroom to his office.

“You had an interview with TechCrunch?” Adam asked sternly.

“Yeah! Tom and I just got back from University Café.”

“You went without me?” His voice was shaking.

Amelia tried to backpedal. “Well, it was super last-minute. Tom gave me fifteen minutes to get ready.”

“Why didn’t you call me, or text? I could have met you there.”

“I didn’t realize it was such a big deal.”

“Not a big deal? This is our first interview with TechCrunch. How could you not think it was a big deal?” She was silent.

Adam’s hurt started to morph into anger. “Amelia, I’m the head of business development for this company. This is
my
domain. The press is part of the business side, not the engineering side. This should have been
my
interview.”

“
Your
interview? And here I thought this was
our
company. I didn’t realize you were so interested in splitting things up. Especially since you haven’t been to the office in … what, three days? Is that what you call contributing?”

Adam was fuming. He hadn’t been in the office because he’d been trying to sort out the blackmail. If she only knew how much stress he’d been under for her sake.

“Things are complicated right now, Amelia. Trust me, you’re going to feel sorry for saying that.”

“You know what I’m sorry for, Adam? I’m sorry I just did something I didn’t even want to do to help a company I didn’t even want to start so that you could get a little closer to your little start-up dream. And you have the nerve to get mad at me. You should be
thanking
me.” Amelia was surprised by her anger.

“I’m going back to coding. I’ll see you later.” She hung up the phone.

Adam lay on his bed with his iPhone on his chest, staring at the ceiling.

How could Amelia have done the interview without him? Adam wondered again. And why hadn’t Tom insisted he be at the interview? He felt a well of anxiety building in his stomach. What if Tom didn’t see his value? What if he just wanted Amelia and had only let him join because Amelia insisted on including him?

He looked at his iPhone. After getting off the line with Amelia, he had texted Lisa about coming over. Fifteen minutes had passed and there was no response yet. Great. Now he had two things to stress about: the start-up
and
his girlfriend.

He typed a brief second text—
Hey u there?
—and then flung his phone out of reach to keep himself from sending any more messages. He didn’t want to come across as desperate. Eyes closed, he listened intently for the bright “ping” of an arriving text. But the minutes crawled by with no such reassurance. Why wasn’t Lisa texting him back? And whom had she been talking to when she left his room this morning? He loved her so much.

They hadn’t had sex yet, hadn’t even gotten close, to be honest, but that was okay with him. He’d wait forever if he had to. Of course, he hadn’t used the “L” word yet, and neither had she, but he knew she felt the same way. She was just cautious because school was about to start and she didn’t want to miss out on the freshman experience because she had a sophomore boyfriend.

Thirty minutes. Still nothing.

It was dark outside when he woke up. Lisa had finally texted, almost an hour and a half after his texts:
Sorry. Out with the fam. Tomorrow? Sleeping

@ house. Will be here in a.m.

Sure. B there at 10. Sweet dreams. Miss you
, _ _ he texted back, feeling his heart sink. Adam had desperately wanted to see her tonight.

He had decided it was finally time to tell her the truth about his and Amelia’s past.

“I
’m considering buying this company. What do you think?” Ted asked T. J. as he slid his iPad across the breakfast table and took a sip of his coffee, watching T. J.’s face.

The iPad was opened to a TechCrunch article on Doreye. T. J. began reading:

An Eye for Success

_ By now we all know about superstar entrepreneur and investor Tom Fenway’s pet-project incubator, and we’ve all been anxiously_]
awaiting news about what’s coming out of the playful tree house on
Sand Hill Road. Fear not, dear reader, we’ve got our first glimpse,
and it’s looking bright.

The company is called Doreye, and it’s setting a new standard for
syncing all your devices into a central control panel. Everything, from your television to your cable box,
DVD
player, garage door, and even
your stove, could all be controlled by the Doreye app on your iPhone.

And just for kicks, Doreye is throwing a few micro-sensors into the
package, which you can stick onto your keys or your wallet for instant location mapping, straight from your iPhone.

Who is behind all this? Amelia Dory, who despite growing up without
parents in the Indiana foster care system, got accepted to Stanford on a full scholarship. She’s a hardcore nerd; during our interview, she
made three Star Wars references, but behind her smudged glasses her eyes glowed with an innocent, undeniable passion to change how we
interact with the world around us.

Right now Amelia has her twin brother on biz dev (cute, right?), but
we figure Fenway will bring in someone legit to run the business soon enough and keep Amelia on the computers cranking out the Next
Next Big Thing. Stay tuned.

T. J. put down the iPad. When had TechCrunch interviewed Amelia, and why hadn’t Tom told him about it? Isn’t that the sort of thing he was responsible for helping with?

Over the past three months, T. J. had become increasingly worried that his job didn’t have the responsibilities it ought to. At first he’d done pages of analysis on Doreye’s market potential and constructed a thorough marketing plan that he’d presented to Tom. Tom had barely looked at it before asking if he’d mind sharing it with Adam. Next, he’d tried to get in with Sundeep, the new guy who clearly had no business sense, but Sundeep had politely told T. J. that his customer acquisition strategy model wasn’t exactly applicable in rural Southern India. Lately, out of desperation, T.J.

had been hanging out at Facebook and Google headquarters trying to spot engineers who might join the incubator, but he’d had little luck. He was starting to feel like a lackey, not an entrepreneur.

“So, what do you think?” asked T.J.’s father. “I bet Tom would sell it to me, don’t you?”

“Why would you want to buy Amelia Dory’s company?” T. J. asked morosely.

“Why wouldn’t I? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Or, if you can, own them.”

T. J. didn’t disagree with that logic. He took another bite of his Fiber One cereal. As much as he hated to admit it, his father did have good ideas.

“You’ve been working with them, right?”

“Yeah, sort of,” T.J. said.

“Maybe we could put you in as
CEO
.”

T.J. almost choked on his cereal. He could feel his heart beating faster.

“Really?”

“Why not? I think you’d make a great
CEO
.” T. J. blushed. He wasn’t sure his Dad had ever given him such an important compliment.

“Well, I can definitely find out more for you,” T.J. offered, trying to sound nonchalant. “Just let me know what information you need and I’ll do some analysis. Tom’s pretty tied up with other things so I’ve got some bandwidth during the day.”

Ted had flicked to another news article on his iPad, but he looked up at his son for a moment. “Sure, T. J. Think you could put together a pitch deck for me by tomorrow?”

“Definitely!” T. J. crowed. Then, aware that he’d sounded too eager, he adopted what felt like a more professional tone. “I’ll check my calendar and e-mail you a confirmation this afternoon.”

“Great, son. Would be fun to work together on this.” A few hundred feet away, Adam parked his bike behind a tree and crept around the back of the Bristol house. Through the kitchen window, he could see Ted and T. J. eating breakfast. He ducked down and slipped through the back door and up to Lisa’s bedroom.

Lisa was seated at the vanity in a pink bathrobe, curling her hair. “Hey, you,” she said without taking her eyes of the mirror.

“Hey,” Adam said. “How are you?” He walked over and kissed her shoulder from behind. “You look beautiful.” She smiled and held his eyes in the mirror.

“So, look,” Adam started, determined not to lose the courage to say what he wanted to say. “I know you think I’ve been acting funny lately, and you’re right: I have. And I want to tell you the reason.” Lisa put down the curling iron and turned on the stool to face him.

Half her hair fell in neat curls down her shoulders, and the other half was tied with a ribbon, sectioned off and waiting to be curled.

Adam loved watching her get ready. There was something very sexy about seeing her natural perfection become even more glamorous with lip gloss and hairpins.

Focus, he told himself. He had her attention now. He had to do it.

He grabbed the desk chair and pulled it next to her vanity stool, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Okay, here goes. Amelia and I grew up in these institutions, sometimes called group homes, that are like modern-day orphanages. To be fair, they weren’t terrible places. It’s not like in Dickens, with giant creepy buildings full of hundreds of kids eating cold gruel and all that. There were usually no more than a dozen of us, and we spent most of our time at school. But being bounced around from place to place every year or so took its toll. It was hard to feel like we ever belonged anywhere.” Lisa swallowed and nodded her head in sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I was adopted so young that I don’t really remember what it was like not to have a family. I can only imagine.”

“Well, getting a family is actually where the trouble started,” Adam said.“What do you mean?”

“One day, when we were nine, Amelia and I found out that a foster family wanted to take us in. I guess based on our school records—neither of us ever got in trouble—we were an appealing pair. So, three weeks later, we packed up to go live with the Dawsons. They seemed nice enough.

They had three kids of their own, two boys and a girl, aged eleven, thirteen, and fifteen. Instead of calling themselves “the Dawsons,” they referred to themselves as “The Family,” and talked constantly about what was expected to be part of “The Family.” I guess we should have realized that was weird, but at the time we were so happy to have someone want us, you know, that we didn’t think anything of it.”

Adam took a deep breath. He was conscious of how much he was talking and worried that Lisa would lose interest. But she was still looking at him intently.

“Anyway, within a few days the niceness stopped and The Family started to ignore Amelia and me. They weren’t mean; they just ignored us. They didn’t buy us new clothes, didn’t offer to help with anything. We found out later that Mr. Dawson, who was an insurance salesman, had a serious online gambling problem and had lost a lot of money. They had taken us in because it was a huge tax break that essentially offset his gambling debts.