A lot of technology that we think is about communicating more, or communicating better, is really about communicating less. The telephone took the place of calling in person; phone conversations are shorter. Emails are short, often terse, versions of letters. Our texts and tweets are shorter still. And now that we maintain contact with the rest of the world via the “like” button, our communications are entirely wordless.

What’s the next step?

The Enterprise - 29

Neil was pissed. He called a meeting, all the execs (minus Sam), the team leads, plus me and David. Sales, dev, creative, marketing and operations. Judy and Bill were to call in from out west. He included links to some of the more provocative user session transcripts in his e-mailed invite and noted that he wanted these to serve as a "kickoff point" for a brainstorming session to "determine lessons learned," "adapt to new realities" and "establish best strategies moving forward." He remained standing even as the rest of us were seated.

"Did everyone take a look at the links I sent?" he began.

We nodded and murmured our assent. Neil made a brusque gesture of his open hand, signaling impatience.

"And?" he demanded.

A few seconds of silence ensued.

"Anyone have anything to say about it?"

Finally Bob spoke up. "It's interesting."

"Interesting?! What kind of a goddamned thing to say is that?"

Bob smirked and twiddled his pencil.

"Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone wanna tell me why I'm just a little concerned about our user base? Anyone?"

Dennis, our amiable and ingenuous COO, spoke up from his seat in the back of the room.

"They struck me as a little bit rude, Neil."

We agreed, thankful that someone had confronted the question at last. We looked hopefully at our leader.

"And why the fuck are they rude, Dennis? Why?"

Dennis grimaced and recoiled into a helpless shrug.

"Can't anyone in this room tell m–"

Just then Judy's voice crackled through the tricorn phone. "Neil? Neil? Neil?"

"Judy?" Neil responded, leaning over with his hands on the table. Debbie was visible behind him, poking her camera around his shoulder. Its lens ranged over us like the snout of a predatory beast.

"I don't know what everyone's observing on your side," Judy began diplomatically, "but my takeaway is that our audience skews young."

Neil stood straight back up and launched a volley of sarcastic applause.

"Thank you Judy. Thank you." Then he addressed us all again. "That wasn't too goddamn hard, was it? Do you all understand what Judy is saying here?"

"Our demographic is young?" piped in Derek.

"THEY'RE KIDS!" howled Neil. "THEY ARE FUCKING KIDS! For Christ's Jesus sake."

"Well, of course they're kids," Tom rejoined bravely.

"Of course they're kids?!"

"They are early adopters of technology, man."

"That's it," chimed Bob.

Neil shook his head incredulously and emitted a coarse, unhappy chuckle.

"Guys, guys, people: they are early adopters of shit."
"But Neil, kids are on the leading edge of texting, of instant messaging," Cindy noted.

"They're on the leading edge of profanity, Cindy," Neil groaned. "They are pioneers on the frontier of vulgarity. They are the explorers of the scatological depths. They are–what do you call it? In the caves?"

"Spelunkers," I offered.

"Spelunkers. Thank you, Paul. They are spelunkers in the ass of our culture."

"I dunno, Neil," Bob insisted. "The kids of today are the adults of tomorrow." He looked around for some support. "Am I right?"

"Bob. Did you read the transcripts?"

Bob sighed and bowed his head. We all knew Neil was right.

"Question: How the fuck do we monetize this? Excuse me. Sorry." Neil closed his eyes and drew a breath. "Rephrase that: How do we monetize this? I'm serious. I'm all ears."

After a sad lull, Bob responded: "Let's instruct them to find their mother's purses, take out the credit card."

A ripple of dark laughter traversed the room.

"Type the digits into the little window. Please? Kid?"

"And the expiration date," added Derek.

"The expiration date. Four digits always," said Bob.

"We'll need the full name as it appears on the card," Cindy added.

"Mrs. Whatever. Whoever Whatever. Your mom's full goddamned name, kid."

"Mrs. Mommy Mom," I said.

"The special code on the back," David noted. "Three-digit code."

"Three or four depending," Bob corrected. "American Express."

We all were laughing hard. I looked up at Neil. He was laughing too. At least for now.

The Enterprise - 28

I'd managed to leave my last job for this one rather than get laid off, which would soon have been my fate. It was another Web startup, Riot.com, founded by a few American ex-pats in Budapest in the mid- to late-nineties and transplanted to New York City when it caught wind in the first boom.

Its arc was emblematic of the era: a few friends – smart, young, ambitious – intertwine their fates, breaking down the barriers between work and play, between the professional and the personal. They observe sweatshop hours, they drink and fuck, they snowball-fight in the cobbled streets of a medieval city recently liberated from Soviet rule. Soon strangers are hired, strangers much like themselves but strangers nonetheless. Some are American, some Hungarian. Most are agreeable. Some less so. One has body odor and carries his belongings in a backpack everywhere. All are integrated into the fold. They are called upon to believe that the world is changing; that they are agents of its change; that they shall inherit it, too.

Like magic one day, an intrepid and visionary investor rained millions of dollars upon the venture. Its holding company came to be traded on the Vienna Stock Exchange. The headquarters were relocated to a vast space on Broadway just below Prince, with shiny wood floors. Satellite offices opened in London, Chicago, San Francisco.

What did this company produce? Games. Not graphically sophisticated first-person shooters, adventures or races, but rather trivia games of various configurations. Short ones, long ones. Individual player. Multi-player. Music trivia. TV, sports. History. True or false, multiple choice. All of the above. I was hired to write the questions.

When I arrived in 1999 the office had just moved from SoHo to the garment district, from retail to wholesale, to 35th Street, in the workaday shadow-realm between Penn Station and Times Square. The reason for this was its acquisition of, merger with, or acquisition by another concern that specialized in one thing: prizes. They awarded shiny merchandise to anyone who lingered long enough on their site, clicking around, absorbing brand impressions. You could collect points and bid them on a mousepad, a travel alarm, six Omahan filet mignons in dry ice. The executives and boards of both companies agreed there were tremendous synergetic opportunities here. Huge upside. Big gestalt. Their union seemed to be written in the stars.

The first order of business was to merge the two databases of tens of millions of registered users. Engineers with thick accents were flown over from Hungary to evaluate exigencies, examine risks, model schemas and perform test runs. Shouts were often audible from behind the conference room door. An atmosphere of solemn purpose permeated the office, as one might find at NASA ground control or Allied Headquarters in the weeks before D-Day. I kept my head down. Wrote the trivia.

By November, a site redesign had been launched to decidedly mixed reviews from both inside and out. Millions were spent on an ad campaign: national television, radio, billboards, digital. The TV spot featured a group of businessmen in suits busting out of prison and running jubilantly through a field, doing cartwheels, tearing off their ties and hurling their briefcases into a pond. No allusion was made anywhere to the purpose or even the characteristics of the site. The company also underwrote a backmarking team in the CART open-wheel racing series. One morning on my way to work I was jolted from my sleepy stupor to find our name and slogan – "There's a riot going on!" – adorning the side of the bus I was to ride.

The combined company grew bigger still. One day in December, a global e-mail announced that, moving forward, we would all be required to share our cubicles. My mate was a female database manager from India who smiled shyly and spoke halting, fractured English. She reported to the CTO, a Chinese wiz known as Dr. Bill. He came around periodically to bark out instructions in his own stilted syntax. "Prepare user geography distribution statistics for analysis! Column here! Column B! B!" Then he'd wander off and she'd poke around her screen for a couple of hours. It appeared to me that she never understood a word of Bill's commands. Then she'd speak to her husband on the phone for fifteen minutes, put on her coat, and leave with a smile and a wave goodbye.

A public offering on the NASDAQ exchange was scheduled for early 2000. It happened that a week beforehand, the market, which heretofore had emerged as the newest wonder of the world, magnificent and ever glorious, had plunged by about ten percent. The new president of the company, Jeff Travis, gathered everyone in the unoccupied tenth floor of the building for a pep talk. All was well, he said. Evidently he and the CEO and COO had been on a dog and pony show, lining up investors around the globe. Pension funds, mutual funds. Hedge funds. A spendthrift Arab prince. "We're gonna get there," he said. "Keep doing the great work that you're doing."

I chanced upon the three executives on my way out of the elevator one evening as they returned from a few days on the road. Their spooked, ashen faces gave the impression that they'd each, in turn, tiptoed to the edge of the abyss and taken long, pensive looks into its darkest reaches.

Many of us participated in the pre-IPO reserved for employees and other privileged parties. The strike price was thirty-four dollars per share. I threw in, I don't know, five thousand dollars. I even roped in a friend of mine to do the same. I parried his doubts about the investment with something like this: People will always love trivia. But something didn't feel right on the big day. We all observed the price obsessively. It twitched up to thirty-five then slid slowly over the course of the afternoon, settling at thirty-two something. I remembered some fine print somewhere about a twenty-four-hour grace period. I phoned the Merrill Lynch broker who was in charge of our accounts and canceled my bid. The following day, the stock tumbled another five points. Within a month it was trading in the low single digits.

A round of layoffs soon came, followed by another a few weeks later. The second took my own boss, Margaret, a fastidious and demanding editor with decades of experience. Finally we remained a patchy crew, barely able to keep the site updated. We devoted ourselves desperately to the slightest revenue-generating hope. Most were dashed as advertisers pulled out of deals and partners closed shop.

There was a methadone clinic next door. As the weather warmed, junkies sometimes lay passed out against the wall, legs splayed like they'd been shot.

Most nights, we'd gather after work at the wood-paneled Irish bar on the corner, making dark little jokes about the way things were.

The company was sold again, on the cheap, to a direct marketing billionaire. He installed his dour, headstrong, imbecilic son, who appeared to be about twenty-three years old, as chief executive of the dying operation. They picked our bones and declared that virtually everyone would be laid off come September. I was told I'd keep my rum ration if I stayed aboard the sinking ship until the last mast disappeared into the sea. I got my new job instead.

The Enterprise - 27

Though we had no money coming in, the Product appeared to be resonating with a certain audience. At long last Tony, the operations guy out west, provided to us a simple reporting interface where we could track usage and even scrutinize individual user sessions.

The traffic growth was thrilling to observe. It burbled in the single and low double digits in the weeks around the soft launch - mostly reflecting the false activity of internal testing. Then it spiked one day - 347! Three hundred and forty-seven. Such a hopeful number. Expansive. A fat and happy number. Looking at it was like watching the sun burst through the clouds. It seemed to signify nothing less than the approbation of the cold and fickle world outside. From that momentous day on it kept rising in fits and starts, sometimes modestly, sometimes in bewildering leaps. Weekends seemed particularly busy, as were the hours from about 3 pm to dinnertime.

When you clicked the link for each day's total users you descended a level deeper to find transcripts of each session. There they all were, uniquely identified by long strings of random letters and numbers; mysterious, authentic, the surreptitious record of every interaction everyone had ever had with it. The Product. There were thousands of them, page after page after page. You had the feeling you'd stumbled upon a new world. Except it was your world all along.

I clicked a link. Here's what it showed:

Input: faggot
Output: Hello! I'm pleased to meet you. How may I help you?

Input: faggot
Output: That's a bad word. I know about sports! Ask me for the latest scores.

Input: faggot faggot faggot faggot faggot
Output: You really do have a foul mouth. Would you like to play a game?

Input: DIE FAGGOT DIE
Output: That's not a particularly nice thing to say.

I clicked another.

Input: sexy
Output: Hello! I'm pleased to meet you. How may I help you?

Input: ur sexy
Output: That's an interesting thing to say.

Input: thas cuz i m inrested in fukking u
Output: Me?

Input: fuckk my rear
Output: Your what?

Input: i wan u 2 stik ur metal cock n my ass
Output: You want me to what your what? I can show you news and weather.

Input: fuk me u HOTT ROBOT
Output: That's very flattering, but I'm not in the mood right now. Would you like to use my dictionary?

I looked over a few more. With few exceptions, the interactions tended to gravitate closely around either of two themes: highly profane abuse – often savagely racist and/or homophobic – and extremely explicit petitions for sex. In many cases both were present in a single interaction.

The Enterprise - 25 - What Goes Through Your Mind?

"What goes through your mind?" howled biz dev Lisa from the middle of the floor. She was brandishing the day's New York Times high above her head. "What goes through your mind?!"

We looked up at her mutely, hands prone over our keyboards.

"What goes through your mind when you get off the elevator?" She gazed around at us lividly. "When you get off the elevator every damn morning and you step over the goddamned newspaper without picking it up?!"

Had I ever even seen it, at the threshold? And if I had, what did I think? I searched my conscience. Vaguely, I remembered noticing it once. If I was at all tempted to pick it up it was covetously – that shameful, queasy feeling you get when you see something of value unattended. The infantile impulse to take. But not me. I'm a civilized man. I know the line between what's mine and what's not mine. That's not my news. I tiptoed around it as if it were a sleeping baby. And never gave it another thought. Eventually, it now occurred to me, I no longer saw it at all.

"Well think next time!" Lisa demanded, and released the Times so it fell flat on the floor with a thwap! She paused briefly, hands akimbo, then brusquely turned away with a sigh of disgust. The paper remained there, conspicuous, accusatory, for the remainder of the day, the guileless smile of the newly installed George W. Bush somehow serving as a reproach.

This was the day of our first Christmas party, for which an entire Mexican restaurant had been rented for the evening. David had recommended the place. He knew someone who ran it, or owned it, or tended bar. Something.

"Did I tell you guys about the mango margaritas?" he asked from his partition.

"Yes," answered Steve.

"You have to try the mango margaritas."

Sam was in the office for the occasion. I spotted him sitting crosslegged on the floor between Julie and Lisa. A few others had gathered around him, some sitting on desks, some leaning on cubicle walls. They listened intently, nodding, laughing when they were meant to laugh, looking down at him with veneration.

"I think we can take on the big providers!" Sam proclaimed. "We are in possession of a media property. We can take on the Disneys, we can take on the AOLs. Don't think we can't!"

Nods all around.

"Content consumption is changing," he continued. "We're the leading edge. I'm telling you." He peered over his glasses and fixed his audience with a pointed stare. "And you are the team that's going to make it happen!"

A flurry of self-conscious giggles rippled through the gallery.

"I'm not kidding. Don't sell yourselves short! You're the ones. You're the ones right here, right now. This time – now – belongs to you!"

The impromptu lecture ended with more nods, smiles and coos of agreement. Finally everyone returned to their desks and Sam continued to wander the room, joking, backslapping, dropping to a knee for an earnest interaction with this or that employee. He only ever entered his office to put on his coat to leave.

We walked to the restaurant in loose groups reflecting a combination of team affiliation, desk proximity and other, vaguer kinship. When the cold air struck outside it suddenly seemed inappropriate, unprofessional even, to discuss work. Jokes were made. Our language drifted further into the vernacular, sometimes the profane. We were intoxicated ahead of our inebriation.

In the warm glow of the restaurant, decorated by Christmas lights and tinsel, everyone looked different. There was something open, unprotected, in their faces.

The expense of a DJ had not been spared for the occasion. He worked his turntables diligently, holding one side of his headphones to his ear, and selected deliberately from crates containing hundreds upon hundreds of records. He had the sober bearing of someone who worked in life-or-death; an anaesthesiologist, an airline pilot. Boom! Bap! Boom! Bap! went the music. Some swayed shyly on the periphery of the floor. Only Neil and his wife danced, a bit imperiously, and awkwardly, adapting a North Jersey two-step to the hip hop. From the speakers, a command alternated with a warning: Shake ya ass! But watch yaself!

People drank, and laughed, and, red-faced, shouted into each other's ears above the din. Is this who they all really were? Or were they now somebody else?

Sam called everyone to the bar for a toast. He raised his glass and saluted us all for our efforts, assuring us that success and its glorious rewards were well within reach. He toasted the West Coast team in absentia. And then he remembered something else he had to say, something more important yet.

"One other thing. Can I make sure I have everyone's attention? Everyone?"

The room quieted down.

"I want to make sure we celebrate the incredibly hard work of Brett Morgan. He gave so much to bring us where we are today."

I turned to Tom and whispered, "Is he dead?"

"No, no," Tom replied quickly.

"Brett, wherever you are right now," Sam continued, gazing at an arbitrary point on the pressed-tin ceiling as though he'd located Brett's astral body, "know that we are thinking of you."

"Is he locked up in a mental home?" I asked Tom.

"No, no, no."

"Then what?"

Tom made that grimace I would come to know so well. "He's taking a little time off."

"Cheers, Brett. Get well," Sam concluded solemnly, and we all raised our glasses, in silence this time, and drank again.

The Enterprise - 20

Brett lurched across the floor one morning, grabbed an empty chair, swiveled it around and sat facing me.

"Sex," he stated.

"Hmm?"

"Sex!"

"What about it?"

"Exactly! What about it?"

"Yeah?"

"I type in 'sex.' How does the application respond?"

"I see."

"I see?"

"No, I see. The application, let's see, I mean, uh..."

"What does it say when someone says 'sex'?"

"Right."

"Because that's the first goddamn thing everyone's gonna say to it."

"Probably."

"It might not be the sort of thing you pick up in Judy's fucking usability testing. But trust me."

"I suppose you're right."

"Faced with a blank screen. A keyboard. People are gonna type S-E fucking X."

"People are predictable. We're in the business of predicting people."

"It's the first and the last thing on everyone's goddamned mind." He gave a sly smile. "You know what's everything in between, of course."

"In between sex?"

"Death."

"Death. Wow."

"Death is the other thing."

"Yeah. I don't know how we sh–"

"We got death covered already."

"We do?"

"Someone says, 'I want to kill myself.' What do we say? In your opinion."

"Don't do it? There's so much to live for?"

Brett closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Please type your zip code and I will provide you with the phone number for the nearest suicide prevention hotline?"

He shook his head a little harder. "Nope."

"Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Someone says they want to kill themselves. We say nothing."

"We change the subject? We present the home screen?"

"Nope. Nope. Nothing."

"We say nothing? In other words, we don't say anything?"

"Precisely," he stated, satisfied.

"Blank screen?"

"Empty space."

"Wouldn't that constitute a tacit endorsement?"

Brett shrugged. "Lawyers told us."

"Lawyers?"

"They examined the question and determined that in order to fully protect ourselves from any conceivable liability, we should go dark."

I pondered this a moment.

"So forget about death. Sex."

"Right, so–"

"So what does it say?"

"What does it say?"

"The application. I came over, I sat down. I said 'sex.' What do you say?"

"That's very interesting."

"Really? Interesting."

"What an interesting thing to say."

Brett thought it over for a little while.

"I like it."

And so I began writing my first domain. The Sex domain.

The Enterprise - 17

My friend Mike from back in Connecticut had a big idea of his own. I went down to his apartment, a creaky industrial loft in Chinatown, after work one Tuesday. The space was spare, with splintering floors, a computer, a hammock strung from wall to wall. Several sixteen-millimeter Russian windup cameras were stacked in a corner. He had an angle on them from some ex-pat named Boris. He bought them cheap, fiddled with the insides so they'd work a little better, sell them to NYU film students. This wasn't the big idea.

There were four of us in at first, besides Mike. There was Adam, from back home too. There was Jim, one of our circle in the city. There was Evan, a bleary-eyed doctor friend of Mike's. We gathered in folding chairs in a circle around nothing. As Mike began his pitch, a dull, rapid pounding emanated from beyond the ceiling. Though it was rhythmic it was not musical. It was relentless and oppressive, the beating heart of a great mechanical beast.

"What is that?" I interrupted.

"That's the sweatshop. The sewing machines."

"When does it stop?"

"Never. Well, sometimes. But mostly never."

Gradually, haltingly, Mike outlined his plan. It seemed sensible. He wanted to build an online interface too – a video player, specifically, tricked up with features and controls – through which people might learn languages. We asked him what we imagined to be wise and diligent questions: What's the business model? What's the exit strategy? He offered few answers.

"I'm going to need some money," he declared.

We each pledged thousands of dollars in exchange for shares in this vaporous endeavor. We did it automatically, dutifully. Not one of us considered not buying in. Certainly not if the next guy was. It would have seemed contrary to the spirit of the gathering. It would have seemed rude.

I was certain the enterprise was doomed.

We made plans to meet again and parted under the robotic throbbing of the machines.

The Enterprise - 16

The application – the Product – could be conceived of as an assemblage of subject areas – domains – within which content was aggregated from one or more sources. It was unclear to me who had devised this breakdown, and on what basis. Had there been market research? Focus groups? At first it seemed that the subject areas had arisen organically, by some collective intuition. It then grew clear that more prosaic factors were at play: The availability of content. The cost. The degree to which deploying it as a new domain within the Product would turn into a goddamned pain in the ass.

In the Product as it stood you could, among other things, get your horoscope for today or search words and phrases in the Holy Bible.

Each developer under Brett was in charge of one or more domains. These had been distributed according to some combination of interest, proclivity and seniority. Sports belonged to Kevin and his sidekick Jim. Movies to Julie. News to Rob. Stock quotes fell to Peter, games to Lucy. Each fiefdom was defended with wary pride. They were all, perhaps, a little bigger than they had to be. More complex. For there was an unspoken competition to lay claim to the most end-user requests and session time, statistics that were scrupulously culled, parsed and displayed each day on an internal reporting site. The traffic to one's domain became a measure of the self.

The developers became adept at using little tricks to exploit the algorithm at the heart of the Product. Liberties were taken in the definition of synonymous words and phrases. Dubious predicates and key words were added. Matching scores crept up. The entire department existed in a state of cold war over language. Not over meaning – at the expense of meaning, really. Over raw language.

There was a rolling whiteboard in the middle of the room, beside an island of cubicles. On it, Brett had listed guidelines to remember in red:

1. Synonyms. Did you think of every fucking synonym? Add synonyms!!
2. Predicates. Check the score of your predicates. Is your predicate too sticky?? TEST!!
3. Matching. Add alternations! Add optionals! Does every query you can think of match?? WHY THE FUCK NOT!?
4. Ambiguity. RESOLVE AMBIGUITY.
5. Last but not least: Does your domain suck? Ask yourself. MAKE SURE YOUR DOMAIN DOES NOT SUCK!!!
6. See #5!!!

At first I lived on the periphery of this world, making occasional, meek requests for copy changes. I had no programming skills, after all. I was on the creative team, the builders of images and concepts. I was not meant to get dirty. But the editorial process was absurd. I'd write up and format a Word document, send it to the right person. They'd have to lift their heads out of their code long enough to tediously copy and paste my edits. So Brett and Bob agreed to give me access to the web-based domain editor, a mostly foolproof tool, with the understanding that I was only to touch the output.

I deleted a word. And another. I deleted a sentence. I wrote a new one. I saved the file. It was queued for production.

The Enterprise - 14

The clock had counted down and read zero for a few days now. Weeks, maybe. It was hard to keep track without its steady, reassuring decrementation. The bright-red digits saying: There's still time. Or: It will happen soon. Depending on your point of view.

I stood beside Bob's desk as he reviewed a hardcopy of my website edits.

"The clock's at zero," I remarked.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. Yeah," he replied, and looked back down at the marked-up pages.

"Are we going to reset it to something?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Isn't zero when we launch?"

"Zero came and went."

"We launched? The Product?"

Bob grimaced and rolled his head from side to side. "Not exactly. Sort of."

"Did we blast off into space?"

"The current strategy is to soft-launch," he said.

"When's the soft launch?"

"Super-soft."

"But did it happen? Or is it going to happen?"

He sighed. "It's happening right now."

I looked around us. The office was enveloped in the characteristic hush of digital industry, everybody seated, pointing, clicking. Occasionally a desk phone emitted a soft, electronic burble.

"Really?"

"The idea is to let the Product seep into the world rather than to inject it. It's more authentic that way. It's organic. The virality should really benefit."

I nodded.

"It's a known strategy," he continued. "I think it's Japanese. Possibly Finnish."

"Seeping?"

"Not sure what they call it. And plus, the feeling at the tippy-top was that the Product is not ready. You didn't hear it from me."

"The feeling out west?"

"The feeling out west. Back east, too."

I stared at the expired clock and pondered it all.

"We did change our name. I'm working on a new logo for the business cards. By the way, they're going to need you to weigh in on the press release. Cindy's going to reach out to you tomorrow morning."

"Prizm? With a Z?" I asked.

"No. Our lawyers did some investigating and there's a conflict with some fucking consulting company. Probably not a big issue but they judged it to be imprudent."

"So what's our name?"

"Intracto."

"Intracto," I repeated.

The Enterprise - 12

You get a special feeling in San Francisco. It's airy and isolated, impervious to the dreary ailments of other cities. I cannot imagine a wisp of trash blowing in its streets. As we approached it from the south dusk fell upon it gently, like a hallowing.

It probably didn't hurt that the place was inundated with capital.

David had wanted to rent a motorcycle, ride it into the hills and up and down the PCH. I don't know. I contemplated what an afternoon at The Prison might feel like, drifting into evening and finally, night. The microwave food. The cheap booze. The pornography. Time distending, collapsing into silence. Is that what I wanted? It was almost what I wanted.

But for all his enthusiasm David was frustrated in his quest. And so now we found ourselves parking the rental on Haight Street, two guys on a detour from business, anonymous, without a purpose.

The sidewalk was peopled with what appeared to be runaway kids. It was impossible not to think back to the so-called Summer of Love. That's what everyone thought about when they thought about this street, even those who weren't alive in '67. Especially them. For myth has greater power over those who did not witness fact.

A scrawny boy with spiky black hair and a face both acne-scarred and studded approached us, hand outstretched.

"Gimme some money," he demanded.

"Why?" I asked.

"Fuck you."

He walked with us for another fifteen feet or so, hand still out, as though the interaction so far had been perfectly normal and might well result in the dispensing of a dollar or two. I glimpsed his girl behind us, by the wall. She wore a wild tangle of dreadlocks, a lip ring, a granny dress, nothing on her feet. She clutched a trembling dog and kissed him between the ears. Finally her boy broke away and returned to her.

We pressed on, nowhere to go but forward, nothing to do but this. We wandered in and out of bookstores and cafés, their entranceways festooned with calls to demonstrate for this and that, against the other thing. The neighborhood itself seemed to be a living bulletin board. Behind the latest tract was last year's; and behind that one, the year before's. No one ever bothered to throw anything out. It'd be disrespectful. Or worse yet: negative. Nihilistic. The anarchy flyer's OK, just don't tear anything down, man. If you have a new idea, pin it on the past. And any surface that wasn't covered had absorbed the smoke of all the fires it had seen: peace marches, feminism, black power, animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights, whatever. You could drill out a sample like a scientist, read the history of our time.

We had a drink at a tall-ceilinged, decrepit bar.

"Now what?" said David.

"I don't know."

We sat in silence for a while longer.

"Let's drive around," I said.

"OK."

We drove to the Presidio and stopped where a street took a right angle to the right and straight ahead the earth just fell away. In the distance was the Bay. We parked the car and got out and walked down the steps, the Lyon Street Steps, shouldered by ornate, shuttered Venetian-style homes with terra cotta roofs. It was all beautiful and precious and I wondered what it would be like to be one of these joggers, rich, healthy San Francisco people, running up and down the steps and stretching against the stone walls of the garden.

David had gone to Berkeley and lived there after graduating. He wanted to drive by his old haunts, the Greek Theatre, the old chemistry building. We ate at the most famous and expensive place in town, a legendary bastion of locally sourced and seasonal cuisine. We spent lavishly.

"I think the first thing the user needs to do is type 'home,'" said David between bites of mesclun.

"I agree," I replied.

"If they don't see the home screen right away, they have no idea as to the scope of functionality."

"Clearly."

"If they don't type 'home,' we should force them to type 'home.'"

"How?"

"Deliver a message. Telling them they should have typed 'home.' Type 'home' now. Please."

"No matter what they typed?"

David nodded.

"I'm not sure I agree."

After dinner we drove back across the Bay Bridge. We sat at another bar, a posh one this time. Ornate and old-timey. Might've been a literary haunt some time ago, or might've been  made to look like one. Some of the ritziest bars in the world are the ones where broke writers used to drink. David had expected some old friends to be there. We drank expensive and pretentious martini-style cocktails. Nobody came.

Finally, there was nothing left to do but cross the Golden Gate. Up in the hills beyond it lay Marin, home of rich musicians, artists, free thinkers of privilege and means. I wondered what it might feel like to cross this bridge at the end of every day.

As soon as we arrived on the other side we pulled in to the vista lot and turned around.

The Enterprise - 11

"The sensei is a friend of a friend," Bill declared. "We let him come in and use a computer sometimes."

"And he gives lessons in return?" asked David.

Bill nodded. "I think he's homeless."

Conversation quieted for a few minutes and our attentions drifted to the television, where a bicolored mosaic crept across the national map from east to west, favoring red. We balanced paper plates of takeout Chinese on our knees as Bill's little boy and girl ran around smacking into things and scaling the furniture.

We were in a ranch-style house on a tiny patch of grass beside a busy street, near a vast and gleaming shopping mall. Bill volunteered that the place had cost one point two million dollars.

"Did you enjoy it?" Bill asked.

"What?" I replied.

"The sword training. Audrey! Come here!"

We made favorable sounds and expressions.

"It's my team-building exercise!" he beamed.

Later, back at The Prison, I lay on the stiff bed clutching a flask of scotch. Things were getting weird in the election. Al Gore had called George Bush to retract his concession. It was not immediately clear whether Bush understood the meaning of the word "retract." Florida had been declared but now was back in play. I drifted off to sleep to the increasingly surreal metaphors of Dan Rather, sounding like a drunk Mark Twain.

The following day we concluded our testing, the final user exiting after having provided the same ingenuous and anodyne feedback as practically all the others. We sat with everyone for a midafternoon conference call with New York. The contested election shadowed every conversation. Someone put up CNN on the projection screen and we watched the gap in the tally narrow by the minute.

It was early Wednesday afternoon and we had nowhere to go, nothing to do.

The Enterprise - 10

We checked in to the sad little hotel across from the office, a distressed outpost from another time, from when people did not come to town to tinker with machines but passed through to hike the Russian Ridge, maybe. Or God knows what. To escape on a doomed tryst with the secretary. To light out for the desert with a body in the trunk. It was inappropriate, it would seem, to the bright-shiny character of our endeavors, to say nothing of our cozy sense of privilege. So we chose to laugh about it: the nickname for the Pacific Inn was The Prison. If you were going to spend a few nights out west, it was said you were going to prison. One of the rooms – you'd have to be awfully unlucky to get it – was equipped with a Murphy bed.

Dinner was a selection of plastic-wrapped burritos, stacked beside the microwave. The yellow one, the red. The jumbo for the bigger appetites. Atop the microwave sat a Mr. Coffee machine with a perpetual pot, darkening by the hour. The Styrofoam cups were stacked up beside the sugar and the Sweet 'n' Low, the half-and-half, the Coffee-Mate. You were free to help yourself anytime of the day or night.

The following day was Tuesday, November seventh, the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I'd voted days before in Manhattan, dutifully filling out my absentee ballot on Varick. Still, of all possible days, it seemed peculiar that on this one we should find ourselves across the country, about to scrutinize a series of strangers as they interacted with the fruit of our labors.

The Sunnyvale branch was predominantly hardcore technical: guys who didn't see much light of day, who were involved with the Product at the seabed level: where it was darkest, coldest, forbiddingly dense. The New York office was full of salespeople, business developers, designers and the like, people accustomed to looking each other square in the eye and smiling.

Of course it wasn't that simple. There was a bit of the West Coast in the East. There was a bit of the East Coast in the West. There were aspects of the people themselves that you couldn't readily see.

The office itself was located at an intersection, on the ground floor of a dismal commercial building that also housed a roster of utterly prosaic small-town concerns: an accountant, a lawyer, a distributor of medical supplies. Behind the glass door lay a jumble of desks, computers, computer parts and idiosyncratic personal effects. Judy appeared from her office in the back and introduced us to whoever happened to be around: the joyless and matronly office manager, Nancy; an enormously obese programmer, Nick; the genial Frenchman Jacques and his introverted echo Julien, and finally, the famous Bill, officially the CTO but really just the famous Bill.

Judy took us to the conference room and introduced us to Lisa, from Interim Consulting Services. Lisa was attractive, officious, a little bit distracted. She had a file folder open before her containing several documents and pages of handwritten notes. A keyboard and monitor were set up at the empty head of the table.

"Lisa will be facilitating the usability study," Judy declared.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I'll be asking the questions," said Lisa.

"What are we going to do?"

"I want you guys to observe," said Judy. "Note-take. I'll be asking for your thoughts later. Thoughts and impressions. They'll be invaluable as we take on board the feedback, reassess and reconfigure."

"So we sit. And watch?" asked David.

"Watch."

"Where?"

"Over here, if you like," said Lisa. "Or over there."

"Right where you're sitting now is OK," said Judy. "Is that OK, Lisa?"

"That's fine. That's OK."

For the entire morning and the better part of the afternoon, men and women, mostly young, perhaps recently unemployed, paraded in and took their turns in the seat of honor. They examined the screen with alacrity, eager to please, or at least to satisfy.

A rather large tray of catered snacks was on offer on the credenza: brownies, petit fours, cookies, strawberries, sliced melon. It remained largely untouched.

"What might you type, do you think, at this point?" was the first question Lisa would ask, or a variation thereof.

"I don't know," some replied, frankly flummoxed.

Others might meekly, tentatively key in an overture: "Hello." "Hi." "What is this?"

"Were you at all inclined to type 'home'?"

"Oh!" they'd reply, like chastened pupils. Or: "No." "I don't know."

"Type 'home.'"

They did as they were told and the interaction continued, sometimes veering into vexing dead ends, sometimes concluding more or less happily, it would appear.

"There!" Lisa would exclaim.

A bashful smile from the user.

"Do you think this is an experience you might be interested in having again?" she asked. Or: "Would you tell other people about this if it were available? Family? Friends?"

"Oh yes," was the inevitable reply. "Yeah. Definitely." And if any cookies were eaten it was on the way out.

It was only midafternoon, and we had arrived at the end of Day 1. Judy led us in an impromptu debrief after Lisa had packed up her notes and folders and left.

"I wasn't too happy with the quality of the usability testers today, guys."

We murmured vague noises of assent.

"I didn't say anything to Lisa but I will. Do you realize how much we're paying for this?"

We smiled and nodded, allowing the question to be rhetorical. Just then Bill walked over with some urgency.

"Training time, guys! Take your swords."

He handed each of us a practice Japanese samurai sabre, a sinister-looking, gently curving wooden object that seemed only marginally less lethal than its steel analog.

"Everybody out in the parking lot!" yelled Bill as he strode through the main room clutching his sword. "Practice time!"

The programmers stood up creakily, stretched, and took up arms as well. Soon we were all out back, between the dumpster and the cars, standing in traditional dojo formation before a bald sensei clad in a flowing, black robe.

"Transfer your swords!" he barked.

The others dutifully moved their swords from left hand to right and held them stiffly at the opposite hip, as though they rested in a sheath. I stood in the back, fumblingly imitating them.

"Pair up!"

Everyone found a partner and stood ten paces or so apart. Mine was Nick, the tremendously obese programmer. His face bore an expression of solemn concentration and a faint sheen of sweat.

"You'll get the hang of it," he said. "Just watch what I do."

"Does everyone remember the kata from last week?" demanded the sensei. "New people: pay attention!"

He grabbed Bill from the front row and demonstrated a series of swift, cutting motions, each time bringing the tip of his sword hard and fast to within a few inches of Bill's neck.

"Yoko giri! Side cut!" he exclaimed. This time he swung his sword laterally and halted it beside Bill's pudgy abdomen. "The objective is to slice your opponent in half like a ripe fruit. Cut briskly and cleanly, without mercy! You must be completely dedicated to your strike. Hesitate for a moment and your opponent–" the sensei grabbed Bill's wrist and forced it upwards, the sword hanging high overhead in a chopping position – "will come down on the top of your skull with one hundred percent commitment and cut you to the core."

He broke away from Bill and turned toward the class, his every movement self-consciously fluid, ritualized. His posture was immaculate.

"Your turn!" he shouted at us.

Nick and I came at each other haltingly, deliberately, and positioned our weapons in the prescribed manner. I brought mine down over his skull; he parried as instructed. I had the feeling of participating in a staid, courtly dance.

Suddenly the sensei was behind me. He pulled back my shoulders and oriented me directly ahead.

"Face your opponent! Face your opponent!"

"Right, right, right," I said.

"He wants to cut you to ribbons!"

"I know."

"The kesa giri is like casting a fishing line. Try it! Try it!"

I pulled the sword over my head and brought it down in what I imagined to be a clean and graceful manner.

"No! No! No! No! No!" shouted the instructor.

Again he grabbed my shoulders, then my hips, my elbows, my hand, my wrists, and again my shoulders, shaping me and shaping me again, as though I were made of uncompliant putty.

"Don't force the blade."

"OK."

"Don't force the blade!"

"Got it."

"Let it fall. Let the blade do the work."

"I see."

"It's very sharp! Trust the sharpness. Trust the blade!"

"Yup."

"Move quickly, decisively. Bring the blade down through Nick's skull."

He grabbed my wrists and moved them for me, bringing the sword down with them.

"Collapse your wrist before the point of impact. Move your body through. Move your body through!"

I leaned far forward, holding the sword loosely with the tip in the vicinity of Nick's forehead. I was off balance and out of breath. I hoped desperately I would not fall over.

"Better. Better!"

"Thanks," I said, returning to the ready position.

"Chiburi!" the master howled.

"What?"

"Chiburi! The blade!"

"Hmm?"

"You've just cut clean through the body of another man."

"Yes?"

"Shake the blood off that blade before you sheath it!"

He took my wrists again and shook them up and down. The sword bobbed in the air a few times and we all imagined fat, crimson drops falling from it onto the tarmac.

"Good!" he declared, satisfied, and continued on his rounds.

Beyond the parking lot fence the Caltrain roared by, whistle blaring, on the way to San Francisco.

The Enterprise - 9

David and I had twenty minutes or so before our flight to San Francisco. I followed him up the stairs of the Continental departures terminal at Newark Airport.

"Let's go to the lounge!" he exclaimed like a child, and led me to the hushed and privileged sanctuary. We'd used our miles to upgrade to first class, at his insistence. An elegant woman welcomed us between the double doors and showed us in with a gracious bow.

Inside, we sat in silence at the bar. It was like any other airport bar. More or less. But you couldn't see out a window to look at any planes. I liked to look at the planes.

David's left leg fidgeted maniacally. He checked his watch.

"Guess we better get going!" he said.

We were on a mission to better understand our users. Or to better understand our product, as there were in fact no users yet. To understand what a prospective user might expect from the Product, such as it was. In anticipation of launch – with the shot clock in the lower twenties – an idea had been floated around senior management that David and I should fly out to assist in the conduct of a round of usability testing. We were at our desks on a conference call with them – Sam, Neil, Bill, Elaine and Judy, the West Coast-based Vice President of Product Development.

"We need some end users to poke some holes," Judy explained.

Mutters of approval and encouraging sentiments followed. Judy proposed a Tuesday and a Wednesday in early November, not two weeks away, and David and I were told to make plans.

Now we floated high above the Rockies in vast leather seats, warm nuts and whiskey arrayed on the wide flats of our armrests.

David drove us in the rental from the airport down Route 101 to Silicon Valley. As we approached our destination we gazed left and right at the gleaming industrial parks, immaculately landscaped, housing the intrepid startups that would still beat back against the season's dismal tide, repositories of vain aspirations and tragic dreams, some, perhaps, destined to be spared.

One of these companies was ours.

The Enterprise - 8

One day a man appeared in place of our regular masseuse. She was on vacation maybe, or had quit, or fled town; I don't know. But now there was a man. Young, slight, slender-fingered. The men in the office were nonplussed, almost indignant. Many did not respect their appointments, pretending instead to be so lost in work that they'd lost track of time.

Lucy took her turn as scheduled. When she walked back into the light of the workspace, past the metallic reaches of the sculpture, some perverse impulse must have struck her. Some mischievous idea. She walked to the far wall where Brett and Tom sat.

"That fucking dude touched my ass!" she declared.

"What?!" Brett replied, aghast.

Tom lept brusquely to his feet, his chair swiveling and rolling errantly across the glossy floor.

"He fucking did what? That motherfucker what?"

Tom and Brett were both up now, peering intently at the darkness down the hall.

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding!" Lucy protested.

"He fucking what?"

"I'm kidding! I'm kidding!"

The tumult ended in laughter and finally everyone was seated once again. Work resumed under the enormous countdown clock.

The Enterprise - 7

The year two thousand had begun auspiciously enough: when the clock struck midnight and the planes stayed in the sky, the grid kept humming and the burble of data crisscrossing the planet did not quiet, we all thought we had it made. A two followed by a zero followed by a zero followed by a zero! If you paused to think about it you might just lose your mind. It was the year two thousand for Christ's sake! We'd finally arrived in the long-promised future and it was magnificent, more than we'd imagined.

But a curious thing occurred before spring, even. A hiccup in the markets. A collective hesitation, as though someone had seen something that spooked them and everybody else reacted. An entire generation, ambitious and accustomed to success, tiptoed through the summer, hoping it had been a false alarm. This was our time, after all. The new millennium. How could we be doomed so soon?

That fall a second darkness encroached upon our days. Dot-com ventures were collapsing all around us, companies whose names were not long ago plastered on city buses, whose fresh-faced employees used to spill out on the streets at night, giddy and oblivious, and parade from bar to bar. They thought they'd stay young forever. Now they were packing their bags and riding the Peter Pan bus home.

We watched it all happen from our little enclave on 25th Street. By some dumb luck, Sam had secured our money very late in the game. We were swimming in it, still. Living the startup fantasy while our contemporaries' careers were devastated, their theoretical fortunes eclipsed. You could almost hear their wails of uncomprehending grief through the exposed brick walls of our hundred-year-old building.

In the meantime we were knee-deep in candy. Enormous bucketsful. Candy to make a child quake with desire. We had Sugar Daddies and Mary Janes. Jawbreakers, Necco Wafers, Gummi Bears. We had Bit-O-Honeys and Hot Tamales, Now & Laters, Lemonheads and Jolly Ranchers. Good & Plenty. Squirrel Nut Zippers and Root Beer Barrels. Tootsie Rolls, Atomic Fireballs and Zotz. It was all arrayed in psychedelic rows on the counter in the kitchenette. In the unlikely event that we ran out of something there were boxes and boxes and boxes stacked up higher than you could reach in the supply closet around the corner. What was it all for? I wondered. Surely it was not meant to be eaten. Were we trying to tell the world something about ourselves? To tell each other? This was the currency of our childhood: early indicators of wealth, privilege and pleasure. Was it there to remind us what we wanted?

Should you care for a beverage, Sam had arranged for the shipment of Coca-Cola in the iconic eight-ounce glass bottles from a distributor in Mexico at, it was said, substantial cost.

Every Tuesday we had a catered meal, sometimes every Wednesday too. Several cuisines were in rotation: Indian, Thai, Japanese. Grumbling was sometimes heard when one was expected but another provided.

Thursdays were massage day. If you signed up earlier in the week your travails would be punctuated by a half-hour of deep stroking and caressing by a cheery young woman. She'd set up in the morning in the reception area between the couches no one ever sat on, by the window overlooking 25th Street. She'd smile and indicate her table, a forbidding apparatus suggestive of a Guillotine, with a welcoming gesture of the hand and an instruction as to where to put your head.

The Enterprise - 6

The company was not limited to the cozy office in New York. We had a twin out west, in Silicon Valley. In Sunnyvale. The reason for the split went to the root of the company's existence: the two founders, Bill and Sam. Our Romulus and Remus. Bill was the wiz behind the enterprise, the one who engineered the prototype. His accomplishments in the field of computer science were at once spectacular and obscure. He'd won an Academy Award for his breakthrough in the digital representation of animal fur. Sam was the idea man. The concept was his idea. The framework, the skeleton. The very notion that it could be done at all. That was Sam. In our foundation myth the light bulb went on over his head. Sam was never in the office.

Bill lived in California. Sam lived in New Jersey. Neither one was inclined to budge. So Bill lorded over his fiefdom in California, hiring trusted confederates from the hifalutinest realms of West Coast innovation, the venerated tech schools, the esoteric startups. For some reason this specifically meant a close-knit group of expatriate French software developers. And Sam's the one who separated the venture capitalists from their money, not a nickel too little, not a minute too soon. And Sam hired the people I worked with. Us.

There was push and pull between Sunnyvale and New York. We pushed, they pulled. Generally.

One day an explosion of staticky rage erupted from the glass-walled conference room in the corner of the office. It was Bill on the speakerphone, addressing Brett's crew.

"There is no fucking excuse! No fucking excuse!"

Protests were meekly stammered around the table.

"You did not follow the test plan! You did not follow the test plan!"

Brett tried to interject. "Bill –"

"Brett! Brett! Brett! Brett! Brett! Did you receive my test plan document? Did you receive my test plan document?"

A sheepish pause. Then: "Yes."

Bill, even louder now: "Then WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED!? WHY DIDN'T YOU FUCKING FOLLOW IT?"

The team sat around the table in stunned silence, staring at the triangle.

"THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE!"

As I peered over the horizon of multicolored cubicle walls into the conference room I noticed something odd: a woman with long blond hair hovered around the table. She was carrying a cumbersome apparatus on her shoulder which she pointed towards each chastened face in turn.

I swiveled my chair towards David. "Who is that in there?"

"Hmm?"

"Who is that in there? Standing around. Is that a camera?"

"Oh," he said. "That's Debbie."

"Who's Debbie?"

"Debbie is our documentarian."

The Enterprise - 5

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The Enterprise - 4

On my first day Bob introduced me around. There was his assistant graphic artist, Lowell, also known as Mr. Fun. Mr. Fun was ornery, overweight. He grumbled a little at me before returning to his mouse and screen.

There was Brett. A former aspiring rock star, dressed in leather, frayed jeans and attitude. He was rail-thin, manic. A stud pierced his brow. He lurched around the office on a gimpy foot, his Doc Marten shit-kickers clomping and shuffling on the wooden floor. Every now and again he'd lean back in his chair and strum a few loud chords from his acoustic guitar. Almost always someone shouted for him to stop.

Brett led the development team, an amorphous group that seemed to include everyone who wasn't in my department or sales. His right-hand man was tall, quiet Tom. Tom's hair was short, spiky and green. He and Brett had been in a band together. Now they were doing this.

And then there were the others: Lucy and Julie who sat together in the middle, Sally the human resources director, André the database guy from Quebec. Kevin the sports specialist, and someone who worked for him. Peter, the militant open-source programmer, who did a little bit of everything but was the IT guy when one was needed. A hippie named Allison. Also in charge of data. I tried to smile. I tried to act like I belonged.

Bob passed me off to Peter, who set me up with a desk and a computer. While Peter sat punching in settings and fiddling with the cables my new neighbor wheeled over.

"I'm David!" he exclaimed, and heartily shook my hand.

"Paul," I replied.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a writer," I said. "I'm an editor. My realm is personality."

He smiled and nodded genially.

"What do you do?"

"I'm the information architect!" he said. "It sounds like we'll be working a lot together."

Peter got up from my desk and indicated my chair with a grand sweep of his hand.

"It's done," he said. "Now get to fuckin' work."

The Enterprise - 3

Over the weekend I told everyone I knew about the Product. The nature of the Product as I understood it. The present and future names of the Product and the launch date of the Product. I told them about the shot clock hanging on the wall and the number on it. Family. Friends. Everyone. In sobriety and in inebriation. I told it all to everyone.

On Monday, as I swam at the New York Sports Club pool on 91st Street and Third Avenue, my heart grew heavy with dread. Surely they'd find out. The mysterious little company in Chelsea would never contact me again. Or worse, initiate some obscure litigation. It was just my luck. To be so lucky and to fuck it up. Out of vanity. Intemperance.

Back home, I somberly checked my emails. There was one from Bob, responding to the ideas I'd sent him – an impressionistic, somewhat rambling document that alluded in equal measures to ironic postmodernist culture, retro-'50s style motifs and Japanalia. It was written in his language. He loved it.

I was hired.

The Enterprise - 2

When I came back out Elaine was waiting.

"Let's meet Bob. He leads the creative department. You'd be reporting to him."

"As an editor?"

She smiled as though she hadn't heard my question. Or hadn't known it was a question. She led me to the far corner of the office and introduced me to Bob, a gruff, bald man. He peered at me warily.

"Do you like anime?"

I thought fast. "Yes."

"Let me show you some concepts," he said, indicating that I should sit beside him. "Here are some personifications of the Product."

Bob paged through a series of digital sketches on his screen. They depicted the same cute robot that Elaine had shown me, but in a variety of settings and attire. The robot in a tuxedo. The robot playing tennis. The robot in a Native American headdress and warpaint, wielding a bow.

"These are merely representations of the Product," he stated solemnly. "Not the Product itself. Do you understand?"

I said that I did.

"Your job would be to extend these representations into the editorial realm."

"That's exciting."

"Not analogs. Not companion pieces. Your mandate would be to codify the spirit of the enterprise as expressed by management. The owners of the vision."

I endeavored to give him the impression that I understood perfectly.

"We'd like to task you with nothing less than establishing and maintaining the personality of the Product," he stated gravely, making sure I heard each word.

It did have a pleasing ring to it.

"Can you outline some ideas and shoot them back to me? Maybe we can talk again next week," he said, and we shook hands and parted ways.

I took the elevator back down with a man who appeared to work with the company in some vaguely senior capacity. He was tall, thin, handsome. Bored. He carried himself with the mix of nonchalance and ennui that can only come from a lifetime of entitlement and privilege. He introduced himself as Derek.

"I'm Paul," I said, shaking his hand.

"You gonna get on board, Paul?"

"Looks like I might."

His tone suddenly turned serious.

"This thing, this idea, this thing we have here," he said, indicating the third-floor office with an upward glance. "It's a big, big, big, big deal."

"I get the feeling."

"Lemme tell you something. The only other time I ever felt like this–I'm not lying to you. I sat with Jerry Yang when he founded Yahoo."

"That right?"

"That feeling, that electricity in the air."

"Yeah."

"Can you feel it?"

"Yeah!"

"So can I," he said. The elevator doors opened and he exited with a thumbs up and a smile.