A Debut Novel Skewers Startup Culture, Click by Click
This content was originally published by LARA VAPNYAR on 8 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
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D) Yes, but only if you’re sure that the sex will be worth risking your and your company’s future.
2. You are a young female employee of the hottest new startup in the country. You’ve been having casual sex with the C.E.O. but now want to stop. What would be the best way to break it off?
A) To have a straightforward adult conversation with the guy.
B) To ignore his texts, while Instagramming your new relationship.
Photo
C) To quit your job.
D) To file a sexual harassment lawsuit and spill the details of the affair to a tech magazine.
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3. You are a young female reporter for said tech magazine (motto: “Tech news straight, no chaser”). You’re desperate for a scoop. You happen to be at the same party with said female employee and see her phone at the exact moment when she receives not one, but three photos of the erect penis of said C.E.O. with a text: “don’t tell me u don’t miss this.”
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What would be the most professional thing to do?
A) Pretend that you didn’t see anything.
B) Take photos of the penis and save them on your phone for future use (either work-related or masturbatory).
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C) Blackmail the female employee into giving you a scoop about her relationship with the C.E.O.
D) Publish the penis pictures in your tech news magazine along with an expository article that would potentially help all the harassed women in the workplace.
4. You’re a married father of two who works as the managing editor at a tech gossip magazine, but feels that he deserves much much more. You’ve heard of sexual harassment, but you think it cannot possibly apply to you, simply because you’re a decent guy. What would be the appropriate course of action toward your much younger female subordinate?
A) Complain about your wife to her every day 10 times a day.
B) Eagerly accept her invitation for a drink.
C) Order her more and more drinks until she’s sufficiently drunk to endure a kiss.
D) All of the above.
5. You are a reader of “Startup” who needs to form an opinion about the following five people. Which of them should inspire your sympathy?
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A) The C.E.O., Mack McAllister, because he is so lonely, clueless and hopeful, plus he has “somewhat ungainly ears,” which should automatically inspire sympathy.
B) The female employee, Isabel Taylor, because she is a woman struggling in a male-dominated work environment, and because she is capable of wearing a T-shirt that says “I
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C) The “rail thin” chain-smoking reporter, Katya Pasternack, simply because you share a Russian immigrant background.
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D) The managing editor, Dan Blum, because … he has to work a lot? I honestly don’t know why anybody would side with him.
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E) His frustrated wife, Sabrina Choe Blum, because she is the closest to you in age, and has two children like you do, and is a writer like you are, but she also happens to engage in unseemly activities that you don’t like. (You are O.K. with selling smelly underwear to horny men, but compulsive shopping terrifies you.)
I’ve struggled with Question 5 the most, but then I reminded myself that this was not a sexual harassment quiz but a satirical novel, so I definitely didn’t have an obligation to pick the right answer, or side with any of the characters. This revelation freed me to savor many delights of “Startup,” like the process of making the app that measures your mood and pretends to care or the struggle to ensure the most clicks and retweeting in the serious media, or detailed renditions of VC presentations, and especially my favorite — MorningRave.
“MorningRave, a monthly gathering devoted to the idea that the best way to start the day was with the excited energy of a clean-living dance party. It was a movement that in a previous generation might have been derided as corny, or Mormon. … At MorningRave, they danced alone and in pairs, with friends and with strangers. They danced on the stage and on the floor. One woman danced with a baby in a carrier attached to her torso. (The baby wore headphones.)”
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Most of my friends, myself included, start their days with either weeping or raging over their newsfeeds. MorningRave is one way to break that routine. Reading this book would be another.
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