The Start-Up (3 page)

“Yep. She’s Patty Hawkins’s roommate, actually.”

“Oh, Jesus. No wonder she hides out in the computer lab.” Adam laughed. The whiskey was settling in. He was feeling more relaxed.

“What’s your major?” he asked.

“I’m MS&E. Management science and engineering. It’s half engineering and half business classes. Great major. Super tough, but solid. And I did minors in econ and French.”

“Wow!” Adam was impressed. Now that T. J. wasn’t dating Lisa, he had nothing but admiration for this intelligent, charming guy in front of him.

“You must have declared early to get all that in.”

“Yeah, I always knew it’s what I wanted to do. I think it’s important to have a plan and to stay diverse. MS&E gave me a good set-up for business school, econ a more academic study, and French some diversity that throws people. No one ever expects a guy like me to know anything about Balzac.” He smiled. “You really ought to figure out a plan for yourself. Figure out what you really want to be.”

Adam thought back to what Professor Marsh had said this morning and sighed. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.” T. J. paused, then said, “I could help, you know. Sometimes it’s helpful to have someone who’s been through it to bounce ideas off of.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Absolutely. Why not? Cheers.” T. J. clinked his glass against Adam’s.

“How about a refill?”

Adam’s spirits were high with this affirmation from T. J. and the whiskey as he cheerfully mixed another Manhattan.

“So, do you still play soccer?”

“What?”

“Your dad said—during his toast he said you used to be really into soccer.”

TJ’s jaw clenched a little but he responded coolly. “No, soccer ended up not being the right sport for me. It was a little too … co-operative. I’ve found I prefer individual competition.”

“Oh.” Adam was worried he’d said something wrong.

T. J. chuckled. “Dad’s been pretty wrapped up in this Gibly stuff. Guess he’s missed the past, oh, ten years.” Then with a big forced smile he added,

“What do you say we get out of here, Adam? Go have some real fun?” Adam looked at his watch. He’d made a deal with Margaret that he could leave at eleven-thirty at night so he could work on his homework problem set, and it was now past midnight. He briefly wondered when he would get to that problem set, then brushed the thought aside. “Sounds good. Where to?”

B
ack on campus, Amelia was on a roll. It was approaching one o’clock in the morning and she’d been in the Gates Computer Science building since before noon. She’d gone through three shifts of teaching assistants, graduate students who hung out in the computer lab in case undergrads had any glitches and made sure people from outside the University didn’t sneak in to try to poach ideas. While most of the campus was dead at this hour, the real action in the Gates building had only just started; around eight o’clock, programmers had filed in with Chinese take-out and set up shop for the evening, and right now the energy was palpable, with twenty-odd engineers typing away at their computer screens.

The Gates building had been donated to Stanford by Bill Gates himself, and, for someone like Amelia, it was heaven. The warm, blue glow of large-screen PCs lit up the long rooms, and eager computer scientists perched on ergonomic chairs coding away around the clock. Gates had designed the building with engineers in mind. Vending machines were stocked with ramen noodles and Hot Pockets, in addition to the standard candy bars and potato chips, and the fridge was filled with an open supply of Red Bull.

Bathrooms were equipped with showers, in case students didn’t want to go back to their dorm rooms to freshen up, and the lounges were equipped with Xboxes and Wii sets for taking a break. But the real energy was in the computer rooms. The mixture of adrenaline, creativity, and anticipation was hard to describe. Everyone in the room was on the cusp of something groundbreaking. The guy next to you might be creating the next Google or Groupon, or maybe even Facebook. People came in and out, but most of them stayed for long stretches—fifteen and twenty hours at a time—the excitement of a new idea outweighing physical exhaustion.

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.