The Woman Who Stopped Traffic (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

Going roller blading with Tom Nguyen was one thing, but staying at his apartment was quite another. Thankfully, the question didn’t arise. Tom informed Natalie that Clamor was now treating her trip as an official recruiting event, and paying for her room at the Keaton.

She got back there by late evening. An enormous box of Ghiradelli chocolates lay at the foot of her bed. She put a ‘
Shhhh
’ sign on the door, slipped into her silk pj bottoms and favorite ribbed top, then treated herself to a night of
Grey’s Anatomy
and
CSI
, lounging among the cool bed sheets while picking off the dark chocolate creams.

She awoke early feeling sluggish. She meditated then went down to the stately lobby for a fresh orange juice, a large latte and a
New York Times
.

“Miss Chevalier,” called out the concierge. “How are we today? Hertz has delivered a rental car, courtesy of your hosts.”

She walked through the front entranceway. It was a glorious San Francisco day. A tram gave a mournful
toot
and
ding ding
as it whirred along California, half-a-block away. The Hertz car was a Ford Taurus Limited, but new and surprisingly solid feeling with its hefty three-and-a-half-liter engine and stitched leather seats.

By mid morning, she was ready. As she reversed the Taurus out of its valet spot, an image magically appeared in the rearview mirror – a camera view from the rear of the vehicle. It vanished again as she swung forward onto Stockton. Nice. Once again, she was impressed by how they’d thought to take care of her needs while in town.

She exited the city. A sign in garish motel neon flew past: ‘Yahoo! A Nice Place to Stay on the Web’. She passed the airport and, with the light Sunday traffic, was soon in the Valley.

The name had once conjured up things fertile and mysterious but that day it didn’t even look like a valley to her. It was flat and sun parched and it dissolved into bright haze as she searched fruitlessly towards the horizon. Silicon Valley would often be twenty degrees warmer than the fog-prone city. Here and there, a steel-framed, mirror-glassed building erupted from the tawny scrub, marking some start-up’s ascension to stock market success. Natalie suddenly couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live there. Perhaps for the reduced distractions from its infamous seven-day workweeks?

The Clamor office was a white, four story building on the nondescript outskirts of Sunnyvale. From the street, she could just make out the discrete logo next to a smoked glass entranceway. The cars in the parking lot were equally forgettable: an old Honda Civic, an older Ford Taurus … her Hertz rental car would fit right on in. Slightly off to the side was a pale-blue, modern Beetle. You would never have guessed that the owners would soon be worth as much as a small country’s GDP. Would the parking lot look any different post-IPO? Probably not. There would be the odd Audi or Volvo, but nothing more flashy. It was such an odd game of appearances, she reflected: ‘For bankers, for VCs, it’s about the money. For us it’s about so much more.’ Yet what if someone tried to take all that money away? It was just a different kind of religion, Natalie concluded – for which she was attending her first Sunday service in a while.

She parked and walked towards the main doorway, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair and scrutinizing the entry arrangements: simple key card access, no guard. Through the smoked glass, she could make out Tom Nguyen coming towards her. He’d probably been there since dawn, if not all night. The door sucked open: “How’re the thighs holding up?” he greeted her with a grin.

“Huh? Oh, the roller blading – fine thanks.”

The lobby was dark, functional and heavily air-conditioned. Behind Tom was an un-staffed reception desk bearing the company’s logo. No sign of a weekend crisis following the Friday investor debacle. Rather, it looked like there’d been a college party meantime, with paper plates and cans of
Bud Lite
covering the low tables of the lobby seating area.

Having adjusting to the light, she looked again at Tom. His hair was gelled slick, making him look closer to 25 than 35. A chain hung round his neck, disappearing into a white T-shirt. Over it he wore another, darker one featuring a gold elephant and something written below in Asian characters.

“What does your T-shirt say?” she asked.

“ ‘I don’t remember’.”

“Very good,” and she laughed.

“I guess elephants forget sometimes,” he said, thumping his sternum, where the golden animal glistened. He looked like he’d been working out. Surprisingly toned. “People always ask,” he added. “It’s my counter-personality test: anyone who thinks I’d put on a T-shirt without knowing what it says hasn’t got me figured me out so well!”

“There you go,” and Natalie laughed again.

“Come on through and meet everyone.”

He opened a side door into a long conference room.

The room faced back onto the bright parking lot. But the blinds were drawn, filtering the light into disorientating patterns. It felt like first day of school all over again. People sat spread out along each side of the elongated oval table, down the middle of which stood bottled drinks, coffee cups and plates of cookies. Most people had their laptops already open. Each head turned towards her. She struggled to keep up as Nguyen rattled off the names of a product manager and three technical program managers nearest the door. At the farther end sat the top team, whom Natalie had seen on stage two days prior. They stood up in turn: Mike Marantz, tousle-haired and red-eyed, in a crumpled pair of khaki chinos. Yuri Malovich, sallow and intense, in puma sneakers, drainpipe jeans and an old Atari T-shirt draping his wiry torso. Natalie couldn’t tell whether his top was deliberately vintage or had been lurking in his wardrobe forever. Furthest along, on the near side, was someone Natalie hadn’t encountered before: a petite Asian woman perhaps in her early twenties, extending her hand:

“Hi, I’m Nancy Wu,” the woman said. “The Chief Connectedness Officer.”

“Nancy? Natalie. Nice to meet you.”

Nancy’s mouth smiled but her eyes remained female-evaluative. Probably just like my own, Natalie chastised herself. Nancy was arrestingly pretty, with tumbling dark hair streaked cherry-red, porcelain fine skin and glistening eyes. She was in a dark blue polka dot dress above the knee, over which she wore a damson-colored cardigan. The girlish look was contradicted by her boots, sleek black, accentuating her athletic calves. But it was the heels that made the point. Beside them sat a bug-eyed pug, with matching polka-dot kerchief.

“That’s Minerva,” Nancy said, smiling. The dog looked terrified.

Nguyen guided Natalie on to the head of the table, where slouched Dwayne Wisnold, his faded denim shirt leaching the color from his face.

“Hey,” he said without getting up. His hand was lifeless. His energy had faded from Friday’s. He was almost a different person. He looked unnaturally pale, with purply-dark circles round his eyes radiating nervous irritation. Late nights, Natalie reasoned. And yet he dominated the room. Michael Marantz sat next to him on the far side of the table, asking him whether he’d be back in the Midwest for the upcoming holiday weekend.

“Why would I do that, when I have this?” he replied, waving disconsolately at his laptop.

Natalie took her place half way down the table, in-between the senior management team and the program managers. It gave her a view of everyone in the room. She pulled out a felt pen and note pad from her bag. Still feeling very much like the new girl, she flipped to a clean page.

Two things struck her immediately. One, there would be no discussion of the Friday investor debacle. That discussion had either already happened ‘off line’, or would not be happening at all. Two, for a company founded on the premise of connecting people, this was a decidedly unhappy family.

She sketched the table and everything she could remember about people’s names and roles, keeping her handwriting just messy enough to confound prying eyes.

Nancy asked the head of the table whether he wanted to say a few introductory words and Wisnold casually called the meeting to order.

“So, this stuff is like, real important, if we’re gonna build this company to last. Really, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it in terms of a one year product roadmap,” and he thumbed his copy of Nancy’s presentation, which he’d clearly had access to before the meeting. It was so striking, the come down in his energy from two days prior. Like an addict bottoming post-high.

“What we should be thinking about –” and he paused for an unnaturally long moment “– is how we’re gonna build Clamor.us for the next hundred years, or so.
Or more
.”

“Thank you Dwayne,” Nancy said. “Well hopefully it won’t be a hundred year war!”

The attempt at humor fell flat. Everyone looked too exhausted to laugh. Nancy proceeded to hand out hard copies of her presentation. Mike Marantz flipped to the back page and stared blankly at the final recommendation. It was one of Natalie’s pet peeves: give the poor presenter a chance to make her case!

The first slide was headed:

‘m.ID.
e
– status update’

– and over the next few slides, Natalie caught the gist of what the Multi-Identity Engine, or m.ID.
e
, was all about. The Clamor team had sought to recreate online the complex topography of our real world relationships – those subtle, subconscious ways in which people present themselves differently in differing social circumstances.

Certainly it was a step forward from the ‘autistic’ software defining user experiences of sites such as Friendster: ‘Are you my friend?
YES
or
NO
?’ The Clamor engineers had come up with a series of algorithms that dynamically reformatted a user’s profile page, according to the level of familiarity with each viewer. No longer would a user have to refuse the request of a boss, or ‘un-friend’ a lover upon breakup. The user tagged each of their contacts – ‘work stuff’, ‘ex-file’, etc. – and the engine edited the profile elements into an always-plausible result. All the user had to do was upload their photos and self-description and then label or re-label each contact from an impressive array of choices: ‘acquaintance’, ‘top friend’, ‘
top
top friend…’ From there, the engine would do the rest, learning from user behavior as it went.

The next slide unveiled the question that had really been exercising Nancy and team:      

‘What causes people to reveal the very most about themselves?’

The null hypothesis, or starting assumption, had been ‘familiarity’. We tell our families more than we tell work colleagues. We tell a close sibling more than we’d tell a distant cousin. Apparently, it was a founding premise of the Multi-Identity engine, that the more trusted the connection, the more profile elements should be viewable. But the experiments had in fact revealed something that the team
suspected
all along, which ran entirely counter. That people disclosed the most about themselves to those they
barely knew at all
. The statistically inferred conclusion ran along the bottom of the slide like some fortune cookie message:

‘Anonymity tends to amplify inner tendencies.’

In a sense, it had been apparent since the dawn of the Internet: that people used the anonymity of the medium to do or say things they would never do or say in ‘real life’. Only, Clamor.us
was
now real life. The place where many of those 350 million members spent their days and nights! And in that light, how
should
the Clamor team re-view these ‘inner tendencies’? Slide 14 started:

‘Understanding the subterranean self’

“OK, this is getting a little creepy,” Mike Marantz said.

Wisnold narrowed his eyes. Natalie was struck by the curious, nervous energy circulating the room. It was
flinty
with tension, like a tinderbox –

“I just don’t know that the term ‘subterranean’ sounds entirely appropriate,” Marantz was saying. “Couldn’t we use another?”

“Like what?” Nancy said.

“You have ‘hidden’ on the previous slide,” Nguyen intervened.

“It still sounds weird,” Marantz said. “Come on, Berkeley psych major. There must be a better word.”

Nancy visibly bristled, controlled herself then said: “Carl Rogers talked about the true self. I guess we could use true sel–”

“I like true self.”

A pause hovered with a life of its own. “With all due respect Mike, you are
not
responsible for creating the engine.”

“Well neither are you.”

“How d’you draw that
conclusion?’

“I coded it,” Yuri Malovich butted in.

“
And
? Nancy hunched her shoulders, turning her palms upwards. “Yuri, you may have written the code, but
I wrote the rules
!”

“Well if Yuri’s name is on the patent application as an inventor, perhaps legally we should be careful not to deny his contribution,” Nguyen tried to reconcile the room. “We should be mindful of the Six Degrees situation,” he added, somehow sealing his authority on the subject. “Although, with all due respect to
you
Yuri, on a go-forward basis my team does have responsibility for the engineering work on the engine.”