Artifical intelligence.
If you have to hear those two words again, you are going to throw your fucking computer out the window.It’s Monday morning at 8:00. You are on a sales call with an East Coast customer. You’re normally at the office at 10:00. You’re grumpy. You need a personal day.
You are in a Lyft with AirPods on while videoconferencing on Zoom. Two companies that IPO’d. Your company hasn’t IPOd. Being in a Lyft on a Zoom is a perfect metaphor for everything you are not. You are nowhere close to an IPO. You are not up and to the right.
You joined your company — Klusterphuck—two years ago. It was 30 people. You reached unicorn status a year later on $5M of revenue. You were in a hot space. Something about artificial intelligence, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, Apache and some other technical terms. You saw all those words in the pitch. Seemed exciting. Everything seemed exciting.
Your company hit a rough patch and had to lay some people off. Eh. Readjust priorities. Pivot.You discovered three months in that your “artificial intelligence” was actually 50 people in Bolivia manually reviewing images.
You daydream about all the companies you could have joined. It’s 2019, the year of the Mueller report and the fall of Notre Dame, but more importantly, the year of the IPO. It seems like so many people are getting rich. You are not rich.
You think about Zach. Zach joined Slack four years ago. You’ve done the math in your head a thousand times. He’s going to make enough to make a no-contingency, all-cash offer on a two-bedroom condo. He’s single. You hear he has ED. There may not be anything left over to fix that. You feel better for a moment at the thought of him going flat during intercourse.
You know what? Who needs an exit? You don’t need more money. Money is only going to add stress to your life. It’s not like these people are going to be any happier. What would you do with more money? You are so lean already. You get out of the car. You spend $10 on a cup of cat-shit coffee. Your Lyft cost $17.
Capital efficient.
You roll into the office. You do some meetings. You Slack a few people. The current topic of discussion is how your office eliminated all single-use plastic and stopped serving meat to reduce your company’s carbon footprint.
Shit. You forgot to bring your water bottle. You are thirsty. You go to the Bevi. You scan the office. You swipe someone’s mug and fill it up with flavored carbonated water and bring it back to your desk. You roll a paper straw and drink it. Bevi will be public soon. No doubt. You check their jobs page.
You are close friends. He’s “too busy” for you to call, so he makes you go through the emasculating process of sending out a calendar invite every time you want to talk to him.You scarf down a Beyond Burger for lunch and check their stock price. Maybe you should join Impossible. You hear that the Whopper is going to be amazing. It tastes like real meat. Except it doesn’t.
Back to work. Your company eliminated PPT presentations a while back. Now it takes 50 times as long to present an idea. All because your boss read an article about Jeff Bezos not liking presentations.
Your CEO was tweeting his latest Zen Buddhist advice during the call. Multitasking. He suddenly discovered Siddhartha seven months ago. And he can’t keep his mouth shut. He microdoses and smokes peyote. He must have read that book about sleep that everyone is reading now. His latest tweet storms have been extolling the virtue of getting eight hours a night. Lin Manuel Miranda retweets him.
He was employee #271 at Uber. You hear he was really critical to building the infrastructure or something. He built an internal analytics system they used to figure out whether they needed to order more La Croix. But now your company doesn’t order La Croix anymore.
He talks about his meetings with “T. K.” during an all-hands. He invokes his name with equal parts reverence and disdain. “Like that one time T. K. gave me advice on X.”
It’s 12:00 p.m. Time for some boutique fitness. You’ve tried SoulCycle, the Bar Method, Orangetheory, Barry’s, CorePower and RowZone in the past month. You might still be paying for three of them, but you’re not sure. It’s ROI positive. An investment in your health always is.
You choose Barry’s today. You really want to preorder a $12 smoothie. Your instructor looks especially happy. She somehow consulted for Peloton and got some advisory shares. She’s going to make enough for a down payment.
You should have been a trainer.
You check your calendar. You have a call scheduled with Jordan. Jordan was your roommate in college. You are close friends. He’s “too busy” for you to call, so he makes you go through the emasculating process of sending out a calendar invite every time you want to talk to him.
Jordan copied your econ homework because he couldn’t grasp the basic concepts around labor economics. He’s now a thought leader in the on-demand economy.
You catch up. It’s pleasant. All those speaking gigs paid off. He has shares in Uber and DoorDash. He’s going on vacation in Tulum after the Uber IPO. He offers an invite. But only if you reach out to his assistant to send him a reminder.
Podcast interview with Philz CEO Jacob JaberYou look back at old InMails. You were recruited by Pinterest. You missed that boat. You missed that role at Airbnb three years ago. You missed that role at Upwork four years ago. You reflect on your self-worth. You could have made bank. Everyone makes more money than you.Instagram influencers who sell detox tea and expensive candles make more money than you. Those kids who unwrap toys on YouTube make more than you.
You head back to the office. The day is almost over. You’ve worked your ass off.It’s 4:00 p.m.
You scan a few articles about the number of millionaires that will be created by the IPOs. You open Redfin on a new browser tab. You speculate how much real estate is going to go up this year. You did the same when Bitcoin was hot.
Lightbulb.
You’re going to start a company. If all these jackoffs can do it, so can you. How can you intersect a bunch of hot markets into one idea? You think of the sharing economy. You think of mental health. You think of remote work. You think of AI. What should you do?
Nirvana.ai
You are going to deploy small coworking spaces situated throughout Silicon Valley in public parks by repurposing those Zen-looking phone booths. Each one will be outfitted with an iPad preloaded with Zoom.They will actually “work” only from the hours of 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and require you to take 15-to-30-minute breaks every hour to avoid burnout. Use of space will be free, but you’ll have to watch 10 minutes’ worth of ads a day.
You’re onto something. Everyone can work remotely this way, even if it’s only a 15-minute walk from the office. They’ll save money and feel Zen. This is it. This is your company.You are ready to design the mobile app. You log in to a no-code tool. You can’t decide between Bubble or InVision. You start using PPT to make an eight-slide deck to raise a $2M seed round.You reach out to Zach. You pitch the idea. He’s in for $50K. You start writing your resignation. You are ready for what’s next.
You are ready to be pre-IPO.
All Rights Reserved for Sunil Rajaraman
Productivity Hub 