Sophia of Silicon Valley
Page 34
My gut reaction is to play detective and solve this puzzle myself, but surveying the damage is much more important. I look around the office—monitors are still sitting on desks that look untouched. “What did they take?”
“Umm,” Adam mumbles, but before he goes on, I hold up my hand to stop him because I already know what he’s going to say, and I can’t bear to hear his words out loud.
They took our laptops.
My stomach drops. I feel faint as I think about all the proprietary software code stored on those laptops—all of it lost, fifteen months’ worth of work down the drain. I want to blame someone, or at least to berate the team for leaving their laptops at the office.
How many times have I warned you to take your laptops home? Now what are we going to do?
As I play the dialogue through in my head—how to explain this to Lasso’s shareholders, to Christine Kraft, Jonathan Larsen, Grant Vicker, and of course, Eric McCabe—Adam says with a proud grin, “The good news is that we just tested our product last night so all our work is backed up! Lasso works!”
“What?”
“We tried Lasso for the first time last night. Or technically, this morning. It works! We have our data!”
Oh, thank God. Thank God! Thank you!
Adam hands me a piece of paper that lists the information for all the stolen laptops, then tells me he and Viktoria are going to Best Buy to purchase replacements. I hand the list to our receptionist and ask her to file an insurance claim with our provider. It’s only then that I notice what she—an Ivy League graduate—is wearing: a tight pink cotton sweater whose V-neck drops so low that one has to make a serious effort not to look. Her midriff is slightly showing and I’m certain she can’t breathe in her tight jeans.
I lean toward her and whisper, “Tomorrow let’s try not to look like we’re fishing for a husband, shall we?” I kick myself for sounding like a mix between my mother and Scott Kraft, but I feel as though it’s my duty to give her some styling advice. God, I miss him. He would have been so proud.
Back at my desk, I plug in my laptop and call out to our newest member of the marketing team, “Hey, new girl! Draft a press release announcing the robbery. Title it: ‘Data Company Loses Its Data.’ Got it? We pitch it like that to get people’s attention and then go on to explain what really happened.”
There’s no such thing as bad press.
“Why would we want to do that?” asks our new employee as she walks toward me. I can see she’s eager to learn, a quality I appreciate.
As I’m about to answer, my monitor’s screen saver turns on and I watch an octopus swim gaily through a colorful, breathtaking coral reef. Bittersweet memories of Scott flood through me and I close my eyes to acknowledge just how much I miss him. When New Girl is seated across from me, I glance past the framed photo of Peter and me that sits on my desk, then lean in toward her to respond to her question. “Are you stupid, or fucking stupid?”
Acknowledgments
This story would never have been shared had it not been for the team: Katie, who gave me the confidence to start this journey; the Dijkstra Agency, who believed in me; and Rachel, who saw potential and put in hard work to make it happen.
A huge thank-you to my family, for their unconditional love and support; to Adam, Alan, and Steve for helping me breathe easier; and to the Reading Group—our laughs carried me the whole way through.
Also, never-ending gratitude to all my mentors and friends who provided the inspiration behind the story. As Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.”
About the Author
Anna Yen has been an executive at a wide range of tech and media companies. She lives in San Francisco with her dog.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
sophia of silicon valley. Copyright © 2018 by Anna Yen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design and illustration by Nathan Burton.
Digital Edition April 2018 ISBN 978-0-06-267303-9
Print ISBN 978-0-06-267301-5
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