Doree Shafrir - Startup: A Novel

THEY CAME FROM all over the city in the predawn hours, a merry band of highly optimized minstrels in purple leggings and shiny headbands and brightly colored sneakers, walking the fifteen minutes from the L train or directing an Uber to the former spice factory in the no-mans-land between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The neighborhoods normal early-morning crowdthe dog walkers, the construction workers, the marathon trainersmostly looked upon them with amused curiosity. Nothing fazed them anymore.

Once they got into the club, they either headed straight for the dance floor or descended on the bar, which this morning was not selling alcohol but rather providing free sustenance in the form of granola bars and coconut water and green juice (all sponsored by an on-demand laundry app), which they drank greedily before, or in some cases while, slithering onto the dance floor.

This was the October edition of 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. But this was a different New York. The cynical echo of Generation X had finally been quieted and, along with it, most of the dive bars, rent-stabilized apartments, bands, underground clubs, clothing boutiques, and fashion magazines that used to define the city. In its place had arisen a Promised Land of Duane Reades and Chase ATMs on every corner, luxury doorman buildings, Pilates studios and spin classes, eighteen-dollar rosemary-infused cocktails and seven-dollar cups of single-origin coffeeall of which were there to cater to a new generation of twentysomethings, the data scientists and brand strategists and software engineers and social media managers and product leads and marketing associates and IT coordinators ready to disrupt the world with apps. And today, like every day, they would work until it was dark again, and then they would go to dinner parties or secret cocktail bars or rooftop events, and most of them would end the night watching Netflix on their laptops in bed, perhaps in one of the new high-rises summoned directly from a marketing brochureDoorman! Swimming pool! Rooftop cabanas! Yoga room! Unparalleled views and the lifestyle you deserve! Few of them lived alone, but most of them rarely crossed paths with their roommates. Everyone was just so busy.

Wherever they residedWilliamsburg or Bushwick or the Lower East Side or Bed-Stuy or Crown Heightsthey embraced their neighborhoods ready availability of acai bowls and yoga studios. They were all in agreement that adulthood could, and should, be fun.

It was truly a new Gilded Age.

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.) A guy in a turquoise headband did a backflip into the crowd and landed on his feet. They cheered when the DJ told them to make some noise. They danced with the passion of people for whom nothing ever really goes wrong.

Twenty-eight-year-old William Mack McAllister was among them. Many of the sixty-three employees of his startup, TakeOff, were there too, and as he made his way through the crowd, coconut water in hand, it seemed as though every other person said hi. In New Yorks bustling innovation community, Mack was one of the anointed, at least if you went by consecutive number of times hed been named to the TechScene 50 (three), the amount of money in seed funding hed raised for TakeOff (five million; the industrys news site TechScene had reported it as six million, a figure he had not bothered to correct), his Twitter follower count (23,782), and how many women he had slept with since moving to New York City from his hometown of Dallas six years ago (fifty-one, and there would have been more if not for a three-month period of self-imposed celibacy when he was first launching his company). Indeed, by virtually any metric, Mack McAllister was crushing it, and he saw no reason why he would not continue to do so for the foreseeable future. He held up his phone to take a selfie, making sure to capture the crowd in back of him, and posted it to Instagram with a caption that read: The best way to start the day: a massive dance party. #MorningRave #MorningRaveNYC.

There was one person at MorningRave who did not post any selfies to Instagram. She was there to dance, and only to dance. Nor did she say hello to Mack. She knew who he was, but he was not yet aware of her existence. Katya Pasternack was at the party with her boyfriend, Victor, who himself was a founder of a small company called StrollUp. Katya was twenty-four years old, but ever since she was a child, people had said she had an old soul. From what she could tell, this mostly meant that she preferred the company of people older than herself. One of the exceptions was this party, which she loved. Katya weighed ninety-one pounds and had never gone to a gym a day in her life, but she danced at this party as though it were her job. Her actual job was as a reporter for TechScene. She took a break from dancingVictor was at the bar, getting a green juicesquinted and scanned the crowd. Besides Mack, she recognized no fewer than seventeen startup founders. She took out her phone and noted all of their names, just in case she felt compelled to write something about any of them later.

At exactly 9:00 a.m., the music stopped, and the dancers cheered again. They held their phones up to record this moment, when the thick curtains on the windows of the club would be drawn back, and the crowd would recite, in unison, Good morning, good morning, great morning! and then a cheer, louder than before, would erupt. They posted this moment on Snapchat and Instagram, on Twitter and Facebook, anywhere that their messageI was herecould be loudly, clearly received.

Most of them still clutched their phones a few minutes later as they headed out into the morning. Although their eyes blinked as they adjusted to the sunlight, all of them had their heads down, looking at their phones. They needed to see how many people had liked their Instagrams, if anyone had viewed their Snapchat videos, how many likes and comments