Page 6 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
“Thank you,” Dad tells her, and she chirps a “You’re welcome!” before slipping behind the desk.
“It feels like a spaceship in here,” Dad whispers, but as I tuck my phone away all I can think is that this could be my life nextyear. That I could come to a place like this every single day. Beyond the glass door there are long rows of desks arranged to face the windows, mountains rising jagged and commanding in the distance. Every chair is occupied, people in headphones leaning close to their monitors. I can hear the buzz of their chatter from all the way out here, low and thrumming. It’s like a hive, all the pieces moving in unison. And then, the queen.
Evelyn Cross is wearing a rust-colored jumpsuit and has blond hair cut to her jawline in a pin-straight bob. She’s holding a tablet in one hand and pushes open the glass door with the other, her face slicing into a smile.
“Rose Devereux,” she says. Her voice is more imposing in person, like she’s used to having people’s full attention. “Evelyn. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have you here.”
“Excited to be here,” I tell her, which isn’t exactly right. The emotion I’m feeling is part excitement, part disbelief, part serious impending stage fright, and part nausea. I swallow.Don’t you fucking dare puke in this place.
“Pete,” Dad says when Evelyn shakes his hand. “Thanks for having Ro.”
“We should be thanking her,” Evelyn says, and turns to hold open the glass door for us. “Please, come on back. Everyone’s gathered.”
Everyone?I think, and then she leads us to a conference room with twenty people inside.
When Dad and I sit in the two empty seats at the middle of the table, every single chair swivels toward us.
“Everyone, meet Rose and Pete,” Evelyn says. She takes the chair at the head of the table. There’s a tall, skinny glass of water in front of her and glass carafes of water and fruit down the center of the table—lemons, limes, oranges. I kind of want to pour myself some but extremely don’t trust myself to move.
“Rose, this would be your team.” Evelyn sweeps her hand in front of her, and as I look from one person to the next, everyone smiles at me. My desire to be one of them hits pure and strong, all at once. They’re wearing T-shirts and cool watches and chunky glasses and half of them have tattoos. “Well, part of it.”
Evelyn turns to wave along the wall of glass that separates us from the floor of employee desks. “We have three floors here in Denver, and MASH would be one of them.” She looks at me pointedly, and her eyes are like a bird’s: sharp and keen. “Entirely.”
I swallow. “How many people is that?”
“Fifty or so. We’ll be hiring, of course. The board would like three teams on this: here in Denver, London, and Shanghai. We’ll be working on MASH twenty-four seven.”
“Wow,” Dad says, taking the word straight out of my mouth. And then, another word that makes me deflate a little: “Why?”
Evelyn smiles, and when she speaks, her words are directed at me. “We want in on this idea, Rose. It’s a smart one. And the amount of public interest you’ve received without any marketing or funding is astounding. Imagine what you could do with our resources.” She pauses, glancing at Dad. “You’ll need a team if you want to make this work. And you should. Want to make this work, I mean.”
“She built it on her own,” Dad says, before I can respond. “Why does she need all this fancy stuff?”
Okay, I love this man. But oh my god. I almost lift my hands so I can hide behind them.
Evelyn’s eyes flick to a guy at the opposite end of the table, who smiles. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and has a baseball cap propped backward over his hair.
“Rose’s code is good,” he tells Dad, then looks at me. “But we can make it better. Also, the UI looks like shit.” A couple of people laugh, and I feel heat pool in my cheeks. I think of Sawyer, her cheery text from Friday:Looks ready to me!“We’ll bring in a design team, make this as beautiful as it should be.”
“And there’s monetization,” another woman says, sitting right across from me. “We’ll put together a sales team to get moving on sponsored results. MASH tells you you’re going to be a doctor, we serve you an ad for Harvard Med. You know the drill.”
“Marketing.” When I turn toward the third voice, a woman with perfect braids hanging to her elbows offers me a friendly smile. “We’ll set you up with press—interviews, guest blogs, all of it. And, if they’re interested, bring Sawyer Devereux and Josie Sweet on board as brand ambassadors.”
“And of course,” Evelyn says, drawing everyone’s attention like a bow string pulled taut, “there’s the issue of funding.” She nods to the guy next to her, who hits a button on his computer that activates the projector behind Evelyn. Suddenly, we’re all looking at the next six months. “We’ve built out a workback plan.”
There’s a Friday in February, circled in red with the wordsGoalCeleritas meeting dateabove it. Even I know Celeritas—one of the most powerful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.
“You think Celeritas is going to want this?” I blurt, before I’ve even looked at anything else on the calendar.
“We do,” Evelyn says, smiling. “They would be the goal for your Series A funding. We’ll take a few months to make MASH its best before pitching to them. Prove just how powerful this app is going to be, how it’s going to change the way human beings exist in society.”
Change the way human beings exist in society?I blink up at Evelyn, my mouth open like a trout. I didn’t set out to change the world; I was just trying to graduate. But if Icould, if this thing I made really has so much potential—
“And this is how we’re going to do it.” Evelyn swivels toward the projector, pulling a laser pointer out of nowhere and drawing my attention to a date less than a week away.Launch partner match, it says.
I think of Maren in my truck, just three days ago.Get the partner match up and running, and then we can talk.
“If we have a shot of getting Celeritas to buy in, we need to dial up the partner match.” Evelyn looks at me, serious and certain. “This is a dating app that sees the future.”
