56 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
PERSONAL HISTORY
GIRL, DISRUPTED
Four years in Silicon Valley startups.
BYANNAWIENER
D
epending on whom you ask,
2012 represented the apex, the
inflection point, or the begin-
ning of the end for Silicon Valley’s
startup scene—what cynics called a bub-
ble, optimists called the future, and my
future co-workers, high on the fumes
of world-historical potential, breath-
lessly called the ecosystem. Everything
was going digital. Everything was up in
the cloud. A technology conglomerate
that first made its reputation as a Web-
page search engine, but quickly became
the world’s largest and most valuable
private repository of consumer data,
developed a prototype for a pair of eye-
glasses on which the wearer could check
his or her e-mail; its primary rival, a mul-
tinational consumer-electronics com-
pany credited with introducing the per-
sonal computer to the masses, thirty
years earlier, released a smartphone so
lightweight that gadget reviewers com-
pared it to fine jewelry.
Technologists were plucked from the
Valley’s most prestigious technology
corporations and universities and put
to work on a campaign that reëlected
the United States’ first black President.
The word “disruption” proliferated, and
everything was ripe for or vulnerable to
it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home
cooking, home buying, wedding plan-
ning, banking, shaving, credit lines,
dry-cleaning, the rhythm method. It
was the dawn of the unicorns: startups
valued, by their investors, at more than
a billion dollars. The previous summer,
a prominent venture capitalist, in the
op-ed pages of an international busi-
ness newspaper, had proudly declared
that software was “eating the world.”
Not that I was paying any attention.
At twenty-five, I was working in pub-
lishing, as an assistant to a literary agent,
sitting at a narrow desk outside my boss’s
office, frantically e-mailing my friends.
The year before, I’d received a raise, from
twenty-nine thousand dollars to thirty.
What was my value? One semester of
an M.F.A. program; fifteen hundred
chopped salads, after taxes. I had a year
left on my parents’ health insurance.
I was staving off a thrumming sense
of dread. An online superstore, which
had got its start, in the nineties, by sell-
ing books on the World Wide Web,
was threatening to destroy publishing
with the tools of monopoly power:
pricing and distribution. People were
reeling from the news that the two
largest publishing houses, whose com-
bined value pushed past two billion dol-
lars, had agreed to merge. In the evenings,
at dive bars, I met with other editorial
and agency assistants, all women, all of
us in wrap dresses and cardigans, for
whiskey-and-sodas and the house white.
Publishing had failed to innovate, but
surely we—the literary, the passionate,
lovers and defenders of human expres-
sion—couldn’t lose?
One afternoon, at my desk, I read an
article about a startup, based in New
York, that had raised three million dol-
lars to bring a revolution to publishing.
It was building an e-reading app for
mobile phones which operated on a sub-
scription model. The pitch—access to
a sprawling library of e-books for a mod-
est monthly fee—should have seemed
too good to be true, but the app was a
new concept for publishing, an indus-
try where it seemed as if the only ways
to have a sustainable career were to in-
herit money, marry rich, or wait for our
superiors to defect or die.
M
y interviews with the e-book
startup were so casual that at a
certain point I wondered if the three
co-founders just wanted to hang out.
They were younger than I was but spoke
about their work like industry veterans,
and were generous with unsolicited busi-
ness advice. I wanted, so much, to be like
them. I joined at the beginning of 2013.
The job, which had been created for
me, was a three-month trial run. As a
full-time contractor, I would be paid
twenty dollars an hour, with no benefits.
Still, the annual salary amounted to forty
thousand dollars. On my start date, I
arrived at the office, a loft a block from
Canal Street, to find a stack of hard-
cover books about technology, inscribed
by the founders and stamped with a wax
seal of the company logo: a mollusk, un-
avoidably yonic, with a perfect pearl.
The e-book startup had millions of
dollars in funding, but the app was still
in “private alpha,” used by only a few
dozen friends, family members, and in-
vestors. For the first time in my career,
I had some semblance of expertise. The
founders asked for my opinions on the
app’s user interface and the quality of
the inventory, and on how we could best
ingratiate ourselves with the online read-
ing communities, the largest of which
would soon be acquired by the monop-
olistic online superstore. One afternoon,
the C.E.O. summoned the other two
founders and the staff of three to a con-
ference room to practice his presenta-
tion to publishers. He opened by say-
ing that this was the era of the sharing
economy. Music, movies, television, re-
tail, and transportation had been dis-
rupted. Apparently, the time had come
for books. He flipped to a slide that dis-
played the logos of various successful
subscription platforms, with ours at the
center. “Hemingway” was misspelled in
the pitch deck: two “m”s.
After the first few weeks, it seemed
that the founders were paying me mostly
to look for new office furniture and or-
der them snacks: single-serving bags of
sliced apples, tiny chocolate bars, cups
of blueberry yogurt. “She’s too inter-
ested in learning, not doing,” the C.E.O.
wrote. He meant to send the message
to the two other co-founders, but mis-
takenly posted it in the company chat
room. He apologized sincerely, while I
looped the words in my head. I had not
