In January of 2015, Adeline flew to San Francisco to attend a start-up pitch competition. A small contribution to the event had bought a sponsorship for San Andreas Capital and an invite to the finals and the happy hour networking session after.
The event took place on a Saturday night, in a hotel ballroom, with a large stage and a screen almost as large. The energy was electric, a mix of nerves and hopes and a feeling like futures could turn on the success or failure of these moments.
The audience included start-up founders and investors and students, and a smattering of bloggers. The geek factor was high in the crowd. Most in attendance would rather talk about the future and extremely obscure details of their work than themselves. Adeline felt strangely at home.
One presentation midway through the night impressed her more than the others. For its founder’s style more than the company’s substance—which she knew little about.
The company was called speedio, and the founder and CEO was standing on the stage, hands held out, his voice monotone.
“Hi, everyone. We’re speedio.”
On the projector screen, a picture appeared of a thin, toned man walking on a beach wearing nothing but a Speedo.
The presenter faked a pained expression. “No, not that kind of Speedo. Speed-i-o. As in speed.io—your website’s only hope of survival.”
The image changed to a picture of Keanu Reeves on a bus, leaning over Sandra Bullock, who was driving.
“Since I know you pack of animals have the attention span of a rabid squirrel on meth, I’m going to lead with this: if your website drops below a certain speed, your whole business blows up—like Sandra Bullock’s bus in an amazing movie that we’re going to pretend has no sequel.”
On the screen, the image changed to a bar graph.
The presenter shrugged. “I hook you with memes. I close you with graphs. Here’s what this one means: it’s the bounce rate on the average home page on the web. For pages that take two seconds to load, on average, 9.6 percent of visitors bounce—or leave. If your page takes four seconds to load, you’ve lost 17.1 percent. Six seconds.”
He inhaled sharply.
“I don’t like to even think about this fact, but I will use it to get your money. At six seconds, 27.4 percent of visitors roll out. Gone. Poof. Probably for good. There’s very likely an Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, Gone in Sixty Seconds joke in there somewhere but I’m too lazy to dig for it, and I’m already seeing some glassy eyes, which means that, sadly—and ironically—the presentation for a company that speeds up information delivery isn’t going fast enough.”
That brought a bout of laughter from the crowd and sent the guy clicking forward a few slides. “If you’ve got technical questions, hit me up in the Q and A. I’m here for you. For now, let’s just keep it simple: we speed up websites. Fast websites keep their audience and make money. Slow ones—well, no one knows what happens to slow web sites because no one knows about them. We have a free tier for small websites, and we charge for large sites. We’re generating revenue, and we need money to scale ’cause it turns out making your website really fast takes a ton of servers and almost as many coders wearing very huge headphones and drinking very skinny Red Bulls.”
The next slide showed headshots of the company’s founders.
“Here’s the requisite ‘our team is awesome’ slide with credentials that prove we’re legit enough to date your rescue dog.”
The image changed to bar graphs and years written under them. “And finally, our total addressable market is huge. As in, the whole internet needs to go faster, and we get paid to do that.”
The final slide was a picture of a black man sitting at a very old computer terminal. Adeline didn’t understand it. Apparently, some others didn’t either.
“For those of you meme ignoramuses out there, this is Richard Pryor in the movie Superman III, which taught us everything we need to know about high finance: if you take fractions of a penny a bunch of times, you get a whole bunch of pennies and eventually dimes, dollars, and gold-pressed latinum, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what we do—we make a very, very small amount of money every time we make a web page load faster. Thus, the Superman III business model. And with that, I cordially, unabashedly, while making eye contact, invite you to deposit your cash money into my Speedo.”
The last line brought a wave of laughter and applause. As the questions began, Adeline decided that the CEO of speedio was smart and funny and probably a little overconfident and all the things she had been missing in her life. His name was Nathan Hill, and Adeline didn’t know if he was part of Daniele’s past, but she decided that he was going to be part of her future, even if it broke causality, because she couldn’t take being alone anymore.
For that reason, she sat through the Q and A, unsure what some of the questions meant.
“So,” a venture capitalist in the front row said, “I get how you speed up static assets—images, flash video, Java applets—but how are you handling dynamically generated pages? Say, an ASP.NET web form, for example. The ViewState is going to be different for potentially every visitor.”
“Yes and no,” Nathan said. “Even for a web form, the vast majority of the page is static—we can compress that. Same for the ViewState even. Have you ever seen some of the names on these .net controls? Like, what are the developers thinking? It’s like a haiku poem or something. We take a name like txtLastNameGrandParent1 and change it to c18—assuming it’s the eighteenth web control on the page. That’s like twenty bytes saved right there. We change the name back when we post the form data to the originating server for server-side processing. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you save twenty characters for every control on the page, those bytes add up, like fractions of a penny in Superman III.”
After the event, Adeline approached him at the bar.
“Hi.”
Nathan stooped to read her name tag. “Daniele Danneros. San Andreas Capital. Not familiar, but nice to meet you.”
She gripped his hand. “Likewise.” She stared into his eyes. “I’m interested.”
“Okay. Wow. Nice. What size investments does your fund typically make?”
“I’m not interested in investing.”
*
They had dinner the next night in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that had excellent chips and even better margaritas. About halfway through, Nathan dropped some of his bravado—but not all—and Adeline got to know the real him, the one he hid from the people at work and the venture capitalists on the phone.
For the two of them, from then on, being together was effortless. Adeline thought one of the reasons their relationship worked was that it never got serious enough to interfere with either of their true passions. For Nathan, it was his company. For Adeline, it was the future. Those two things were, sadly, the main attractions in each of their lives.
But the relationship was enough to help Adeline hang on, until the fall of 2018, when an alert popped up on her computer. It was a notification for a video she had been waiting ten years to see—a video that would start it all.
She clicked the link and sat back as it played on YouTube.
In the clip, Elliott was standing on a stage with a picture of a spiderweb behind him.
“Thirty years ago, scientists at CERN invented a web that changed the world. That web we all know today. We surf it on our phones and tablets and computers. But there’s another web waiting to be discovered, one far more important. It connects to you and me and every atom in this room. The web I’m talking about is, like the World Wide Web, unseen and extremely powerful. This web is a quantum mesh created by entanglement. And it’s going to change the world. Even more than the last web.”
*
Adeline waited two days before she sent her email.
Dear Dr. Lucas,
I saw your lecture on the quantum web at CERN. It’s fascinating. In fact, I think your theories could be applied to create a technology with incredible potential.
I’m the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital fund. We’re small, but we have extensive capability—and capital to deploy.
At your earliest convenience, I’d like to discuss the possibilities.
Daniele Danneros