Typical Day
Apollo Plectic will never get skin cancer. He's been pale his whole life. He's an indoor kind of guy. He fiddled with things in his parents' garage since he was five; he chose toy computers over riding bikes with the neighbor kids. He was…different. Socially awkward. Kind of strange. And he didn't mind that status a bit. Very Big Bang Theory.
So when it came to making intellectual leaps, betting on new things, trying things that nobody had yet tried before, the process felt natural. Over a decade of trying (yes, from age five to age fifteen), he had developed a pattern recognition system that was vastly sophisticated for his age. He was able to figure out what experiment would work and what would fail within five minutes' worth of trying.
The speed of analysis that he had developed enabled him to fail often—and cheaply. That combination was golden in the Silicon Valley where he was reared.
By age seventeen, he had built a small iPhone application that he sold for $350,000 to Google. He paid taxes and a few expenses he'd incurred along the way and had earned enough to pay fully for college at Stanford. But he didn't have to—he had won several academic achievement scholarships, and his degree—which took him only three years to finish—cost him little.
Along the way, he met a bunch of smart classmates and bonded in particular with one individual. The two of them ended up partnering to begin his new Big Idea:
Doyouknowwhereyourparentsare.com
The concept originated because of his wild neighbor having been grounded after her last party. His bedroom window overlooked hers. On her sixteenth birthday, she waved at him. It was the most social activity he'd had his entire life. The need for his new product reached him deeply.
Specifically, this software attaches (silently) to parents' phones (cleverly, it requires that the phone be the bill-paying one), and then tracks it. The system makes the phone publish back to the web cloud its GPS coordinates, which are then translated and mapped to Facebook and other pages so that kids can track their parents' every move, like stalkers.
However, the product is cleverly titled, "Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?"—and there is reciprocity. Only there's a fairly easy toggle switch to turn it off. (ACLU got huffy early.) However, most parents don't know how to turn off things. So kids have privacy; parents don't. And kids are actually encouraging Mom and Dad to buy it.
The mojo is so strong that they have sold a million units at ten bucks each with a ten buck a year renewal fee. Their world is turning into a real business.
Apollo and his partner Narcissus Narkington have seen the dough roll in. Originally, it was just the two of them coding all day long. That is, they write computer program code mostly in Java and Javascript with some of the app-specific elements in C#. These were languages that they learned in school and then in working/renting their services for hire to some corporate clients along the way.
They hadn't raised outside capital from venture capitalists because Apollo had made that small win in the app he sold to Google. But now with $10 million in revenues on their docks, they were being bombarded by venture capitalists all wanting to invest big money in them and their company.
So after coding from 9:00AM to noon, with eleven separate product tweaks and enhancements along the way, they were both trying to get out the door. Apollo "takes lunch" with a venture guy.
Fancy lunch. Lots of ego stroking. The VC pounds his chest a bit about how great the deals were that he had done and all the great people he knew who would be at the beck and call of Apollo and the gang. Apollo feels jaded—it was the twentieth meeting like this that he'd taken and he was starting to feel like all of these people were clones of one another; they all seemed to say more or less the same thing.
Lunch luckily ends in eighteen hours (er, one) and Apollo goes back to the office, where a distribution executive from Yahoo! was waiting in the hallway. Yahoo! wants to find a way to "do something special" with doyouknowhereyourparentsare.com in hopes of making itself look like a young-appealing, youth-skewing company again.
Apollo sits in his office and asks, "So, what do you want with us?"
The Yahoo! exec stares somewhat blankly, not really knowing what to say. He mumbles a few jumbles about a billion page views this and a hundred million page click-throughs that.
Apollo nods blankly. Yet another hour of my life I'll never get back. He wishes he had a business development exec to handle these "strategic" (meaning no money) meetings.
Apollo spends the next hour sifting through data that's come in from the computer servers on which he's billing, metering, measuring and diagnosing his customers, whether they know it or not. He clearly needs to buy the keywords "mom and dad grounded me" on Google, as that phrase is distributing a ton of traffic to his home page.
The next hour is spent dealing with complaint letters—a few from parents who discovered they were being tracked (he has a form letter that was a polite "then don't do it to your kids" note which he copies and pastes), and then a few complaining about the technology.
Those letters, he takes very seriously. He does his best to replicate the bug and, when he can, he sends the complainer a free t-shirt and a personal thank-you. Sometimes he offers them a job as a QA (quality assurance) tester.
There's no bedtime in this gig. No "stop." The servers run round the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year. So Apollo just goes to sleep when he's tired, which won't be for a few hours.
Big Bang Theory is running a marathon; he has it on background. There's no way he's going to bed until Leonard and Penny get together.