1. Talia #2
These Ideal Life “Friends” were inspired by Sam’s favorite book from childhood, The Golden Compass.
Each character in the series had their own distinctive daemon, which was like the person’s “inner self” in the form of an animal.
Sam had always wished for his own daemon and daydreamed what form it would take.
This is what Talia thought of when she wanted to create a virtual assistant for Ideal Life users. After all, why shouldn’t everyone have bespoke software, tailored especially for them?
Her Ideal Life Friend was a cartoon bee wearing a crown with a personality inspired by Queen Elizabeth, who would buzz into her Omni 3Ds’ field of vision when it wanted to help Talia.
Other users had created photorealistic versions of their grandmothers, or an anime version of a favorite teacher.
Ideal Life was hoping to make licensing deals in the future with Disney for their Marvel superheroes and animated movie characters.
In any case, Ideal Life’s customers loved being able to design their own virtual Friends—it made the suggestions to remediate their lives so much more palatable and felt truly personal.
That popularity of Ideal Life Friends in augmented reality was what had piqued Omni’s interest.
When one of Talia’s early investors had called to tell her that Omni was thinking about acquiring Ideal Life, Talia had literally fallen out of her chair. She’d nursed the bruise on her hip for over a week afterward, but it had been worth it.
Because if—when—Omni bought Ideal Life, it wouldn’t just be one of many third-party apps on the smart glasses. Omni would integrate Talia’s technology through all of Omni’s global social media and communications functions. That was 3.5 billion people.
Which meant Talia’s childhood dream of making the world a better place was finally coming true.
Sugiyama—the eponymous restaurant of the world-famous chef—was sleekly elegant, all white marble floors and high ceilings and gold accents on the wall sconces.
Deep, cream armchairs surrounded tables made of dark walnut.
And in the center of the restaurant on a raised platform was a glass sushi bar, where all the diners could watch the chefs slice perfect slivers of fatty tuna and delicate yellowtail that had been flown in overnight from Tokyo’s famous Toyosu Market.
The second Talia and Sam walked into the restaurant, glasses of champagne were put into their hands.
She would only fake-sip tonight—male business leaders were allowed to drink heavily and slur speeches and still be declared geniuses, but women were held to a higher bar.
Whether fair or not, Talia had learned that her success depended, in large part, on understanding what the unspoken rules were, because what mattered the most to her was expanding Ideal Life’s reach so she could help more people.
If she had to sacrifice a few glasses of champagne along the way, so be it.
Sam, on the other hand, took a long gulp of his.
“You doing all right?” Talia asked. “I know this is a lot of people.”
“I like people. It just takes a minute of adjustment.”
“We can hover here together as long as you need.” Talia had been dragging Sam out to events their entire friendship, so she was very familiar with the brief transition phase he needed to shift from living in his own head to being in the real world.
If allowed to, Sam could spend a lifetime happily lost in thought, pondering philosophical questions or logic puzzles or immersing himself in the fictional realms of books he read.
He was neither introvert nor misanthrope.
It was more that his extreme intellectual curiosity made him introspective, and he spent the majority of his time thinking or having debates in his head.
Shifting into “public mode” with other people for company (besides himself) required a minute, and Talia had always been the best facilitator of this because she understood him.
Sam drank a little more of his champagne but left about half in the flute. “Here,” he said, reaching for Talia’s glass. “Let’s swap.”
“Aw, an almost-empty flute,” she fake-cooed. “This is the best celebration gift you could have gotten me.”
“Oh, hush,” he said. “It’s just the right amount so that no one will try to refill it, but not so full that you’ll get teased for not drinking.”
Talia shook her head and smiled. “Sam Chang, you are my favorite person.”
He shrugged. It was effortless between them. Always had been.
Ryan Higashi, general partner at Luminary Innovation Fund and the very first investor in Ideal Life, approached them. “Ah, the woman of the hour!”
“Sorry,” she whispered to Sam. “Incoming, and I can’t stop him.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s do this party thing,” she said.
These moments with Sam had helped Talia shake off the last of her nerves.
Now she put her game face on, the one that said I am a strong, confident, brilliant—but not bitchy—woman.
It wasn’t an easy face to perfect, because the conflicting demands and “requirements” on women these days were myriad.
But after much trial and error over the years, Talia had the formula down:
1) Smile just enough that it met your eyes but didn’t crinkle them. (Too big a smile was interpreted as ditzy. Too little of a smile and you could be labeled cold.)
2) Hold eye contact for two and a half seconds. (Two seconds or less made a woman seem flirty or subservient. Three seconds or more was much too intense.)
3) And always say your conversation partner’s name warmly in greeting. (Saying their name would make their subconscious feel validated and, therefore, important, and the goodwill would transfer back to you.)
“Ryan, hello! I’m so happy to see you here.
” Talia shook his hand—firmly but gently.
(Limp fish hands signaled a weak woman unworthy of leadership.
But too hard sometimes scared men away, although Silicon Valley was more forgiving—here, the merit of your ideas carried more weight than your gender.
Usually.) “May I introduce you to my friend Sam Chang?”
“Sam, a pleasure. I know you just got here, but do you mind if I steal Talia from you? We’re doing photographs for the press over in the corner with all the investors and the Omni team.”
“No worries,” Sam said. “I want to go watch the sushi chefs anyway. Have fun.”
As Talia and Ryan crossed the restaurant, they were stopped half a dozen times by people who wanted to congratulate her.
Finally, though, they made it to the far side of the room, where a backdrop with Ideal Life’s purple star logo alternated with OmnisZcience’s name, written in simple blue font.
Omni was so well known they didn’t even need a symbol. The name was logo enough.
Ideal Life’s investors chatted over glasses of wine with a couple of Omni executives and several people Talia didn’t know.
“Hey, Talia, good to see you.” Raj Banerjee, head of Omni’s artificial intelligence division, shook her hand. “Let me do introductions. You know Melanie Goldschmid, product lead for Omni 3D.”
“Of course; thank you for coming tonight.” Talia smiled and gave Melanie a warm-yet-professional hug.
During undergrad, they’d overlapped for a year in Kimball Hall, one of the upper-class dorms. It wasn’t unusual to run into classmates in Silicon Valley; Stanford students often didn’t go too far after graduation.
“This,” Raj said, gesturing to the man next to him, “is DeVon Robinson. He’s head of media relations for Omni.
And he’s to blame for this circus of journalists getting invited tonight.
” Raj and everyone else laughed as he pointed at the three other people with them.
“That’s Jesse Fogarty from TechCrunch, Kristin Santos from The Wall Street Journal, and Rich Zherdev from Wired.
Laura Owusu from the San Francisco Chronicle was supposed to be here, but she got stuck in traffic on 101, so she’ll be here late. ”
Everyone groaned in commiseration at the mention of Highway 101. If it wasn’t rush hour, it was something else, like a new pothole that suddenly cracked across three lanes or construction… again. Frankly, it was more of a surprise when there wasn’t a snarl on 101.
DeVon waved over the photographer he’d hired to snap photos of the event, and she shot some pictures of Talia, Raj, and Melanie in front of the Ideal Life / Omni backdrop, with some variations that also included each investor group.
Then the reporters were given the opportunity to ask them a few questions.
“Why did you create Ideal Life?” Jesse from TechCrunch asked.
Talia talked about her parents’ past struggles and their recent transformation, thanks to Ideal Life.
“Omni has been on a startup acquisition spree,” Rich Zherdev from Wired said. “Why is Omni interested in this one?”
Raj—who was well versed in corporate jargon—said a bunch of specific yet vague stuff about “pushing technological frontiers” and “forward-looking innovation” and “integrative, collaborative synergy.”
Kristin from The Wall Street Journal leaned in. “It’s unusual to celebrate a potential acquisition at such an early stage, when there is still a lot of due diligence to be done and the deal might fall through. So why are we doing this tonight?”
DeVon laughed and clapped his hands together. “Well, I think it’s important to celebrate important milestones. Plus, Omni truly believes in Ideal Life, and we want the world to know about it.”
Talia read between the lines. All the major tech companies had been neck and neck in competition the last few years to continually demonstrate their superiority and ability to expand into new fields.
Omni was using tonight’s party as another way to broadcast that they were still on top of their game, despite being a dinosaur in the industry, having been founded in 2004 (which might as well have been the Mesozoic Era in Silicon Valley time).