The Start-Up Read Online Free Page A

engineer. It wasn’t just the fact that countless hours were for nothing, but that you had to retrace your steps, take a break from the momentum you were building for the next thing, and go back and reprogram something from the past. At moments like those, no call was necessary to alert the room about what was going on at your station; the person next to you would realize it and send an instant message to everyone in the room. Then everyone would stop, gather around the computer scientist in crisis, and repeat the mantra, “If your computer never crashes, you’re not working hard enough. Or you’re an idiot.” Everyone would then pat the crash-victim on the back and he’d laugh and sigh and get back to work.
    It was in this room that Amelia felt, for the first time in her life, really at home. The sound of tapping computer keys and the sight of line after line of zeroes and ones and Courier typeface up and down the screen and the steady heat and buzz of computers running were all familiar and good.
    Her favorite computer stall was in the far left corner, at the end of the table, number eighteen. The front and right side of the desk were enclosed in a cubicle divider, but the left side was open to a floor-to-ceiling window that looked down from the third floor to the street below, and across to a popular campus café.
    Whenever she got stuck on her code, Amelia would gaze out the window and people-watch. She liked to observe how they behaved, how they interacted. She’d watch how walkers bumped into each other because they were looking down at their phones, punching text messages or trying to surf the web. She’d note the annoyance of a girl waiting for someone at the café across the street, checking her watch incessantly, or the nervous twitch of a student dressed awkwardly in a suit, interviewing for a job at a table inside.
    And every Friday at one o’clock, she’d stop to watch a Chinese couple that met every week for lunch, always at the same table. He was slim and tall, always dressed in khakis and a Polo shirt. The woman was petite, with long black hair, always carrying a pretty purse and wearing oversized sunglasses that she never removed. Amelia felt close to the couple, having watched them through various phases of joy and argument (they’d been arguing a lot lately), and gained a certain comfort in the steadiness of their routine. Today he’d brought her flowers and she’d hugged him with delight, but when she received a call midway through lunch, she’d left him sitting alone with the flowers at the table.
    That was almost twelve hours ago, before Amelia had made her breakthrough on this code. She’d taken an iPhone application class during her first quarter at Stanford and had been addicted to programming little games and shortcuts ever since. But this was the first time she’d tried to create a program that was totally original.
    Amelia paused. It was the end of her marathon programming session, when weariness ordinarily overtook her, but instead she was filled with a surge of energy. It came all at once, like a sudden break of sunlight in a cloudy sky, the awareness of just what she was trying to accomplish. To create something out of nothing, to forge a path through the frontier of Silicon Valley that nobody before had even considered.
    It’s the new things that change the world.
    “Hey, Amelia?” George, a junior, popped his head over her cubicle.
    “Just a sec, George.” Amelia didn’t look up as she typed furiously, squinting at the screen in front of her.
    George waited for several minutes while Amelia finished a line of code.
    When he saw she was slowing down, he went on. “I’m going to go grab a slice of pizza and wondered if I can get you anything?” George was tall and lanky, with a mop of curly brown hair and wire frame glasses. He almost always wore brown corduroys and a Google t-shirt he’d gotten for free during his internship there last summer. He’d been hugely kind to