Founders Less Than Three is a funny, sexy, office romance about a fictional accelerator program in Cambridge, MA where five female founders and five male founders compete for funding and fun.

Praise for Founders Less Than Three: 

Smart, funny book reveals new world of tech startup…
“…This story moves lightning-fast (definitely feels like a smart romantic comedy) but the well-chosen details place the reader solidly in… startup ground zero…Highly recommend.”

an excerpt from

Founders Less Than Three

by Halley Suitt Tucker

1

Getting In

Once upon a time there was an accelerator named Celery. No, I suppose that’s not quite the way to start my story. But there really is an accelerator program in Boston called Celery. It’s a jumping joint where geeky folks come together to start new companies, meet mentors, find financing. But the best stories start with boy meets girl, don’t they?

So, it all started when I met Nick Belden. He was a nerdy geek with big glasses who never thought any girl would give him the time of day, until he founded a startup company, then suddenly he was famous.

But I didn’t know who he was. I was just being nice. I nearly ran into him on my bike on a side street, off University Avenue in Palo Alto, California. He had a flat tire and was holding the wheel in his hands, examining it as if it were a mysterious invention. He turned to look at me as I rode by, my blonde braids hanging out the sides of my helmet. I was wearing a red polka dot dress and going to a birthday party. He was blocking the path in an annoying way.

“Hey! You nearly slammed into me,” he said.

“Hey! You’re blocking the whole road,” I said. “What happened to your tire?”

I got off my bike and took the wheel away from him.

I spun it and found the problem pretty easily.

“Here,” I pulled out a nail and handed it to him.

I got my Park tools and patch kit out of my backpack. My dad had taught me to fix bikes and I always carried my tools with me.

“You’ll need a patch,” I explained and made him one. I worked quickly and silently. He seemed amused to watch me work.

“Who are you?” he demanded in a rather confused way.

“What, you’ve never seen a girl fix a bike? My name is Monica.”

“Monica What?”

I ignored him as I finished what I was doing. I got the feeling people jumped when he asked them questions.

“I asked you, Monica Who?” he said.

“I’m just Monica. Monica, the girl who fixed your bike. Who are you?” I said returning his bike to him. I wiped my hands on a rag I carried.

“Nick, ah, Nick Belden,” he said.

“Nice to meet you Nick. Take it to a shop soon and get it trued up,” I told him and rode off.

An hour later, he walked into the same party he’d made me late for. The birthday girl introduced us.

“Monica Kroy, this is Nick Belden,” she said.

“You mean, Monica the girl who fixed my bike? Let me see your hands,” he said. “No bike grease. Impressive.”

My friend was looking at me strangely, like this was a big deal that he was talking to me.

“Nick’s running a hot new startup,” my friend, birthday girl gushed.

“Monica wouldn’t be interested,” Nick said, “It’s got nothing to do with bikes.”

“Actually she’s a whiz at coding. She went to Caltech,” she told him.

“Really? We’re hiring. Here’s my card,” he said.

I nodded, slipped the card in my jeans jacket pocket.

“Gotta go fix another guy’s bike, catch you later,” I said and ducked out. Later I tossed his card in the trash on the back porch.

I was in full crush mode on some other guy, so I ignored Nick most of the evening. It ended up crush guy worked for Nick, and as I started hanging out with him, I kept running into Nick, at his company, at a local coffee place, at parties.

Nick was charming, but no prince. I was 20 and he was 40. Nick was becoming Silicon Valley royalty and kept calling me and trying to convince me to come work for him. I finally agreed. A week after I started, he fired the guy I liked. Nick didn’t know that things had already cooled down with the crush guy and we were just friends. He actually did me a favor, letting the guy go. I settled into my job and kept ignoring Nick.

Other guys asked me out but I said no. I had changed my mind a little. I was kind of getting to know and like Nick. But I didn’t want to lose my job over an affair with the boss that could end. Girls did dumb things like that all the time. I didn’t want to.

I’m a girl who grew up believing it was okay to be a totally nerdy blonde girl on a farm in Manteca, CA, who would some day start her own high-tech company. Manteca isn’t the cool part of California; it was the hot, inland part. My dad made me believe I could do anything. It was an unlikely place to start believing in that dream, but he was good at making me believe in anything.

I had a Cinderella story going, in a way. I grew up on a farm, not rich, but in a working-class family. We even had chickens. But instead of waiting around for some Prince Charming to show up, I decided to take things into my own hands, learn how to write some code, go to school in computer science, create a company, and change the world, even though I was from an unknown town like Manteca, which by the way means “lard.” It’s a crazy thing to name a town. Bad branding. It’s an agricultural Garden of Eden in a way, a part of California with peach orchards and almonds trees and tomato fields and grape vines, which makes it feel as far away from Silicon Valley as the moon.

Nick was getting bolder, texting me funny messages and leaning over me when he was showing me stuff on my screen, teaching me Agile Programming, you know, romantic stuff like that.

So I guess, he just talked me into it. He decided he was going to make me love him one way or another. He did all the romantic things geeks are good at doing. Engineers are seriously sexy and very romantic. They have the best brains anywhere and that’s the way to turn a girl on. Nick knew how to get me smitten. He took all the time in the world to listen to me and teach me things. We talked about every new company, every programming language, every new device and we stayed up late with good California wine many wonderful nights talking about the future. I really fell for him. It was a fun time. Riding the roller coaster to the IPO for his startup and getting to be his main squeeze was a thrill.

We founded a second company in 2009, but it wasn’t taking off as fast as the first. That was more about being early in mobile and the lousy economy. By 2012 things at the company were getting a little better, still, it hadn’t been a piece of cake. We’d had a few years of slogging along, the regular hard work of it, not at all glamorous, but necessary. And lately, my now famous husband was getting tough to deal with. He wasn’t very nice to me any more. He didn’t seem to have the time. Didn’t seem to want to bother. I was beginning to think Nick was the wrong guy for my story.

By now, I was 32 and Nick was 52 and I’d always wanted the same thing he had, the same thing most of the guys in the Valley wanted. I wanted my own company. But I also wanted something he didn’t have and didn’t want. A baby. I guess I changed my mind one day between 20 and 32. It happens. But Nick hadn’t changed his mind. He made it clear he didn’t want one.

So over breakfast one morning, I saw a blog post about accelerator programs around MIT and I thought I might like to try one of them out. The article explained what accelerator programs were, a kind of summer camp for entrepreneurs, but not necessarily in the summer, giving them money and mentors and six months to try to launch their company. People knew Celery; it was getting some good press. It wasn’t as famous as Y Combinator or TechStars, but it was respected.

I showed it to Nick. He seemed politely encouraging. So I applied to the program and waited to see what happened. I thought I might have a chance. I needed a chance. I applied in September and they said we would be notified by the last day in December.

It was two weeks before Christmas and the Bay Area was having a heat wave. I remember what I was wearing that day, a blue cotton summer shift, knee-length, and a tiny white tee shirt underneath. I was dressed for a day at the ocean. But this would be no day at the beach.

I remember the weather in Palo Alto that morning; it wasn’t breezy and fresh as usual, but actually hot. I had my blonde hair up in a ponytail, to keep it off my neck. I was wearing grey Converse sneakers and white gym socks.

I went into the office early, leaving Nick home to meet one of his “guys.” He often worked at home to meet one of his many house buddies: the plumber, the roofer, the electrician, or the contractor. I could never keep track of them.

I was at my office. It was about 7:30 a.m. and there weren’t many people at work yet. My lead programmer Puff was already in. The rest of the team had just left, after working all night. I was waiting for a special email. Today could be the day. Nick was getting on the conference circuit, getting famous since his first three startups had done well. People knew the name, Nick Belden. He could get a table at a cool restaurant. It might help me get into the Celery program. It might not.

Lately, he was complaining a lot about stuff I did. And he was realizing I might actually get in and then really go to Boston.

“How the fuck am I supposed to manage without you?” He loved to use the F-word.

“Nick, relax. What are the odds … ?” I’d said.

I was the CTO of our current startup. Hell, it had been my idea and I had done the pitch that got us funded. That made it tricky if I actually got into Celery. Who would replace me? My top three coders, Puff, Sanjay and Ranji were seriously fine coders, and Sanjay was almost ready to step into my shoes. But not quite. The VCs had invested in Nick and me. It would get them nervous if I left.

We had gotten some good press just last month, hinting at a big valuation, so suddenly my husband had his old Berkeley buddies hanging around the office looking for jobs. At a party the other night, his friend Steve had “volunteered” to take my place, when the two of them were very drunk and being stupid. Steve didn’t have the chops. No way.

When I thought about it, Steve was suddenly hanging out at our place a lot. He was showing up at our office parties, dragging along that stupid model-pretty PR chick he was dating. Her name was Cindy, but she spelled it “Sendi.” He even talked Nick into hiring her.

On his birthday, Nick had promised me we’d go out alone, just the two of us, to a new place in San Francisco I’d wanted to go to and somehow we ended up with those two, Steve and Sendi, crashing our birthday dinner date. I didn’t want to spend Nick’s birthday with them. I wanted a dinner date with my husband alone. It wasn’t a lot to ask. Sendi the PR chick was telling another name-dropping story about someone she knew at Facebook. The hostess brought over a blue birthday cake for Nick. Blue, hmm, it reminded me of a free Viagra sample he tried a few months back. That didn’t go so well. The cake had a straight line of candles, some on, and some off.

“I asked them to do it in binary for you, Nick,” Sendi gushed at my husband.

Yes, it was supposed to be fifty-two in binary — 110100 — six candles with the first two lit, then one off, then one on, then one off, but the last one was lit which actually made it fifty-three. Do the math, as they say. But she didn’t know crap about coding. She couldn’t have figured it out herself. Wonder who explained binary to her… they had done a great job.

Nick thought it was cute.

He actually said that word, “cute!” He never says that word.

I leaned over and blew out the ones digit.

“Now it’s fifty-two, it was fifty-three before,” I said.

I didn’t enjoy the birthday party. I really didn’t like the idea of Steve trying to take my place at work.

The office was surprisingly dead the next morning. Lately it was the place I’d rather be at dawn than in bed with Nick. This wasn’t a good trend.

The email from Boston had arrived overnight and was sitting in my inbox when I opened it. It was a YES from Celery! I read it, then jumped up and shouted, “Yes!” I printed it out. Old School, I know, but sometimes, nothing beats paper.

“And that means?” my coder pal Puff said. His turban looked sharp this morning.

“I got into Celery!” I said.

I handed Puff my phone, “Here take my picture.” I stood at the screen pointing to the email, as if you could see it. “I can’t wait to tell Sonya!” Sonya was my best friend and I wanted to talk her into going to Boston with me, to join me at Celery.

“Lovely,” Puff said, handing me back my phone.

“I gotta go tell Nick,” I said and headed for the printer room.

I headed out the side door, and took University Ave at a gallop. It meant I was going to Boston for five months, starting in January and ending in May on Demo Day when we would show off our companies and try to snag financing. I was so excited.

I ran up the street on that sunny hot morning, already hot even though it was early. It was more like half running, half skipping and half jumping up and down. I was going to run my own company!

Yes! It felt so good to run. Just like I used to feel when I was 12 and I spent the summers at the beach with my family, my dad giving me projects, asking me to invent stuff with him and we’d both try to build something with junk we found on the beach and see who came up with the better product. We were builders. We were makers. We were prototypers. My dad always made me feel like I could do anything, as long as I could just start building it.

My feet were strong and sure in my sneakers, flying up the street. I got to our driveway in about 10 minutes. I didn’t see any workman’s truck in the driveway, just a shiny little red VW beetle. The house was looking good. I realized I’d be a little sad to leave it behind. I flipped on my video and did a quick selfie video to show Sonya.

“Sonya, I got in, I’m going to Boston, but look at the house, I’m gonna miss it!” I panned over to the addition we’d just finished, past the red car, to the patio.

I teased Nick that he had bought the house just so he could have some real guy-type guys to hang out with, instead of geeks. Working men. Real men. Men who looked like they belonged on the covers of romance novels, tan buff hunks, sporting cowboy hats, carpenters’ belts, and big biceps. I couldn’t remember any of them having a red VW beetle; they were more the pick-up truck type. I ran into the house.

Nick wasn’t on the first floor. I called his name, no answer. There was a dull pounding noise on the second floor, but not like a hammer, more like furniture moving or maybe they were fixing a wall. I ran upstairs. I burst into our bedroom, “I got into Celery!” I yelled. Then I saw them.

There was my naked husband in our bed, with Steve’s alleged girlfriend, Sendi, the PR chick. What the hell? She was all tangled up with him, her skinny tan legs wrapped around his white butt and the soft pounding noise was him, my husband, on top of her, up to the hilt, maybe banging her head against our headboard.

Her toenail polish was bright blue.

She saw me and knew enough to make a squeaky gasp and some words that sounded like, “Oh my God!”

He didn’t see me at first, but then turned to look at me, his face hot, red, interrupted. I remember things — little things — like his expression. He didn’t look embarrassed or sorry. He looked mad.

“What the fuck?” he said, to me, his wife, like, “Why are you interrupting me while I’m busy screwing the PR chick!”

His red face and her bright blue toenails. It made me sick. I would remember those colors.

I turned around, took a few zombie steps, stunned, leaving our bedroom door wide open and then turned back, gripping my phone.

“Out! I want her out of here!”

“Shut the goddamned door,” she growled at Nick, pulling the sheet up around her.

He walked towards me, naked, slammed the door in my face.

I was dazed, seeing her, seeing him. And then a red-hot bolt of anger went through me. I turned to get out of there, just get out and get away from both of them and the slightly dank sexy smell to the clean, sunny street below.

I ran out the front door and across the street to my best friend Sonya’s place. I was in tears that left splotchy marks down the front of my sundress. I had the crumpled-up piece of paper in my hand.

“Oh my God, what happened?” Sonya said, at the door.

“I got into Celery,” I was crying.

“I know, but then why are you crying?” Sonya hugged me because she always knew when people needed hugs. She was short and came up to about my shoulder.

“I just found Nick in bed with the PR chick,” I said.

“No! The PR chick? I hate her!” she said. “He’s a bastard! They both are!”

“Yes! I’m going to kick his ass,” I said.

“Los traidores sucias!” Sonya went all Spanishy on me when she was pissed off. Her mom was from the Dominican Republic, her dad from Puerto Rico.

She brought me into the kitchen. Her computer was on the table. She got me a glass of tap water.

It was dawning on me. I said to Sonya slowly, “Oh my God, do you think that’s why he was wanted me to go to Boston… “

“You mean?” she said.

“Yes, that’s why he pushed me to apply to the Celery!”

“Crap! Like he wanted to get rid of you?” she said.

“She has blue toenails,” I said.

“That blue OPI color? Called, ‘What’s With The Cattitude?’ I do love that color,” Sonya said. “Seeing them, Senorita. It’s like a bad YouTube video blowback thing. It might be stuck in your brain like forever. Yuck!”

“Yeah. And a fake orange tan! Who does that in California?” I said and then I sort of stopped breathing. “And he’s gonna put his idiot friend Steve in my place at work!”

“This is bad.”

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said.

“What?”

“Hit him where it hurts!” I said.

“There?”

“No, I mean start another company that’s about a hundred times better than his. I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “You have to go with me.”

“Boston? It’s freezing and girlfriend, Latinas don’t do freezing,” she said, “and I’d have to quit.”

“Then quit, I can pay you. I can pay you whatever Google’s paying you,” I said.

“Quitting Google is cool now,” she said.

“It’s like quitting Harvard used to be,” I said.

“But what about that cute cook in the gluten-free café?” she said. She was kidding. We liked stalking that guy for fun cause he was so hot. And we liked eating his excellent polenta.

“Please go with me,” I told Sonya.

I grabbed my phone. I had to move fast.

“Ok, but I can’t leave for two weeks at least,” she said, “Monica? What are you doing?”

I was using my banking app on my phone, transferring a little money from our joint account to my personal account. Okay not a little, a lot of money. “Nick loves investing in startups. He just gave me a little bon voyage present,” I said. “We’re going to Boston.”

2

Getting Lost

Sometimes people make it easier to leave. Nick did. Cheating with the PR girl was bad, but in the morning on the way to the airport, I had four new discoveries. A close friend sent me an email telling me Nick had tried to get into her pants too. An ex girlfriend of Nick’s texted saying he’d been with her a week after we got married. The receptionist from his first company DM’d me on Twitter reporting he’d also slept with a different PR girl there and as if all that wasn’t enough, some girl at an accelerator in New York sent me Facebook pictures of her and Nick at CES the past January that were really pretty gross. I was mad, sad and glad I was leaving him all before 7 a.m.

Sonya drove me to the airport and headed into work. She planned to quit and join me in Boston two weeks later. She was usually good at cheering me up, but I wasn’t feeling too cheery. I didn’t tell her about the four new revelations. I just didn’t want to get into it.

It was a beautiful day out my little airplane window as I buckled in and started thinking about Nick. I was trying to understand how I had missed what was really going on with him. We’d worked so hard at the last company. I really wasn’t watching.

The pilot announced that it was 74 degrees out, but that we were heading into a snowstorm in Boston. Great. We were up and over Nevada by the time I started thinking back on how Nick and I met. I was just looking out the window as I crossed from west to east, trying to figure out how I’d married such a jerk. I’m not one of these women who think all men are jerks. I like men. I thought back on early days, how much I loved learning geeky things from Nick, how we’d talk until nearly dawn about Hex and Python and Android. We used to tell jokes about the Fibonacci Series, for goodness sakes. Those were the better times, when he took me seriously, helped me get into the startup world, showed me the ropes. So was it all just crap? Had he just been stringing me along (and all the other girls, too) not because he thought we were smart, but just because he wanted to sleep with all of us?

Sendi had staked her claim. That was the thing that bugged me. There were articles all the time about how women didn’t know how to compete like men in the entrepreneurial world, but no one ever pointed out the obvious. Women definitely knew how to compete. Unfortunately, they were competing against one another. When it came to fighting it out for the attention of certain alpha males, we never shied away from a good battle, without thinking twice. We could be cutthroat and shrewd, but why were we cutting each other’s throats instead of helping one another get ahead? Why didn’t we help other girls get inside startups and make sure we all got promoted to the important jobs, with seats on the executive team and finally, made room for one another in the boardroom?

And Nick? Had he encouraged this kind of thing in his company? I’d never thought of Nick as a philanderer. A cheater? I’d never believed he could do that. He wouldn’t do that to me. “Nick was no cheater,” I remembered saying that to a friend. Ha!

We’d been gaga for each other in the beginning. He asked me to marry him the first weekend we met. It got to be a joke, him proposing to me all the time. Then later, when he sold his first company and gave me a new Porsche, his lawyer thought it might be a good idea to draw up a pre-nup, just in case. I had a friend who went to law school at Berkeley and she reviewed it, adding in one of those cheating clauses, so if he ever cheated, he owed me big bucks. It was enough to really piss off Nick at first, but he finally agreed to put in a mutual cheating clause, which he insisted on calling the “good for the goose, good for the gander” clause.

I wanted to think bad things about him there on the plane that morning, I certainly was getting encouragement from all round to do so, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking of nice things we had done together. It seemed so sunny when I strolled down Memory Lane and turned the corner onto University Ave in my mind.

Bright yellow sun. And dark black sunglasses. That’s what I think of when I think of meeting him in Palo Alto. Blinding sun. Or maybe I was blind. Sunny happy Silicon Valley where the cool kids in black sunglasses and shorts and tee shirts roamed like wild animals imagining new ways of doing things. Kids who happen to be founders of companies you’ve heard of, builders of software you use every day and you probably think some adult invented. Well, an 18-year-old is legally an adult, right?

The bike shop. The Apple Store. The coffee shops. The rat-a-tat-tat crunch of a skateboarder tearing up the sidewalk. We were all so casual and cool and killing ourselves working 24/7 out there. Startup city. Even the names — try “Sand Hill Road” — it sounds like a day at the ocean, just bring your shovel and pail. Not exactly. More like, “Bring your A game.” A phrase I hate. The people who use that phrase seem to come from the camp where A stands for Asshole. It all looks cool and fun, sun and sand and silicon.

But don’t start thinking founders are having all that much fun. They are intense, serious people burning their brains over the next new thing, the perfect app, the big data mega-solution, even if they look all relaxed and casual in their cute clothes, madras Bermudas and the famous Adidas beach sandals with the black and white stripes. Don’t be fooled, they aren’t so relaxed.

Getting into Logan Airport, Boston looked grey and cold, the snow had ended and was deep, but Boston had one wonderful feature not noted in any guidebook — it was a town my husband wasn’t in! Yes, December in California meant I was wearing flip flops the day before, and now I was exhausted after a night of bad sleep and worry, but bundled up in wool and GORE-TEX, wearing my L.L. Bean boots ready to fight the elements and win in a town where Nick didn’t rule.

The pilot announced the fact that it was 20 degrees out, but with the wind chill, it was more like 12. One day ago Sonya and I were wandering down the street to get some frozen yogurt. Now this. I didn’t know from “frozen” yesterday.

I stood in the cab line, half freezing to death, and then finally got a cab into Cambridge. When we got to Kendall Square and I tried to pay the cab driver with my credit card, it was declined. That never happened. Maybe Nick had been up to no good. I scraped together enough cash from my purse, paid the guy and dragged my stuff into the lobby of the Marriott and stood near the concierge desk, as I pulled up my banking app on my phone.

My wonderful husband had emptied my account. I was broke. Great. I guess he figured, two can play at this game. I found an old credit card that was an individual account of mine and paid for the hotel. After I’d checked in and my stuff was settled in the room, I went swimming, hoping to forget the day. It almost worked. But even the pool was a bit cold and so was the air, nothing like my good old home sweet home of California, which suddenly wasn’t my home anymore.

I was thinking of how broke we were growing up and how I’d been given one of those pre-owned dresses for my senior prom. All night, I thought any minute some mean girl might come up to me and say, “Hey, that’s my dress!” I’m tall but it made me stoop a little. I don’t like the word “broke.” It makes me think of an old man in tattered clothes with a back nearly breaking.

After swimming, I felt a little better so I’d bundled up in all the clothes I could drag out of my suitcase and made the other plunge, out into the snow, in fact, into a full-on snowstorm. I made my way into Kendall Square, weaving through the streets of partly shoveled Cambridge to an ATM, where I could get some cash out of my personal account.

Kendall Square in January. Snow swirling up, snow blasting down the street, slapping the back of your neck, doing rude things up your skirt, if you were stupid enough to wear one. Nothing gets the heart racing quite like icy rain and having to leap chunks of snow every time you tried to cross the street. A chill that thrills some people perhaps, but not me. It only warns me to button up and keep moving.

It was like some video game set on a distant planet with whiteout conditions, but this was real and really cold, and you weren’t feeling like any Halo hero in this mess. It was “Beam me up, Scotty!” weather. Get me back to the ship or give me a new planet for God’s sake. Any planet. This one’s a loser. Bone chilling, wind whipping, seriously!

I rushed back to the hotel, not keen on doing much exploring. I was looking at the room service menu, thinking about the genius who invented that concept, wishing I could thank them when Sonya called.

“I did it,” she said.

“You quit?” I said.

“Yup and they didn’t like it. But Marissa said she understood.”

“I forgot you know her.”

“Duh, yeah,” Sonya said.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her I was going to Boston to be a co-founder in a new company,” she said. “She said that was awesome.” Sonya sounded so cheery.

“She’s right. Co-founder, shit, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t say that when I asked you to join me,” I said. “Sonya, will you … will you be my co-founder? It sounds like ‘will you marry me?’ ”

“Don’t mess with me girl! Of course, I’ll be your co-founder!” she said.

“Crap, I can’t even pay you. Nick took all my money,” I said.

“Yo, Monica, girlfriend! I’ve got money. Don’t you think Marissa treats us right? She showed all us girls how to take care of our pretty little assets?”

“Your assets,” I goofed.

“You betcha,” she said. “I’m buying in and you need money honey, you ask me. I don’t want you talking to that idiot Nick.”

“You’re the best, Sonya,” I started crying.

“Don’t be crying! You cry at anything.”

“I’m just happy and I’m freezing. It’s so cold here, I have to warn you, it’s insane,” I told her.

“What time is it there?”

“Already 10:30.”

“So just take a bath and go to bed!”

“Now you’re my friend, my co-founder and my mother?”

“You need all three, girl!”

She was right. I was wiped out and a bath and bed sounded good.

The next morning I woke late, thanks to the jet lag and the dark sky getting ready to dump more snow on my new city. I got bundled up again and by the time I got downstairs the snow was falling heavily. I asked the hotel doorman where MIT was. He pointed straight ahead.

Welcome to Boston. I headed towards MIT, thinking the offices of the Celery program were near there. I was outside the Stata Center at MIT, beautifully designed by Frank Gehry with that stunning slanted roof, corrugated and crazy, decidedly out of the box. They were surprised the slanty roof leaked? I was surprised the roof was still attached to the building in this weather! I checked out the local geeks going by like Inuits sporting fur-rimmed hoods and puffy coats in many colors. This town had great hats.

But who the hell named these streets? There were no simple street addresses. Instead, there was 1 or 2 or 3 Cambridge Center or 800 Technology Square, or on the MIT campus which stretched across many blocks, you’d have an address like “E39” as if that made it easy. How about a number address with a real street name, something simple, like 367 Addison Avenue?

I was twenty-four hours from a sunny Palo Alto afternoon, now lost in the Star Treky ice of Planet Kendall and an hour away from pitching my startup idea to the other new kids on the block— God knows which block— at Celery, the coolest accelerator program in the MIT hood. Cool. Or more like FRIGID! Except I can’t find the block and my GPS is doing me no good.

Next to me, outside the Stata building, I asked a guy waiting for a bus for directions. He looked like a professor. He was happy to help, pulling out his smartphone. He assured me, “It’s right here on my phone.”

But all his phone said was LOADING.

Great.

He started shaking the phone. Who shakes their phone, like it’s a saltshaker that’s gummed up? So maybe he’s not an MIT professor. There’s something poetic about thinking you can shake a piece of gorilla glass to get more data to fall out of it. Hello, Sir, it doesn’t work that way!

I said thanks and ran inside, out of the beastly weather. The building was warm and welcoming, beautiful spaces to study or meet, all curving around a cute café.

I stopped to ask another stranger — a tall, skinny Indian guy in shorts. Wait, shorts in a blizzard? I was dreaming of Palo Alto and he’s jones-ing for Punjab I guess. He showed me his cool tablet phone, I played along, like I’d never seen one, but I knew the guys who invented it.

He looked at the address seriously.

“Wait, are you at Celery? You in the new winter class of startups?”

“Ah, yep, except, I’m not there and I can’t find it.”

“My roommate applied but didn’t get in. Three thousand, nine hundred twenty-five people applied. Ten got in.”

“Sorry,” I said, trying to sound humble. “He probably had a great idea. Tell him not to give up.”

I sounded like a parent. This guy must be about 16. I’m 32 and he probably thinks I’m about 1000 years old here on Planet Wunderkind.

“It wasn’t such a great idea really. He kind of did give up, but he’s got a great gig now at Pinkberry.”

More frozen yogurt. All Artic, all the time, around here.

“I know where you’re going. I’ll take you. I’m Vivek1412. I mean, I’m just Vivek, but there are a lot of us at MIT, so I’m Vivek1412 now. “

“I’m Monica. Monica Bel… I mean Monica Kroy.”

Jetlag. I can’t remember my own name. Back to my maiden name after what my idiot husband did. Monica Kroy was easier and she sounded like a hot chick in a video game dressed in a black latex cat suit. I don’t look like that, but apparently I’m relatively hot for 32, since some young Android programmer told me so the other night at a party in Soma. Nice to know. Wasn’t feeling that way. He was likely very drunk.

A pretty girl in a bold blue sari wanders by. She’s sporting one layer of baby blue azure gauze and three gold stripes across the hem. Perfect for this weather. “Vivek, we’re gonna be late!” She is very beautiful, almost mythic. A goddess.

“Oh no, I forgot. I can’t take you over there, we’re busy doing something, um, wait, almost here … there, look at this map. It’s right opposite the post office, up on Main Street. Do you know where the Kendall T station is? It’s on that street.”

Oh great, that’s where I started. “Yes, actually.”

The goddess is impatient with him.

“Sorry I have to go. We’re getting married,” he says.

“Wow, okay, congratulations,” I said.

I head back out the door. Vivek is dragged off in the other direction by the goddess, but he pivots and points toward the T.

He forgot he was getting married today. Forgot? So all the MIT engineer jokes are for real.

The snow was getting very serious, blowing sideways, but occasionally falling in straight steady lines. I got back to Main Street and asked someone where the post office was, they say right, their friend says left, a girl with them tells me to ignore them and points toward the river. “Next to the flower shop.” It’s the first tip to orientation here. Just like Californians base things on where the Pacific Ocean is, this town is about the Charles River and the Atlantic.

I trudged along, feeling snow bunching up between my boots and socks, melting on my ankles. The streets were fairly empty. No one wanted to be out in this. There’s a nattily dressed guy in a black cashmere coat, double breasted, like a fancy lawyer, looks expensive. Handsome guy, dark skin and short close-cut afro like President Obama. He’s heading my direction. I was trying to read my smartphone again and there was snow falling on the screen. I nearly ran into him.

“That’s not going to work,” he said taking the phone out of my hand and brushing off the snow. “What are you looking for? You look a little lost.” Touch screen in a blizzard. And you have to take your gloves off to use it. Do California designers think about that stuff?

“Got that right,” I said, really sick of being cold and lost. “It’s called 1 Cambridge Center, whatever the hell that is. I can’t believe this place has no street names.”

He laughs. He pointed to a kiosk, not three feet from us with the large letters that read DIRECTORY on top. There’s an actual map behind the glass.

He points to 1 Cambridge Center on the directory map and then points to the building about 10 feet to the left.

“Ever get the feeling, thanks to all these geolocation apps, nobody knows where they’re going anymore?” he asks me.

He was right about that and I laughed, “Yeah!” He smiled a friendly smile. I liked this guy.

“I’m Marshall,” he shook my hand.

“Monica. Thanks,” I said.

“You’re freezing!”

“Palo Alto yesterday. Hard to get used to this kind of thing,” I say.

“Ah, yes. So it’s right in there. See you later, Monica from Palo Alto,” he turned the other direction, then took a quick left into a café called Cosi. I went into the office building.

I’m wondering why he said “later” when I’d likely never see him again. But mostly I’m rushing into a warm building and glad to be there.

It’s hard to start anything from scratch. And this is a cold start for sure. I could walk into a party of entrepreneurs in the Valley and know about half of them. But I was about to enter Celery pretty much cold. I’d have to meet and remember 10 startup ideas and 10 new CEOs at a minimum and their co-founders and their teams. I aimed for remembering three after this first meeting. Unless I write them all down, that’s about all I could hope for with my mixture of jetlag and frostbite. And no team yet. Sonya wouldn’t be there for two weeks and my coders are now likely stuck slaving away for Nick, since I never got a chance to talk to them about joining me.

I took the elevator to the sixth floor, see a sign with the word “CELERY” then head down the corridor to a large conference room with glass along one side and take my seat for the first meeting.

I’m too tired and frozen to be nervous I suddenly realize. The leaders of the program Suzy and Walt, are the only people I’ve met before, just once in California and even these guys aren’t all that close to me. I go up to shake their hands, sit toward the front and we’re ready to begin. There’s an empty seat next to me and after about five minutes, the same guy who gave me directions in front of the building comes in and sits next to me.

“Marshall,” he reminds me and reaches to shake my hand.

“Monica. I guess you said you’d see me later,” I say.

“Yes. I try to say what I mean,” he says.

He pulls out a business card, it has the Dr. Seuss lines on it from Horton. “I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant’s faithful 100%.”

I have to laugh. Suzy and Walter walk to the front.

She’s Samantha Bewitched 1960’s TV housewife pretty. Suzy’s a tall skinny blonde of the country-club-and-equestrian-team-Connecticut type. She even wears her hair in that 60’s style, shoulder-length and curled up at the bottom. I met her at a cocktail party in San Francisco through friends at Y Combinator. She and I had a bet, that a class that’s half men and half women CEOs will be their most successful yet. I’m glad she took me up on the challenge. The bet is dinner at Legal Seafoods at Kendall, which is downstairs and a few blocks away. Just don’t make me try to find it, after the kind of day I’ve been having.

Walter is even taller and skinnier than Suzy. He plays the bass fiddle in a jazz trio and makes that instrument look about the size of a ukulele. He’s a brilliant Ph.D. from MIT in something — I don’t remember — lasers, optics, security? He was a millionaire at 30. Does this for fun now. He actually wears a black beret like a jazz-playing beatnik.

“Welcome Class of Winter 2012. No speeches, let’s just get into it,” he says. “Who’s ready to give me their pitch?”

I heard a slight gut punch of air coming out of most of us. I guess many of us didn’t expect to be pitching our startup ideas for at least a few weeks from now. I have to give my philandering butthead of a husband some credit. It’s something Nick taught me — always be ready to pitch.

Marshall and I both raised our hands at the same time. We looked at one another and laughed.

3

Pitch or Die Trying

“I’m Monica Kroy from BrightLight. The world is all about mobile now. But there’s one big elephant in the room when it comes to mobile. You’re only as mobile as your battery life. Battery life stinks and with each new version of the iPhone or Android, or the iPad or any other tablet, we need more battery not less. We’re solving power source problems for cars. We’re building windmills. We’re going green, but we still haven’t solved power problems for mobile devices. Battery life still keeps us tethered to an outlet and we’ll never really be mobile until we fix that. BrightLight solves that problem.” I wasn’t telling them how it solves it quite yet.

“And do I need to tell you I had to ask three people in Kendall Square for directions and two of them lost battery power as they were trying to load their geo loco apps to help me out?”

I went on a little more, probably too long.

“We need power sources for our mobile phones, but what do we do all day? We run around, so we are nowhere near a convenient power source. We’re more mobile than our devices, until now. BrightLight is a power-generating fabric you can sew into clothing, backpacks, anything you wear or carry, that has micro solar-collectors, which are wired to charge your device as you go about your day. My co-founder and my team’s heading here from California soon.”

Thank God for Sonya, because my “team” was non-existent, thanks to a very quick exit on my part.

I saw someone make a face and I knew it was about using that dirty word “California” in Boston. Note to me: Whatever they say, they hate California here. Don’t mention it. And never say Silicon Valley, ever. I mean, “evah.”

I sat down and Marshall popped up, like we were on a seesaw or something.

“Yo!” he says.

The room is still a bit chatty.

“Yo!” a little louder this time. He commands attention. Quiet now.

“Yo,” he says in a very ghetto voice and then with a charming British accent, “Hell… O!”

People were won over by this goofy opener, by his smile, his presence, by his insistence they should listen to him. Also his excellent tailoring which fit his trim body perfectly.

“I’m Marshall Plum. My company is … “

We waited.

He punched a key on the computer and two very large words appeared on the screen behind him.

“KNOW HOW!” It says.

“Time to change geolocation forever,” he said.

“It’s not about getting there – it’s about HOW you get there.”

He didn’t show any other slides, just the big name of his company. Then he jumped right into it. KnowHow: a contextual app for geolocation. I sure picked the right guy to help me find this place. He was all about maps and what they mean and how to make good choices with them — not just let the GPS babe (Carmen Garmin he calls her) tell you what to do. His app lets you pick routes by context: scenic, fast, cheap, historical, big picture, shortcuts. If you’re taking the scenic route through the mountains or need to get from Vermont to Montreal by the fastest route or cross the border where the guards are easy-going or your crappy car can’t make it up an incline, his app gives you that kind of detail. Traffic overlay, sure, but lots more. Where did he start this project? As a Harvard Ph.D. student in physics. It’s got government and DARPA written all over it. He’s ex-Navy (and ex-CIA I’ll bet) and hails from “the DC area” which I figure means Northern Virginia more likely.

Marshall sat down.

“Thanks for the map reading skills, sailor,” I said. He winks.

We’re going boy girl boy girl in the intro pitches. Next up is another team led by a woman. Women in high tech is a sore subject since there are so few of us. Even for me, it’s so damned weird to be in a room of startups where half were led by women. It’s long overdue. I don’t think I can take one more innovation conference where every speaker is a man with the exception of one woman founder who comes from Asia, who happens to be married to one of the organizers. Promoting this kind of gorgeous exotic woman, via nepotism is apparently okay, but getting plain-talking American women running startups and being heard continues to be a challenge. Not okay with me.

I’m also sick of every startup accelerator program with nine male CEOs from California, except for one fashionista woman from New York who’s pimping a shopping app. Snore. She’s always hot and you get the idea she’s just eye candy for the VCs to check out, when they are sick of looking at male geeks. God forbid they take on a serious woman with a serious idea who might challenge their franchise.

Suzy stood up to introduce Barb. I’d heard about her. She’s a girl-next-door type redhead married to an MIT professor. He’s twenty-five years older than her, gossip has it (sounds familiar), and he’s a Nobel Prize winner. They must have some amazing dinner conversations. Her startup was called EverGrow. The “green team” is the way I’ll remember them. She’s got bright green skinny jeans on and an expensive well-ironed white button-down shirt. Green lace-up Converse basketball sneakers. No jewelry. Big black nerd glasses, likely from Chanel, they are so cool. Great sharp angled bowl-cut red bob haircut. Her team is Chinese — Bing, Bin and Lincoln, all grad students from MIT. EverGrow was a biotech research effort that’s “yielded an environmentally safe resin that allows trees to grow a new superwood that has steel-like strength but bamboo-level flexibility,” she explained, as if you hear about things like that every day. I made a check mark on my score card. Evergrow / Red China / Green Jeans.

After Evergrow comes MortalWarriors. They’re hard to miss.

MortalWarriors was a startup founded by ex-military guys. It’s some sort of video game interface for training new combat troops, which already had some nice funding from InQTel, the CIA venture capital group. Mortal still wants and needs to find big money, like we all do. The warriors of MortalWarriors wear camo fatigues. They have buzz cuts. Today the MW team is in green camo facepaint in splotches.

They brought their whole team and start cranking some music and all three start dancing. It’s Michael Jackson. Actually, wait … it’s Jackson Five. They have a PowerPoint that has three big letters on it: A, B, C! Now they show a slide for each of them: Adam! Bill! Chris! Their CEO Adam literally looks like a GI Joe action figure. He’s just about the most buff, wholesome, shiny clean American-looking Mid-Westerner I’ve ever seen.

“Seriously Caucasian, eh?” I scribble and pass the note to Marshall. He does a long, slow, up and down head nod.

After MortalWarriors danced their way into our hearts, no, more likely our minds, they explained their startup and then they’re off stage in a whirl of male military energy. “Sir! Yes! Sir!” Gaming software for military training.

After the ultra-American soldiers, we went to the Russians, then the Israelis.

The Russians are led by a very pretty woman named “Irina Tovarich.” I jot “Irina Comrade?” in my notebook because it sounds completely made-up. Gotta remember to ask about that. The company was called Slotnik, some kind of slot machine gaming interface to help people manage their finances. Maybe their target market is all new Russian billionaires. And Irina’s the one to deliver the message in a leopard-print mini dress and tall black suede platform pumps.

Slotnik’s CTO was a guy named Slava. He was big and sweet like a bear and has a round face and thick black hair. I wondered if Irina was his wife or something. He was giving her one thumbs up after each sentence she delivered. She looked very nervous, and with the very high-heeled platform shoes she was wearing, it looked as if she might just topple over. The dress was wool, maybe cashmere, very clingy in a good way, showing off her curves. The belt was wide black vinyl with a big buckle, cinched tight, as if to keep her together and keep her from exploding with nervousness. She held onto the buckle like it would save her life.

Next up is CrowdTrial, the Romanian-American team. We’d all been hearing about the many brilliant programmers in Eastern Europe and how Bucharest is the new Bangalore. The team has a CTO named Alex and a senior developer named Alexander, and another developer named Alexandre. Okay, but a little confusing. They went by the names Alex, Alexander and Dan (since his name is Alexandre Daniel Somethingescu.) Conveniently, Alex with the shorter name had very short hair, Alexander with the long name had long hair, Dan fell somewhere in between. All three were very good-looking guys. They explained how they use big data, with social networking and crowdsourcing to develop new ways to conduct clinical trials on medicines and therapies with their advisor, Craig MacDowney, an American guy who was a researcher at Mass General Hospital. They called him Mac.

The French team is supposed to be next, but their CEO had not arrived. Strange. The most important meeting of the session and the guy’s not here. Suzy gets up and explains Jean-Claude is stuck in customs and may be here later. Makes me think of Trey Ratcliff’s killer photo blog, called Stuck in Customs.

“Jean-Claude. He has a unique approach to solving an interesting problem,” she says rather seriously.

Maybe he’s curing cancer, solving world hunger or ending global warming. She went on and on about how great the missing-in-action Jean-Claude Longrée was. I asked Marshall what he knew about the French guy.

He showed me the results of a Google search and a picture of him.

“He’s hot,” he told me in a whisper.

Yeah, I could see that. Looks arrogant.

We moved on to the Israelis.

PatientPal was the Israeli team. They had a male CTO, Solly and a female CEO, Johanna. He started feeding her lines like she’s an understudy actress for the leading role and had only just arrived on stage.

Suzy made an exasperated expression, then interrupted.

“I know certain teams did a shuffle to make sure they had a woman CEO because that might help them get into Celery this year. It’s no big secret. But here’s the deal, guys. If she’s the CEO, she’s the CEO, not you, so let her be that. I don’t want any male CTOs running the company and turning their woman CEO into a figurehead, or just a puppet. Forget it. I still have a list of startups that want to get into the program and I can replace you. So Solly, you can sit down and let Johanna finish. I’m sure she’s more than capable.”

Solly looked a little crumpled and sat at the end of the first row. Johanna stood even taller and already looked about 100 percent happier to be free of him. This will be an interesting team to watch. Their product is “PatientPal” something for hospitals that keep patient records secure in the cloud, with security and redundancy software as well as a payment system that sounds a lot like PayPal. It ran on mobile devices and was actually way further along than the rest of us. It was built, working and they had … customers!

PortMoney was the next team. Named after a spin on the French word, “porte monaille” which meant “wallet” and the idea of it being portable. I think instantly, who’s going to get the French word? Nobody. This is America. Nobody speaks French. Nobody speaks any other languages, except Spanish. I only happen to speak French because I did a junior year abroad program there in Grenoble.

PortMoney was run by a pushy girl named Victoria from New York. I’m wondering why they didn’t wait to apply to the New York Celery program that starts later in the spring. You can see she’s pitching her biz to the guys in the room. At one point I catch her eye, I smile, she doesn’t smile back, but rushes on to talk in a flirty stupid way about her digital wallet app. “Yes, guys, I want to get into your pants and slip that leather wallet out of your back pocket, and put PortMoney in it’s place. You can trust me.”

I wrote a note to Marshall, “Didn’t Jack Dorsey already kill the payment space with Square?”

He tilted his head in a gesture like “you bet.”

Don’t forget the Aussies and XStream. They had a sports app to share and track extreme sports results, which they claimed was just so much better than RunKeeper or Gympact or a million other sports mobile apps. Their CEO was an adorable guy who would rather be jumping off cliffs with any variety of glider, wings, parachute. He was wearing a rock climbing helmet and harness, carrying one of those big ropes. His name was Chris Mooney. I wrote the “XStream / Chris Mooney/ Aussie Hunk” in my notes.

“Always handy to look like Hugh Jackman,” Marshall said to me quietly.

I agreed and rolled my eyes a bit. Didn’t seem fair to have to compete with someone like that.

We were winding down and they were going to serve us dinner in the main room, when the French guy Jean-Claude actually arrives from the airport.

“Nice of him to bother joining us,” I said to Marshall.

He was dressed in a black leather kimono-type coat and skin tight black leather jeans with a long studded chain from belt to a D ring above his knee. And you could tell, the stuff he was wearing was really expensive and looked amazing. He had a Louis Vuitton duffle. He was tall, very thin, with dark brown sleek hair pulled back into a ponytail, bangs in his eyes, and big black sunglasses at night. He carried it off, like someone just threw the clothes on him but he’d also be fine in a crappy tee shirt and jeans. Marshall leans over.

“Runway model in Paris before this,” he explained, like this is what all geeks did before starting companies.

I don’t like him. Looked just like that guy in the Chanel ad. What’s that eau de cologne by Chanel? Oh yeah, Égoïste!

“No way,” I said.

“Yes way, Suzy’s assistant, Roan, told me and he knows fashion.”

Things were seriously upside down. So there was a style and fashion startup in this group, but not run by a woman. It was run by a guy.

Jean-Claude did his pitch. Not too much of an accent. For a guy who looked so cool, he wore a big sweet smile, which was not the usual expression of boredom and ennui guys like him often wear. His app let designers geolocate, buy and sell fabric from distributors all over the world, but especially in France, Italy, the UK and China. It’s an arbitrage system for silk, wool, cotton and leather. The app was up and running, with customers. It was very beautiful. It was already in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese. He called it BSpoken4.

Jean-Claude talked about his company and also about the volunteer stuff his team did to help improve conditions for workers in factories in Asia. This guy was too cool for school. I might like him, if I didn’t dislike him so much. I know there must be a word for cocky in French; I just don’t remember what it is. After his presentation, he sits down across the room; Suzy starts talking about our pitching talents.

I scribble to Marshall. “And his boyfriend is Karl Lagerfeld?”

Marshall giggles, “Nah, he’s straight and married to a woman, but he does know Lagerfeld.”

“How do you know that?”

“The gay part or the Lagerfeld part? Honey, you understand that’s my tribe, right?”

“Marshall, I kinda thought you might be gay.”

“Not kinda, more like totally. So my gay-dar is finely tuned. I met him and his wife at LeWeb in Paris last month anyway, when Lagerfeld spoke. She’s from Bangladesh.”

“You don’t know Löic Le Meur, do you?”

“Honey, everybody who’s cool knows Löic,” he said and looked at me like this was obvious, “and I love Geraldine.”

I turned to check out fashion boy and he turned toward me, as if he could feel me looking. He looked directly at me, then burst into that big smile, like a big puppy dog, surprisingly sweet.

He raises one eyebrow at me, as if to say, “What are you looking at, lady?”

Zing!

I looked away.

4

Boys Are Back In Town

Winter in New England is best left glued on Christmas cards with cheesy little glitter for snow, one horse here and one horse there with their open sleighs dashing toward Grandmother’s house. They can just keep it. You couldn’t help wondering, how do people even do business here? There’s no running to the corner to grab coffee easily in this weather. Casual encounters like you had in Silicon Valley on a regular basis required a dog sled team around here.

After a few days in Boston, I was already sick of the freezing weather. Glad I liked hats. I found one in the local Nordstrom that looked more Russian than the Russians’ furry flap hats.

I’d been lucky as hell about finding an apartment. An old friend who was going to grad school at MIT was getting married and moving in with her fiancé, so she let me have her apartment in Porter Square near the T station for the next six months. The dash between the T and my place was 8.5 minutes if you ran at top speed to avoid the weather. After being in a hotel for too many days, it was good to spend the weekend unpacking and getting settled in. Finally, on Friday of the second week, the blessed day of January 18, Sonya arrived. Thank God.

I don’t think anyone at Google expected her to quit. Surprise! I put her up at my place for a few weeks until we had a chance to go look for another apartment for her. I didn’t like living with anyone I worked with, but was willing to do this for her for a while. We spent the weekend “slushing around” as Sonya called it. Sh