Startup

It's a near perfect contemporary novel showing us the curious and strange world of startups funded by twenty-somethings. World of morning raves, green smoothies, hot yoga, Snapchat. It's also a novel of an amazing women alliance, feminism, work ethics, and changing world of employment.

Startup is presented from three different perspectives. We have Mack who is a founder of popular wellness at work app TakeOff, Sabrina who works in that company. She's much older than the young crowd of twenty-somethings that work in the startup. She has two kids, and a husband who works in the same building as her, in a different startup TechScene. In TechScene works also Katya, journalist and daughter of Russian immigrants. The story also revolves around said husband Dan, and Isabel, an Engagement Ninja and Sabrina's boss.

The author perfectly shows us how the modern employment world works. She contrasts older generations with the youth - we have Sabrina, a mother of two, who works for a girl then years or so younger than her in a startup founded by a guy much younger than her. We see how unusual this work environment looks for the older generations, how much has changed in the attitudes towards work friends, and work life balance.

What I liked the most, and what was the key reason I decided to give this book four stars is the alliance of three women from this book. Sabrina, Isabel and Katya, all from different backgrounds, all with different agendas, decided to have each other's back and stick together. They helped each other, they didn't take man's word over women's word. They tried to find the truth. It was great to read about women helping each other, even though they are not best friends, and they don't have that much in common.

Startup is a fun book, that a lot will enjoy. Recommended read! Great observation of modern world.

**Review will be published to blog on 22 Apr 2017 at 10:00AM EST**

I chose this book because:

I'm interested in this book for the same reason I was interested in the TV show Silicon Valley. As a woman in tech and in search of a job, tech startups and corporations alike are of interest to me. Of course, this book is a work of fiction and I’m not doing going to do any research with it, but I am going to enjoy living through the working hard and playing hard, the glitz and glam, the highs and lows, without any of the consequences. Also, all that about “mindfulness apps,” “driving traffic,” and “viral”-ity is certainly relevant and is stuff I’ve noticed myself in this online world!

Upon reading it:

I thought this would be a quick, fluffy, YA-like read, and whilst it was a quick read for me, it didn’t feel fluffy or YA-like (YA-like, like where I’ll often find myself rolling my eyes and thinking omg this is so trivial, you’re being so dramatic and self-centered). I identified a lot with the young characters, and/or the young characters the older characters saw. The book pinpointed things I didn’t realise that I expected of and/or wanted from a workplace, and I found that especially in this quote:

"Mack thought he did a pretty good job of realizing when people were unhappy, and he did everything he could to prevent that. It was of course important that you felt fulfilled at work and felt like you had a good work-life balance. But the way people, Mack included, worked now, work was life. They expected their work to be fun and their fun to be work, and they didn’t differentiate between “work friends” and “real friends”; they assumed that the way things had been in college was the way things were in real life."

As a woman in tech studying at a women’s college, I am definitely aware of topics like racism and sexism in the workplace, and I found those topics in this book, and even the topic of ageism to a certain extent as well, which I think makes the story in this book feel more real. But what I liked most about how this book dealt with these topics is that it didn’t say them outright or get too preachy preachy. It dealt with these topics like how I might experience and deal with them. Unfortunately, cases of racism and sexism are far too frequent, and it is exhausting to get riled up about it every time. Unfortunately, they’re things we’ve gotten used to having to deal with. Unfortunately, we sometimes don’t even notice that it’s out of the ordinary. We might make a comment to acknowledge it, but then we move on because we have things we need to get done, the risks are more than we can afford, and/or the power structure doesn’t give us very many options.

Overall, I found this book exciting (as I anticipate my future career) and real. Not only that, but it also made me rethink my ideals and expectations of the workplace and what kind of impact I want to make in the technological world and also in general.

A fun page turner! Will be buying this for my library and recommending often!

BuzzFeed Senior Culture Writer Doree Shafrir skewers the New York tech industry in her new novel, Startup. Mack McAllister is a man with a plan. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is poised on the edge of greatness; if he can just get that next level of VC (venture capital) funding, he can roll out the next version of it and become a billion dollar business. In the meantime, he's the king of his world: an eligible bachelor, sleeping with eligible bachelorettes, including his Marketing Hero (managers are heroes, assistants are ninjas), Isabel, but he's not looking for anything serious. It's not like he's 30, for crying out loud.

Katya Pasternack is a writer with TechScene, a tech blog that's putting the screws to their journalists to get them to produce more. She needs a big scoop, a juicy story she can break wide open, so she can get out of fifth place on the leaderboard they've just put up at work. Her boss, Dan, takes an interest in her career - maybe a little too much of an interest, but he's ancient - he's, like, 39.

Meanwhile, Sabrina Blum, a thirty-something, exhausted mother of two, works for TakeOff, which happens to be in the same building as TechScene. She copes with her faltering marriage by shopping herself into a mountain of credit card debt and turns to more creative solutions when the cards start getting canceled. She works at TechScene because it's better than being home all day long with the kids, but her coworkers are a decade younger, single, and more tech-savvy than she is. This group works together, plays together, and, in Mack and Isabel's case, even sleeping together. Sabrina goes home and takes care of her kids - she doesn't fit in with "company culture" - while her husband (who's also Katya's boss) stays out, claiming to have worked late.

Things start going very wrong for Mack when he sends a very personal message to Isabel, kicking off a viral shitstorm that could ruin TakeOff. By virtue of where she works and who she works with, Sabrina gets caught in the middle; Katya sees her chance at getting her big break. The fallout's going to be huge.

I'm a veteran of late '90s Silicon Alley, and this book could have been written back in 1998 and I wouldn't have known the difference. Same mindset, same bullshit, smaller technology. The obsession with youth still holds; the idea that you work and play 24/7, with the same people is still there; the free food, the Nerf guns in the factory space open workplaces, it's all the same.

Shafrir's send-up of startup culture is witty; a biting satire, with deliciously catty stereotypes, from the spin doctors to the founder "I am Jobs, I am God" mentality. Everyone's terrified of turning 30, but at the same time, it seems SO far away that they can't comprehend actually being that OLD. She nails the exhaustion of keeping up with the pace of social media, technology, and the coworkers; she nails it with the entitled ideology of the tech culture. I liken Startup to Bonfire of the Vanities: you'll love the book, but you won't find one single likable character in here. It's a A delicious zinger to read on your commute.

The novel revolves around three characters. Journalist Katya works hard to keep her job in a tech blog even if her boyfriend - who doesn’t want her career to collide with his - and her boss - who seems to have more than professional mentorship in mind - don’t make things easy for her. Sabrina, a thirty-six-year-old mother of two, is still trying to understand how to work through social media and to make her marriage work. And Mack McAllister is a young entrepreneur who started a successful tech company and has to deal with investors and a complicated love life.
I loved the female characters in this novel. They are strong women who stand up for themselves and don’t let arrogant men walk over them. The author perfectly portrays the difference between two generations: the over-thirties who grew up before the internet and whose main concern is building a family and finding a house in the right school district and the younger generation, just out of college, who party all night, drink green juice and communicate only through an app. Set in an age where social media influences people’s lives, this is a funny, sharp, and absorbing novel about ambition, money, love, and family.

TakeOff is the hottest app that everyone is talking about. The app's founder is Mack McAllister who has visions of greatness for his app and himself. His startup has nerf-gun wars, an open office environment, and is the place that everyone wants to work. He has worked hard to land some Venture Capitalists who are going to give him lots and lots of money to take the app to the next level, that is if he doesn't get in his own way.

Katya Pasternack works for a tech magazine in the same building as the TakeOff crew and is looking for a story that will really launch her career to the next level. She is at a party when she happens to see the incoming texts of Mack's assistant, Isabel. They were not the kind of texts that a boss should be sending to an employee if you catch my drift. Katya knows that there is a story there, but is unsure if she should pursue it. In an industry that is still very much dominated by males, she knows that this story could either make or break her career. What will she do?

Startup is probably one of the most relevant books on the shelves right now. It seems like whenever there is a topic that is in the news a lot there are a lot of books that hit the market about that topic - like Ponzi schemes. Startup is the first book that I have read about the tech world. What makes this book so relevant to my life is not only the female characters in a male dominated world, but one of the narrators is a married mother of two who is in her late 30's in an industry dominated by youth. It was so easy to relate to Sabrina for several reasons, but mostly that "elder of the group" situation. Personally, I thought Mack was an egotistical ass and deserved everything that could be headed his way if Katya writes the story. There were a few times I found myself losing interest - just because Mack was such an ass - but I stuck with it to the end and I am glad that I did.

Bottom line - Startup is a fun read about an industry that doesn't get written about a lot. The author, a Buzzfeed writer, does an excellent job of exposing life in a mostly male dominated industry. It really makes for an interesting read.

Details:
Startup by Doree Sharir
On Facebook
Pages: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown, and Company
Publication Date: 4/25/2017
Buy it Here!

I love good wicked humor and this has that. It takes a lot to write a humorous novel that doesn't come across as spiteful. This is engaging, great and captures all the bro culture that I've been exposed to in the startup world!

If you are looking for a great work of contemporary fiction about the high-paced tech startup world told from the POV of the clash of 20- and 30-somethings, a Travis/Uber-like man-child that harasses women and the women who don't put up with this behavior, then this book is for you. Well done and taken from today's headlines and a great story too.

If you like your summer reads served with a hefty side order of tweets, selfies and slack channels, you will probably enjoy BuzzFeed writer Doree Shafrir's novel Startup, a darkly comic, smart and keenly observed cautionary tale set in New York's fast-paced, social-media-saturated tech startup world.

The novel opens at a booze-free, pre-breakfast Morning Rave in a gentrified factory in hinterland between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The young, the hip and the tech-savvy are all there to dance, network and post hashtag-hijacked selfies to their Instagram accounts. Present at the party are two twenty-somethings: Mack McAllister, the ambitious founder of a fledgling startup called TakeOff, and Katya Pasternack, a budding reporter struggling to prove her worth at online tech news outlet TechScene.

Mack needs to secure investment to launch the new-and-improved version of TakeOff app, a mindfulness app that scans your texts, social media posts and other data, in order to anticipate how you might be feeling at a given time and offer motivational suggestions to improve your mood. However, scaling up a small business into a larger, slicker operation — especially in New York, thousands of miles from Silicon Valley — comes with its challenges, and Mack himself, as a high-profile figure in the industry who has grand, perhaps even hubristic ambitions, is just one inappropriate text or tweet away from a crushing fall from grace.

Meanwhile, the founders of TechScene want the reporters to stop going for the low-hanging clickbait stories that bring in a steep but transient spike of page views and seek out the stories that yield greater engagement: repeat visits, comments, social media shares and 'scroll depth'. This is no mean feat when you can spend weeks reporting on a story only to be scooped by a single tweet spoiling the take-home message if you wait too long before publishing.

Fate brings Mack and Katya together a Katya accidentally stumbles on a potential lead that could secure her future at TechScene while destroying Mack's career. But nothing is straightforward in the incestuous New York tech world, where a reporter's boss might be married to someone who works for the company the reporter is writing about, and where publishing the story might also harm the reporter's relationship with her own boyfriend, who also runs a startup.

Shafrir's novel is sharp, fast-paced and all too familiar — particularly for anyone who works in technology, new media, social media or digital marketing. The point of view alternates between several key characters, some of whom are more likeable than others, but most are convincingly written. Mack sees himself as Steve Jobs, but others are less confident in his leadership and talent. He reminded me more of Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network; at one point, he literally clicks refresh in an app waiting for a response, mirroring the final scene of David Fincher's film. Katya, as the young, solitary, single-minded hack, is a recognisable trope too, but Shafrir's writing brings verve and wit to the character.

I finished Startup in a single day and it's a tightly plotted, compelling tragicomedy of the digital age. It would also make a nice companion piece to Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed — or, of course, The Social Network, if you haven't already seen it.

Doree Shafrir is a culture writer for Buzzfeed, so it’s not surprising that her social commentary on the NYC startup world is biting and snarky. In Startup, she skewers douchey startup founders, the South by Southwest technology festival, and the lack of diversity at startups and the venture capital firms that fund them. But, beneath the snark is a human workplace story that spreads its tentacles into marriage, motherhood, and women in the workplace.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
It's hard to give a thumbnail pitch for this book -- my gut wants to compare it to Coupland's Microserfs, just because I liked that so much. But it's more like a feminist Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, I think. It's been about 20 years since I read that, and my memory is more than fuzzy on the details. It's about web/app-based companies in New York and the strange (especially to outsiders) culture that surrounds them. You don't have to know a lot about tech -- or venture capitalism -- to appreciate this, however. You just have to know about people.

Because at the end of the day, this book isn't really about startup culture, apps or technology -- it's about people. There are 5 central characters -- and a couple that hover around central -- to this book, and yes, they're all involved with startups, but that's just where they happen to be. You could set this novel in the Wall Street culture of the mid 80's and not have to change much about it at all, because the relationships, the people are what matter -- not the industries/subcultures they're in.

You've got Mack McAllister -- the driving force and face of TakeOff -- an app promoting mindfulness, happiness and productivity; he seems pretty harmless (initially, anyway), but gets reckless with money and sloppy with interpersonal issues -- when that starts to snowball out of control, he then crosses the line into something worse. Isabel is in charge of Engagement and Marketing for TakeOff, she had a little thing with Mack awhile ago, but has started to see someone else recently. Sabrina works for Isabel, is ten years her senior, but has just got back in the workforce after having kids -- she's got some money problems and a husband that seems to be checked out of the relationship and parenting. His name is Dan, and he's an editor for a Tech News website -- he's pretty oblivious to a lot, really (like his wife's problems) and the crush he has on one of his reporters (actually, he may be very aware of that, come to think of it). Her name is Katya, the child of Russian immigrants -- a hungry reporter, trying to figure out just how to make it in the world where journalism is judged by quantifiable results (views, shares, retweets). Katya needs a break, and stumbles upon a story about Mack -- and Isabel -- and this could be the thing to solidify her position at the news site.

That's all you really need to know going in -- actually, I knew far less, so that's more than you need to know. You take those people and their goals, their problems -- but 'em in a blender and this book comes out. It's pretty easy to see how -- the part that isn't obvious is how Shafrir accomplishes this. She does it by: 1. making these all very relatable characters, with strengths and weaknesses; 2. by making even the villains of the piece not that villain-y (I'm not saying, for example, that Mack is a paragon of virtue -- he does some horrible things, but he never sets out to be horrible, he just ends up that way); 3. by making the heroes of the piece not all that heroic -- just people trying to do (and keep) their jobs, while not screwing up the rest of their life.

I love the fact that Sabrina and Katya are both pretty serious grammar Nazis who find themselves in jobs where they have to do so much that violates grammar -- it's a nice touch, and I enjoyed their reactions to poor grammar. Similarly, Katya's attitude toward smoking is a lot of fun to read about -- but not really something you want to inculcate to kids, or even see in someone in real life.

This is Shafrir's first novel, but she's been writing for forever -- most notably as an online journalist. She knows the world she's depicting, she's lived it and wrote about it -- this is just a barely fictionalized version of her reality, so it reeks of authenticity. I have no doubt I could find people very much like her main characters without trying very hard if I put myself in the right cities. She's not so close to this world that she can't comment on it, nor is she so close to it that she's bitter, nasty and cynical about it.

There's a very slow build to this book -- around the 40% mark, I noticed that while I was enjoying the book, appreciating the writing, and so on -- I wasn't really "hooked" by it, I wasn't invested in any of the characters, which I thought was odd. So, I resolved to make note of when it happened, to see if it was an event, or a development with a character or whatever that prompted it. By the time I hit 80%, the hook was set (it happened well before then, but don't ask me where), but there wasn't anything that I could point to that did it. Just slowly but surely, these people and their individual struggles wormed their way into my subconscious. Which is a great way for a book to be -- not that I mind those that hook you from the start, or those that a have a big, dramatic moment that grabs you -- but those that gradually get you without you noticing.

The ending sneaks up on you -- I really didn't realize the novel ended when it did -- I got to the words "Acknowledgements" on the next page before I realized that the book had ended. I really liked the way it ended (once I figured out it happened), even if I found the last sentence annoying. I still do, actually -- but I see what she was going for and she achieved it. But I still would've liked a few more pages to follow that last sentence.

I can't help feeling like I should have a lot more to say about this book -- but I can't figure out how to do so without giving everything away. So I'd better leave it by saying that I really liked these people, Shafrir's writing, and the way she told a story. Startup was honest, heart-felt, compassionate, and real -- this debut is as strong as it is winning. I hope to read more from Shafrir in the future.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley

I graduated in the early 80’s with a degree in computer science. I’ve watched computers go from big main frames to personal computers in every home to phones that do more than my first computer. So, I find the technology world fascinating.

Starup: A Novel really captures the feeling of being in the technology field today. The emphasis on social media. Trying to get the scoop ahead of all the other websites. Relentlessly checking your stats, your follows, your likes. Trying to come up with the next big idea.

Like social media, this book moves along really quickly. The characters are all interesting, even the unlikable ones.

A quick, enjoyable read.

I received an ARC of the book.

Completely switching gears to something a little lighter, let’s look at Doree Shafrir’s novel, Startup.

Mack McAllister has a $600 million dollar idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech and he’s about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion dollar business—in startup parlance, an elusive unicorn.

Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious young journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she needs more than another PR friendly puff piece to make her the go-to byline for industry news. Sabrina Choe Blum just wants to stay afloat. The exhausted mother of two and failed creative writer is trying to escape from her credit card debt and an inattentive husband—who also happens to be Katya’s boss—as she rejoins a work force that has gotten younger, hipper, and much more computer literate since she’s been away.

Before the ink on Mack’s latest round of funding is dry, an errant text message hints that he may be working a bit too closely for comfort with a young social media manager in his office. When Mack’s bad behavior collides with Katya’s search for a salacious post, Sabrina gets caught in the middle as TakeOff goes viral for all the wrong reasons. As the fallout from Mack’s scandal engulfs the lower Manhattan office building where all three work, it’s up to Katya and Sabrina to write the story the men in their lives would prefer remain untold.

Definitely lighter and less serious than the other books featured today! This is a great book to relax with and enjoy.