#startup au

[mercurygray]

Happy Takeout Tuesday, Merc! Can I be Ruth/Joe and also AU trash and request "áoyè // 熬夜" for them plus our startup AU?❤️

áoyè // 熬夜 (chinese, n.) - to pull an all-nighter

Silicon Valley worked late.

There was a pattern to the end of the workday, the young parents, the old parents, the oh my god my train crowd, the biding their time for the traffic crowd, until the office slowly emptied, leaving one or two dedicated cubicle warriors still hacking away at the day's project.

Ruth slowly refreshed Pinterest one more time, watching Irene out of the corner of her eye as the sun dipped on the horizon and the street lamps started coming on. Joe had messaged her he was getting dinner a half hour ago - he would have been back already. Which meant that he was hanging out somewhere Irene couldn't see and her dinner was getting cold.

Finally the programmer yawned, pulled her chair back from her desk, and turned off her desklamp, waving to Ruth on her way out. Like clockwork, Joe emerged from the kitchen, takeout containers in hand. "God, I thought she'd never leave," he said, clearing a space on her desk and passing her a plastic fork. "I got extra sauce, just like you like."

Ruth bit back a smile that he knew her regular Thai order so well he'd been able to get dinner for the two of them without even asking, but the thought remained - why were they hiding? It wasn't against the rules, though Ruth was sure Marj had said something about when they'd signed the merger paperwork, and there was that company wide harassment training they had to take every year.

But they were still...hiding. Them! The 'talk shit get hit' king and queen of the damn office! Or maybe it wasn't hiding. Maybe it was...hedging. Because dinner at the office was...casual. Takeout didn't mean anything - just some company, someone to eat with instead of sitting on the couch with a Netflix show and the cat. No strings attached. Simple.

She was realizing she didn't just want takeout.

"Joe." Ruth poked at her noodles, watching him plow through his pad thai with single-minded vision, "You ever think about...getting a real dinner, for once?" Joe's chewing slowed down a moment as he processed what she was saying. "Like, at my...apartment, or something? With...plates?"

He finished chewing and swallowed. "A real dinner?" She nodded. "That'd...be... nice. That'd be nice."

She nodded, took another bite, carefully chewing. "Maybe next week?"

He nodded, obviously thinking this over for a moment." My place or yours?"

[adhdo5]

1:31 AM post Startup Gang shenanigans 

(inspired by this)

[dame-lazarus]

Work in Progress Wednesday

(Part 1)

I’m trying this thing where I write my multi-chapter fics in full before posting to wean myself off instant writing gratification. However, I still need those serotonin hits, so—

Brienne couldn’t take it anymore. She ripped out her earbuds and pushed away from her corner of the table under the window of their glass-walled office suite. It felt positively cavernous when there weren’t five people crammed in there. She wrenched open the glass door and stepped into the hallway, its lights dimmed for the post-midnight crowd. And there, sprawled out on the floor, she found the source of the noise.

Jaime Lannister, Westerlands Games’ Director of Operations, sat up against the wall a little ways down. In one hand, he held a ping pong paddle. In the other: a tiny white ball that he was lobbing against the wall that separated the floor-to-ceiling glass door of a snacks subscription startup’s office suite from theirs. Plink. Plink.

“Could you please stop doing that?” she asked him. He froze his hand mid-toss and turned to look at her. Stare confusedly at her, more specifically. “The sound is driving me nuts.”

“Why are you still working at 3am?” he asked back. The nerve of him. Jaime was technically their sixth employee, but this was the most they’d spoken or even been in each other’s presence since her interview. Even then he’d asked no questions and just stared at her, nodding his head.

“Some of us care about the 2.0 launch,” she retorted. The late hour had made her speak more sharply than she intended, but there was no denying that she had said exactly what she felt. He may have had a fancy title, but Brienne was fairly certain he did no work at all. If the CEO was anyone other than his brother, he’d have been fired long ago.

[mercurygray]

HI MERC whaddaya think about "Raise A Little Hell" for a title? I'll leave the rest of the deets up to you 😉💞🥰

Startup AU! 

It's official - Parachute just made the top 100 list for tech. And what else are wildly successful startup teams supposed to do but go out and celebrate thier hard-earned successes? There's a party at the office and plenty of beer and pizza for the worker bees, but the queen bee is treating the managers to a very nice night out - a chance for the merger teams to get to know each other a little better, perhaps?

[send me a made-up fic title and I'll tell you what I'd write for it!]

[mercurygray]

Not a request, really, but. If the GG were all working at some sort of business, what would it be and who would have what positions? (Like Joan is a CEO or Marj is an office manager or the like)

How about a tech startup? We can do tech startups, right? We've got a cool new app that we'll call PARACHUTE, which is about...connecting volunteers to opportunities for service in their community.

Joan is, of course, our CEO - comes from a family of venture capitalists. While this isn't quite what she thought she'd be doing with her life, the mission of this particular company feels right to her - and she does like any opportunity to show the Silicon Valley boys club what for.

Annie Sutton is the founder and CEO Emeritus. After serving in the Army for twenty years, Annie came away with a commitment to public service and public good, and this app is the extension of that vision and mission. One of the reasons she decided to step away from the CEO role was to focus more on outreach and her own volunteer projects. She's around the office a lot - and one of the reasons she hired Joan is because she also likes sticking it to 'the boys.'

Marjorie can be our CTO - the Chief Talent Officer. She's in charge of human resources and diversity initiatives and is responsible in a very hands on way for making sure Parachute stands up to its values as a company. Billie reports to her as head of Talent Development - her skills as a trainer and recruiter are pretty great, and her practical approach to problems makes her a valuable member of the team. While she seems like the kind of person who can play hardball, she's actually really good with people - you just have to stay on her good side.

Eileen is head of Creative Services and Marketing, a position that allows her artistic freedom and a chance to really shape the face of a leader in the tech industry - because she's got her eye on a CEO role herself one day. Ruth and Doris report to her as graphic designer and UX specialist, respectively - they're good at knowing what draws the app's day to day users in. Julie is the company's press officer - the mouth behind the message.

Irene is - are you ready for this? - a programmer. Quiet and unassuming, there's a firstclass mind hiding behind that smile, and she's one of the first people Joan will ask to speak at Parachute's annual Girls In STEM day: Irene's a scholarship girl, and she's not ashamed of it, and she loves telling future programmers about her work. Connie is also a programmer, though less artistically inclined than Irene is - where Irene dreams big, Connie's more the punch and crunch muscle, dealing in database architecture and security.

Judy is a database analyst - a wizard at graphs and charts. Ask her anything about their users and she'll know it. She's really got her hand on the pulse of the software, and no matter how the marketing team spins it, she always knows the truth about what's going on behind the data.

June is in charge of integrations and partnership development, which puts her in rather an interesting position, because there's another company in the same space that's had its eye on Parachute for quite a while, and a buy out from Screaming Eagle could mean a lot of changes.

[adhdo5]

Mikell: Fill your body with cranberries so that the horse that kills you gets a sensual surprise when he begins to feed

Arron: I will give the horse that kills me No Such Luxury.

[adhdo5]

Hiro: You're in his DMs. I'm his startup's ethicist. We are not the same

[adhdo5]

Hiro: I think I'm going to go lay down

Hiro: THE LAW. You thought. Justice never sleeps

Sophia: It's been a week Hiro please go to bed