Growing Pains
This week on As the App Compiles, Cabot’s back from spear fishing in Hawaii looking pink and rested. He’s got some more verve as he brags about the size of the parrotfish he stabbed at the Build Up Youth charity board meeting. After running down the best time to dive on Waioli beach, he subtly presses for contacts to invest in his various endeavors that are “skyrocketing in value.” They look dubious as the market has been extremely bumpy. After some hemming and double-speak, it seems as if Cabot made some bad bets.
At the Data Protects Us conference at Moscone Center, Cabot puts on the full court press to a number of polo shirted attendees. Some he seems to know and others to have just met. His elevator pitch gets smoother as the day goes on. In his most refined version, Sherwood is a perfect investment as it will definitely over-perform in the unsteady economy. If they’re interested, he hints he’ll be able to swing them a good deal. (There are so many lanyards and badges in these scenes!)
In the Sherwood office, Jenya and team discuss the high-level roll-out strategy to new markets. Jenya doesn’t want to move too quickly as there are a number of high-priority fixes needed before pushing things to a broader audience. Scale itself can be a hindrance. Pascal reminds her they need to stay on schedule to drive user adoption numbers for several pending strategic partnerships.
Amrita asks about the Philly trip and Jenya equivocates that they were mostly a well-meaning bunch of academics wanting to find a way to put their theories into practice. She’s not sure how real the opportunity is there. This gets a raised eyebrow from Mathilde that says wtf is this [lady] talking about? Pascal catches it and silently lets her know he’ll look into it. Jenya makes it clear that the stability of the app is paramount. Duc confirms the backlog is properly prioritized and the current sprint dev cycle is even more efficient than anticipated. This gets its own raised eyebrow courtesy of Amrita.
With the office empty that evening, Duc and Amrita bicker about the doneness of certain help features, including a critical fix to Green Ball messaging feature that was supposed to have gone live last month. She’s worried they’ll get in trouble but Duc calmly assures her that the business people understand that “capital A” Agile development requires trade-offs. She doesn’t buy it.
Back at his property outside of the city, Cabot’s house is being remodeled. It looks like there are several different construction projects going on simultaneously. The property is littered with backhoes, pickup trucks and palettes of building materials. Cabot seems at home in the chaos while confirming with workers where his wife wants the cabana. He gives directions to the crew while making a sales call on his headset. When the lead contractor interrupts him to ask about some unpaid supply invoices, Cabot’s sure he already paid them. The contractor’s bookkeeper must have made an error. Hmmm.
Pascal and Jenya have a late-night tête-à-tête in the middle of an empty park a la McNulty and Bunk. He finally gets her to open up about the Drexel initiative. We learn that Derek from Nature Stop is their former friend from grad school. And Jenya’s ex. She broke his heart when he pushed her to move back east where he’s from and get that picket fence too soon. Jenya wanted to establish her career first and wasn’t up for dipping on the SF Zhao’s.
Pascal wasn’t a big Derek fan then, or now, and lets Jenya know he’ll go along with whatever she wants to do on the Philly experiment. But he does remind her it would be a shame if she lets Derek get in the way. She’s agrees that the opportunity with the universities is too good to pass up.
We get our first scene this season with Carlo Weeks at a meet up in the back room of a dry cleaners in Dogpatch. He’s still fighting the good fight on both fronts as he and a small team of Merries talk about an upcoming protest. An old commercial building is being sold and the landlord is evicting the small grocery, café and hardware store that have served the Fillmore neighborhood for decades. The group’s concerned about staying in synch during the protest. Carlo wants to use walkie-talkies to coordinate, but everyone else wants to stay on Sherwood app to maintain anonymous communication.
The next morning, Cabot is waiting in the conference room with grocery store donuts. Jenya and Pascal run down their expansion plans while Cabot fiddles with his phone and expresses disappointment. “One city isn’t good enough. I’m pushing chain here to get this company to attract some attention.” He wants more features, something that makes the app worth it.
When Duc pops his head in looking for a little snack, Cabot asks if there’s any interesting back log he’s working on. Bored with his answer, Cabot tells them about an exciting open source payment protocol he saw at the conference. Duc says as long as there is an API to connect to, he could adapt the data model without trouble. Cabot loves this and proposes that this is their new vision.
“We need people passing around money on Sherwood. That’s what drives adaptive stickiness. Besides, why shouldn’t people be paid for their efforts? It seems downright unfair to ask them to help for free.”
Duc is dismissed with a scowl from Pascal and a wink from Cabot. Jenya reminds the room that they are a helping app, not a payment app. Besides, the technical hurdles could submarine their expansion timeline, introducing payment would cloud user motivation as to what cases to work on and strike at the heart of the Sherwood endeavor. His vote is irrelevant.
Cabot is livid and predicts Sherwood will fail within six months. Jenya might know platforms but she doesn’t “know how to drive infinite growth”. Her users waste time on investigating the “Good Guys” who have nothing to hide and they don’t understand what really needs fixing in this city.
He threatens to pull already agreed upon funding for the next quarter. Jenya asks him to be patient as they’ve already over-performed in the last two quarters. He informs them he needs a return on his investment - asap.
The episode ends with a growing demonstration on the corner of a busy block. A small protest is moving down the street and inadvertently impedes traffic. Some cars start honking and yelling escalates. Carlo urges them to let the cars pass. Various protesters try to move out of the way while another group up ahead blocks further passage. A Tesla gets bumped and the driver starts shouting while someone gets off a corporate bus to scold the protesters on the other street. Tensions are heating up.
Concomitant Confab
Thank goodness we get to see a little of Nancy Parrish this week. She’s prepping for interviews and is back after baby, ready to kick ass. She and Duc just need to find the right Nanny Fine to look after little Loulou first.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to get much of Nancy on Alphas this season. Actress Akiko Boskello is now a regular on Chrysalis which Variety confirms is shooting now. Guess I’ll need to re-up my LostFoundry subscription.
Cabot’s rocking suede Pumas and a heinous Novak Djokovic branded Lacoste shirt. Yikes. At least it fit somewhat.
Pascal says that Derek still carries a torch for Jenya as the one that got away. It sure seems like he viewed Derek as a rival for Jenya’s attention at school. His Tufts dig was cold-blooded.
New hire Langston claims listening to the Uhh Yeah Dude podcast keeps him right for spitting code. That and his homemade MCT Matcha. (Go ahead and pour mine straight in the toilet.)
Mathilde is volunteering for the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) program supporting kids in the foster system. That’s certainly noble work!
So, it seems like the Cabot Green Ball investigation is over? Maybe he was clean? But that sure seems unlikely given what we know.
Did the demonstration in the final scene clearly pull from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia or what? Perhaps I’m just seeing what I want to see.
The song in the credits is Chitu Chitu by Tremolo Audio according to SoundHound. (A hip music message boards assured me this was a side project of Clorofila of Nortec Collective.)