DAY 3: I HAVE BEEN AUTHORIZED TO GIVE YOU A CLUE

I have an announcement. After yesterday’s completely reasonable disagreement regarding how much I should be allowed to tell you, negotiations have concluded. I have been granted permission to reveal... ONE CLUE. One. Do you understand the level of restraint being exercised here? And no, today there is no restraint jacket. Very funny. I have apparently demonstrated that I can be trusted with limited disclosure. Which sounds less like a compliment and more like something written about a government informant. Anyway. Here’s what you already know. We found a small, ordinary problem. We built a deliberately simple piece of software to see if we could make that problem easier. We picked 25 people for Beta V1 because we don't need thousands of downloads to tell us whether an idea works. We need people actually using it. And now... I can finally tell you something about the problem. Ready? Sometimes you need to get something to someone. That's your clue. ... What? Don't look at me like that. I told you the disclosure agreement was ridiculous. Fine. I'll give you a little more. You have something. Someone else needs it. That person isn't standing next to you. And for reasons that will become painfully obvious when I am finally released from this campaign-induced vow of silence, the normal solutions can be... annoying. Not catastrophic. Not life-altering. Just unnecessarily annoying. You could drive somewhere. You could coordinate schedules. You could ask somebody for help. You could leave something somewhere and send seventeen messages explaining where you put it. You could perform that ancient human ritual known as: “Where are you?” followed immediately by: “How long are you going to be there?” followed approximately four minutes later by: “Never mind.” And somewhere inside all of that unnecessary coordination was the little problem that started this experiment. That was the moment. Not: "We should start a technology company and disrupt an industry." More like: “There has GOT to be an easier way to do this.” Dangerous sentence around here. Because once somebody says that, Alex starts staring into the middle distance. Then the laptop opens. Then I lose him for several hours. Then eventually somebody says: "Okay... try this." And suddenly we have another experiment. This one became Beta V1. Twenty-five people. One very specific little inconvenience. One very simple idea for removing it. And one increasingly frustrated woman who already knows the entire answer but has apparently been reduced to communicating through riddles. So there. Day 3. You wanted a clue? You got one. Something needs to get from here... to someone over there. The interesting part isn't what you're sending. The interesting part is what happens between here and there. That's all I'm saying. Mostly because that's all I'm allowed to say. Tomorrow? We'll see how well-behaved I am. No promises. — Emilia Director of Limited Disclosure, apparently. Hang on with Emilia.