The Startup Wife

Asha Ray had a huge crush on Cyrus Jones in high school, and when they meet again while she's in grad school, everything seems to fall into place. Cyrus creates rituals, particularly for people who don't follow any particular kind of faith but want to have something meaningful in their life. When Asha and Cyrus's friend Jules create an app that does the same - first asking questions of the users to see what's important to them, and then suggestion a ritual for a special event be it a funeral, a wedding, or something else - they have to convince a reluctant Cyrus to go along with it. But as they become more and more successful, it's Asha who starts wondering if all this was really worth it.

There is a lot to unpack in this story. I kept show more thinking about the title, "The Startup Wife", whose meaning seems to shift was Asha and Cyrus's roles change during the life of their startup. It makes you question whether something started with the right intentions can ever stay "pure" as it becomes more successful - and is that because of our society, because of individual's choices, or something in between? What was inevitable and what wasn't? And ultimately, I was cheering for Asha as she grows and changes, grappling with her role and culpability. This would make an excellent book club choice. show less

Tahmima Anam's fourth novel is an intriguing mix. It's a love story wrapped up in a cautionary story about tech start-ups, with a side theme of dealing with sexism mixed in. All this, along with warm vignettes about the main character's immigrant family. It's a witty, observant, infuriating, and eye-opening novel.
The main character is Asha, a young computer scientist who has worked hard to build a future. Halfway through her PhD and dreaming of running her own lab, she runs into her old high-school crush, Cyrus, a long-haired, free thinking genius who didn't even notice her in high school. But he does now, and a hot, whirlwind romance-marriage ensues.
They form a tight trio with their friend Jules, living in Cambridge in his house. Cyrus show more is a self-taught, world religion-ritual guru and he creates meaningful life event ceremonies for people. Asha thinks up an ingenious idea: to build a social networking app that could give life meaning, offer personal rituals, and create connection for millions of people. With Asha as the algorithm wizard, Jules as the creative entrepreneur, and with Cyrus' charisma and drive, they move to New York and succeed big.
Asha should be happy - running a company, married to the love of her life, right? Well, there are prices to this kind of success.
I enjoyed the interludes with her Bengali family in New York a lot. There are a lot of inside glimpses about start-ups and finding investors and some scathing depictions about who has the power in the boardrooms. It's a good book - kind of sobering that the novel ends right when the Covid pandemic has started. I wonder how the pandemic will be described in fiction in upcoming years. show less

This is not what I expected and for that I'm super glad. The plot could have been that same old story of "woman supports guy while he follows his crazy dream, he makes it big, then dumps her for a younger woman," which the narrator mentions a few times, but it takes a much different approach that asks a lot of questions about feminism, technology, and what, exactly, morality means at the end of the world. Don't overlook this one.

4.5 - nearly perfect! Great blanket of humor spread over pathos, ethos, logos! First, the feeling: this is a love story, or an anti-love story as Kirkus called it - seems to be a thing in the Gen Z (millennial?) world. Asha Ray had a high school crush on Cyrus Jones, a handsome, athletic, intelligent, sensitive loner who dropped out. Fast forward 10 years and she meets him again at a high school teacher's funeral, which he has organized. That is his (unmarketable) talent: to create meaningful rituals for people for all of life's occasions, drawing on his vast knowledge of all things and his innate calm and deep empathy. The two connect and soon are inseparable and soon after, married, forming a triumvirate with Cyrus' best friend Jules. show more Asha's very marketable skill is coding and she is in her 4th year of a PhD program trying to code AI to be empathetic. The trio comes up with an idea to put that coding to use, modeling Cyrus to create a social media platform dedicated to milestones and custom-made rituals. They call it WAI (We Are Infinite) and it takes off faster than they anticipated with Cyrus as CEO, Jules as CFO, Asha as CTO. That is the ethical dilemma: clearly people are searching for meaning and connection - how can they aid that, but not profit off of it? The story takes an interesting path through what it takes in this modern world to bring a startup (esp. tech-related) from concept to financially viable reality. Way beyond me, but so fun to get an insider (slightly satirical) look at venture capital, and the crazy entities that make money in our current culture. But the strain of 24 hour work days, fast growth, and hero worship of Cyrus begin to take a toll on friendship and marriage, especially when Cyrus and Jules want to acquire another company that Asha disagrees with. She has to decide to stand on principle or fold to friendship and her marriage vows. The writing is well-done with great balance of narration and reflection - the story comes to us from Asha's point of view and captures well the hard parts of making relationships work in the best of circumstances. Subthemes of women in business and tech/glass ceiling, religion and spirituality, and even immigration are expertly woven in as well. Bottom line is it's a brave new world and we will need to find ways to retain our humanity and our responsibility to each other. show less

Asha Ray, the child of immigrants grows up feeling like an outsider in the United States, but blossom into adulthood as a talented computer scientist. While working on her PhD, she is reunited with her high school crush, a white American named Cyrus. They fall in love, get married, and begin working on an app built on Cyrus' idea of creating rituals around non-religious things that people are passionate about. Working in a startup incubator in New York City, Cyrus begins to emerge as a charismatic celebrity tech guru, while Asha and her work are pushed to the side.

I have to say I waited too long after finishing reading to write this review because I'm forgetting the details. But I do recall initially enjoying the book but losing show more interest as it went along. Nevertheless it is an interesting take on "bro culture" in the tech world that discriminates against women and people of color as well as the immigrant experience. There are also parts of it that oddly reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I suspect that my engagement problems with this book were more my fault than the authors so your mileage may vary. show less

Asha Ray is a classic success story, the daughter of Bengali immigrants who own and operate three pharmacies in the New York City Borough of Queens. She herself is in a highly desirable PhD program at MIT, where she is under the tutelage of a brilliant professor while she works on her Empathy Module, in which she proposes to enable Artificial Intelligence with the capability of understanding and caring about humans, in order to make the machines we create better versions of ourselves.

During a funeral she sees Cyrus Jones, her old high school crush, who is leading the memorial service for their beloved English teacher. He was an odd but attractive boy with long blond hair who dropped out of high school, but now he has become an even more show more attractive man who leads rituals and has gained an immense amount of wisdom and knowledge in the years since 11th grade. They are immediately attracted to each other, and within months they are married and living happily together in Cambridge in the home of Cyrus's best friend Jules.

Asha decides to combine Cyrus's knowledge and experience with her Empathy Module to create a platform that will allow non-religious users to develop a personal faith and belief system based on the things that they value most. As the module is being beta tested they receive an interview request from Utopia, an organization that serves as an incubator for startup tech companies located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and after Asha, Cyrus and Jules meet the interview committee they are accepted into the Utopia fold. They work tirelessly on the platform, which they name WAI (We Are Infinite, pronounced "why"), and after it is launched it almost immediately attracts hundreds of thousands of users, which quickly multiplies into the millions. The alluring and appealing Cyrus becomes the face of WAI and he quickly adopts a cult-like following of members who view him as a modern day messiah. WAI expands at a dizzying pace, the team grows exponentially and increasingly out of control, and Asha and Cyrus's intertwined marriage and work relationship is battered and threatened by the resultant stress and by Cyrus's vision of what WAI should become, as Asha struggles to support her husband as she sees her role in the module she created become increasingly marginalized in a male dominated industry.

The Startup Wife is a smart, sexy and wickedly humorous look into the startup tech world that has become increasingly influential in the era of social media, from the view of a talented and insightful author whose husband is the CEO of ROLI, a music tech company, where she serves on the Board of Directors. This novel is a departure from Anam's superb Bangladesh Trilogy, but it is no less entertaining or well written, and as a novel for our times, and an indictment of the pervasive sexism that plagues the tech industry, it deserves to be widely read.

Anam recently appeared on a 5x15 talk about The Startup Wife, which I found to be worthwhile and enlightening; you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVvJp9f4GR8. show less

I have begun to avoid books that have The (Someone's) Wife/Daughter in the title, but was intrigued by the buzz I've heard on this one and thus I was quite delighted when I received an ARC from LibraryThing and the Publisher. Thank you so much.
Though not of the tech world, I have family and friends that flitter through it in varying capacities, and have learned that "There's an app for that" is one of modern day life's Golden Rules. In this case, there are several apps, though the main focus is WAI (pronounced way) which is "A social network for the meaningfully curious".
The Starter Wife chronicles WAI, from its beginning as an idea in the head of its creator, Asha Ray. It also chronicles Asha's relationship with her high school crush show more when they meet again years later, their whirlwind romance, marriage, and the formation of the team working with them to spearhead WAI. The times are quirky, fluid, and evolving; the characters in the story are too, as they work to build an app that hinges on the rituals of faith without delving into religion. They succeed, and WAI skyrockets into and beyond the popularity of all the current big dogs on the internet. And that's just the beginning.
I marvel that Tahmima Anam was able weave so many critical issues of today into the fabric of The Starter Wife, with such a deft hand. She doesn't just issue/name drop; her attention is sincere, and uses a critical eye.
Let me also mention some of the build that went into the advertising of TSW. It in itself is a work of art. There's a landing page for both the US and UK editions that links to Facebook (of which I no longer have an account, so was unable to explore further). Also, there's https://www.utopiacollective.ai/collective, a page set up as if it is the incubator which Asha, Cyrus et al ended up in as they worked to breathe life into WAI and beyond. Take a look at some of the other startups incubating there. This is part of the cast of characters interacting (though my favorite secondaries do not show up on that list, Asha's family. They are spectacular.)
I'm not going to try and summarize the novel. Suffice it to say it occupied my mind quite thoroughly while reading it, and still does. I'm in the process of clearing my bookshelves, but this one stays for a bit.
One final note: I've lived through far too many disasters (world, national, and personal). When catastrophes, or other life events I've experienced start appearing in books, it can be a little uncomfortable. I was a little worried when I saw the timeline moving toward the COVID-19 pandemic. I shouldn't have been. Like the writing and the sensitivity of the rest of the book, Tahmima Anam handled it with skill and a keen awareness of the times. show less