This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's me. This is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. That's the first time I've said. That sounds very exciting. I'm here with Dori Shafir. I pronounce your name correctly. I'm so proud. Dory does many cool things. She's a podcaster. She's a writer at BuzzFeed. Most importantly, for the purpose of this podcast today, she's the author of being a novel, Startup. Go buy Startup immediately. Stop listening to this podcast. Go buy startup and come listen to the rest of the podcast. Have we promoted that adequately? Oh, that was great. Thank you. Awesome. We're done. Oh, all right. See ya. Dory, do you want to tell us what startup is about? Sure. So it's about startups.

Yes.

It takes place in the New York tech world in the present day.

And it focuses on a 28-year-old startup founder named Mack McAllister, who has a mindfulness app called Takeoff.

And he gets kind of caught up in a little scandal.

And there's a 24-year-old,

ambitious young woman reporter named Katya Pasternak who uncovers the scandal and writes about it. And then the third person whose perspective it's told from is a woman named Sabrina,

who works for Mack and also happens to be married to Katia's boss. It's a satire about Silicon Valley that's actually set in New York, so it's about New York, tech media, modern day, 2017. There are accidental sex via Snapchat. Yes. It's great. I read it. You guys should go read it. It's your first book, right?

Yeah, it's my first novel.

Congrats.

Thank you.

And you've got a day job writing at BuzzFeed. I do. How long did this thing take to write? I started it in January 2015, and we sold it on a partial manuscript in November of that year. and then I had until June 1st to finish it,

and I turned it in on June 1st.

Well, you had a day job.

Yes, I took two months off of BuzzFeed, unpaid book leave, to work on it.

But I wrote a lot of it in like mornings and weekends. So you work at a big digital publishing company,

you write a story about a big digital publishing company.

When you told the people at BuzzFeed, hey, I'm going to take time off and write a book that's kind of a satire about the place I work. What was the reaction? Well, it's not a satire about the place I work. No, but there's a lot of buzzfeedy stuff in here. Yeah, there's some BuzzFeedy stuff in there. I mean, I do, I honestly do see it kind of more broadly as

the satire of the whole kind of startup world. Although my boss, Ben Smith, was like, ooh, is this a,

you know, is this a Romano Clef? And I think he was actually slightly disappointed when I said no.

That you weren't identifying specific venture capitalists.

Or like he wasn't a thinly veiled character in the book or, you know.

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