Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

“You can make it up to me,” he said, pulling her onto him and slipping off her tank top in a single motion.

“Okay,” she said. She tightened her legs around him and lowered her face to his. She could still be in the shower by 5:50, on the road by 6:15. She raked her fingers lightly up and down the sides of his body and he shuddered. Tessa felt her guilt lighten and lift, evaporate like raindrops under hot sun.

2021

Early on the morning of April 4, in San Francisco, Luke Zimmerman eased out of bed, pulled on jeans and an army-green hoodie, brushed his teeth, and ran goop through his curly hair. Then he jogged down the gleaming walnut staircase of his restored Victorian, enjoying the slick feel of the polished banister under his palm.

In the kitchen, he grabbed the coffee waiting at the base of the preprogrammed Italian espresso machine, added a splash of Brain Octane oil, and stepped outside into the wispy air of dawn. He spoke a command into his phone and on cue, the garage door opened and his self-driving Elan—not yet available to the public, MSRP $585,000, solar-powered—glided into the driveway. On the half-hour ride from the city to the Seahorse Center, south on the 280, then straight west on Highway 1, Luke sipped his coffee and listened to a podcast of a Buddhist nun detailing the difference between transition and change.

“All life is flux,” said the nun, her voice like heavy cream. “We must inhabit the discomfort of perpetual motion.”

“Fuck that,” Luke said, and then regretted it, as if she could hear him through the car stereo. “Sorry,” he added.

But he’d been inhabiting discomfort for a long time, and he was sick of it. “Failure” was a darling concept in Silicon Valley. Everyone loved to talk about how much they’d failed and how invaluable the experience had been. How essential to their character. How inextricable from their later success. They wrote books and gave speeches about it— after they were sitting on the other side of their first billion, or had been credited with an invention that altered the course of humanity. After they were officially, objectively successful . Then came the “humble” reflections and condescending platitudes. Fail harder. The gift of failure. His best friend, Mustafa “Moose” Lodha, had done it via a TED Talk after Yumlets, his twice-a-day capsules that provided one hundred percent of a person’s daily nutritional requirements, designed to eradicate world hunger and malnutrition, were approved by the FDA.

Before Yumlets, I was sharing a two-bedroom with six guys in the Tenderloin, Moose said to a packed theater, and eating dried ramen for breakfast. I’d been fired from two tech jobs and cashed out the seven hundred bucks I had in a 401(k). (Laughter.)

Now Moose was credited with virtually ending food shortages in Zambia and Comoros. He also owned a Cessna, an assortment of rare vintage cars, and eight hundred acres of a Hawaiian island.

Luke’s own father, Reed Zimmerman, had also loved to claim failure. Never mind that he’d founded the world’s most popular social media network, LikeMe, which was also one of the most successful companies of all time, part of the “Power Quad” of tech behemoths: Apple. Google. Microsoft. LikeMe.

I was a college dropout with no girlfriend and a net worth of three maxed-out Visa cards, Reed was fond of saying in interviews. I couldn’t get a job, because then how would I stay up writing code all night? (Laughter.)

By the time Reed was delivering self-deprecating commencement speeches at Stanford and Harvard (his dropout-mater , as he called it, ha ha), he was a household name with an estimated net worth of $40 billion. Over a billion people around the globe used LikeMe on a daily basis. The company had its own New York Times beat. Reed was unequivocally one of the most successful people of his time.

But then, abruptly, shockingly, Reed Zimmerman failed . Or rather, his myocardium suddenly failed to pump adequate blood to his body, and he collapsed jogging up a steep trail on Mount Tam. He had been preparing for an Ironman the following year. He was fifty-five years old, divorced, with one child: Luke, then age eighteen.

Luke had hardly known his father. He’d been raised by his mother and a series of nannies, while Reed had been off empire-building. Luke’s father had barely recognized his existence. Still, his death had jarred Luke; he’d always imagined his father on some far-off horizon, pointed toward shore. One day, Luke assumed, they’d get to know each other.

That day would never come.

Instead, what had come to Luke was a massive inheritance, along with the mandate from his father to do something radical and extraordinary . He’d written this in a letter to Luke, many years before his death, printed on a single white page in Courier font. Luke kept the letter stashed in each of the series of cars he’d driven since Reed’s death. Now, a decade later, it was tucked into the glove box of his Elan. Luke’s memory of opening the letter stayed with him, in vivid detail. How, for a fleeting, idiotic moment, as he’d unfolded the paper, he’d imagined it might contain something heartfelt from his father. Some love that had been left unexpressed by Reed’s workaholism and the engineer’s aversion to sappiness. Some confession of a deeply held, unspoken feeling Reed had for Luke. Even if I’m not great at showing it, I’m proud to have you as a son…

But no. The letter read more like a half-jokey, half-motivational email Reed might have written to his LikeMe employees.

Luke, [Not Son . Not even Dear Luke.]

You’re reading this, so apparently I’ve been downsized to a half dozen pounds of ash. But just because I’m inert doesn’t mean I’m not still expecting big things from you. I’ve left you a couple of bucks as a sort of insurance policy that you’ll not only do something big, but something radical and extraordinary…

Blah blah blah.

Move fast and break things.

RZ

He’d signed his initials not by hand but via a digital signature. He couldn’t bother to fish out a pen, Luke thought.

Luke remembered how his hands had trembled as he’d refolded the letter and shoved it back in the envelope, giving himself a paper cut in the process. He felt he’d been socked in the gut. But he’d also never felt more motivated in his life. First by the money—the “bucks” Reed referred to amounted to $65 billion in cash and stock—and then by the rage.

Luke’s body tingled with new ambition.

He would not let himself be crushed by something as clichéd as an under-loving father. He would not wallow in Reed’s lack of approval. He would not spend another second wishing his father had been proud of him.

Instead, Luke would move fast and break things . Indeed.

That was ten years ago. Luke was twenty-nine now. By twenty-nine, Reed had already made Luminary magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 “great influencers.” He was already radical and extraordinary .

Luke was not. At the moment, he was best known for being the son of Reed Zimmerman. Lower-grade digital media had assigned him a host of humiliating nicknames: The Billionaire Skateboarder . (True, Luke liked to skateboard. What California-raised male didn’t?) The Little LikeMe Prince. The media had also loved reporting that Luke had invested large chunks of his father’s money in a series of failed Silicon Valley startups. The flying car company. The virtual reality travel company. Perhaps most embarrassingly, the insect milk company.