On Sunday morning, clips.com had a problem bigger than sneezing. The problem was that people loved it.
Some context, for anyone just arriving. Clips.com is a four-person startup above a laundromat, plus a ficus. Our AI, Kestrel, watches any video and returns the single best moment. Since a bad training run on Friday, it believes the best moment is always a sneeze.
Our pitch to Harriet Voss of Ninebark Capital was in twenty-five hours. She had asked us to leave our demo videos at home. She was bringing her own.
The problem began with Tobias, as several of our problems did.
On Saturday night, before he went home, he had compiled our forty-one sneeze highlights into one long reel. He'd done it to cheer us up. He called it "Forty-One Sneezes, Ranked." It had a little music, a countdown, and the great-uncle from the wedding as number one.
Then he had meant to save it to a private folder. Instead, he had posted it to the public front page of clips.com, under a banner that said TODAY'S BEST.
"In my defense," Tobias said, "the buttons are right next to each other."
"Who designed the buttons?" Marguerite asked.
Everyone looked at Dez. Dez looked at the ficus.
By eight a.m., "Forty-One Sneezes, Ranked" had been watched forty thousand times. By nine, it was ninety thousand. Our servers normally handled about two hundred visitors on a busy day. They had started making a sound I can only describe as a sigh.
The comments section, which we'd forgotten we had, was full.
"I have watched the uncle eleven times. I am at work."
"The goalkeeper did nothing wrong."
"Who is the woman who counts them? I need her to narrate my life."
That last one was about Marguerite. Somebody had found her live-feed sneeze from Saturday, which our demo screen had helpfully saved as BEST MOMENT OF THE DAY. It had its own page now. It had eleven thousand views and a fan account.
Marguerite read the comments over my shoulder with the face of a woman being knighted against her will.
"They want me to narrate their lives," she said.
"You'd be good at it," I said.
"I would be excellent at it. That's not the point." She went back to her desk and opened a spreadsheet of her own. I suspect it was a pricing model.
Dez had not slept. He'd gone home at midnight and come back at six, in a new gray hoodie identical to the old one. He sat at the conference table with a laptop and a legal pad. The legal pad said SNEEZE ECONOMY at the top, underlined three times.
"Hear me out," he said.
"No," I said.
"You haven't heard me out."
"I can see the legal pad."
He turned it around anyway. Under SNEEZE ECONOMY, he had written a list.
Sneeze Reels. Sneeze of the Week. A daily email called "Bless You," which he'd circled. A partnership with tissue brands, crossed out, then rewritten more carefully as "a tissue brand that we invent."
"Ninety thousand views in one morning," he said. "Our best day ever was four hundred. Harriet Voss funds things people want. People want this."
"People want it for a week," I said. "Then they'll want something else, and our product will still only find sneezes."
"Then we're the best in the world at sneezes."
"Dez. We're a highlight company. We find the moment that matters."
"I know."
"That was the whole idea of clips.com. Every video has one moment worth keeping."
He looked at me. For a second, he looked very tired, and very young, and nothing like the man who talked to mirrors.
"I know what the idea was," he said. "I said it first."
We argued for an hour. It was the polite kind of argument, which is worse.
Dez's position was that we should walk into Ninebark Capital and present clips.com as a sneeze platform, on purpose. The reel was proof of demand. The broken model became a strategy.
My position was that you can't pivot to a bug you don't understand. If we didn't know why Kestrel loved sneezes, we didn't know what it might love next.
Coughing. Hiccups. The ficus.
"And she's bringing her own video," I said. "What if there's no sneeze in it? It says NO MOMENTS FOUND in front of the one investor who asks exactly one question."
"Then we make sure there's a sneeze," Dez said.
The room went still. Even Admiral, who had come back from the vet with a clean bill of health, stopped washing.
"How?" Marguerite said. Her voice had dropped about a full octave.
"I'm not saying anything bad," Dez said quickly. "I'm saying we have a person in this office who sneezes in reliable sets of three. And the camera's on the wall. And if the demo stalls, maybe someone brings a cat to work that day."
Marguerite stood up. She walked to his end of the table. She did not hurry.
"Desmond," she said. "I will sneeze for clips.com. I have done it fifty-one times in meetings, on the record."
She let that sit.
"But I will not sneeze to trick a woman out of money. If I sneeze on Monday, it will be because my body decided to. Not you."
"That's fair," Dez said, in a very small voice.
"Say it back."
"You will not be weaponized."
"Thank you." She sat down. "Admiral is staying home tomorrow."
Dez went out for a walk after that. He took the tea bag. I didn't follow him.
Tobias came and sat by my desk. He'd been quiet since the front-page incident, which for Tobias meant he'd only titled four things in an hour.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About the labels. And the reel."
"The labels were my fault," I said. "I should've checked them. That's literally my job."
"Still." He picked at the edge of the desk. "Guy Ruins Company. Two Days Before Pitch."
"You didn't ruin anything. You taught a model what everyone in this office already knew."
"Which is what?"
"That when Marguerite sneezes, we're all on the same side for a second."
He thought about that. Then he nodded slowly, like I'd given him a better title.
"Can I help?" he asked. "With whatever you're about to do?"
"I'm about to read four million numbers."
"Oh." He stood up. "I'll make coffee. Man Makes Coffee, Saves Company."
He came back with three cups. One was for Dez, who hadn't returned. Tobias put it on Dez's desk anyway, next to the legal pad, like an offering.
I did the thing I should've done on Saturday. I stopped watching the clips and started reading the numbers.
Every time Kestrel watched a video, it gave every second a score. The score meant "how likely is this to be the moment." Usually, I only looked at the winning second.
Now I exported all of them. Every second of every video we'd tested, plus the eighteen hours of all-hands meetings it had trained on.
It came to about four million scores. I sorted them from highest to lowest.
The top of the list was exactly what I expected. Sneezes. The great-uncle, ninety-nine point two. Marguerite, Saturday, ninety-nine point six.
The goalkeeper. A long, orderly column of people losing a fight with their own noses.
I scrolled down for a while. Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze. A man sneezing on a ferry. A bride's mother sneezing into a bouquet, which seemed unfair to her.
Then I scrolled back up to the very top. I'd missed something. I'd sorted wrong the first time.
The highest score in the whole data set wasn't the great-uncle. It wasn't Marguerite on Saturday. It was ninety-nine point nine, from an all-hands meeting fourteen months ago.
I clicked the timestamp. The video opened on our old conference table.
Eight people, back when clips.com could afford eight. The ficus. The projector.
Nobody in the clip was sneezing.
Up next: The Flinch
Continue to Part 4 →