Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 53349 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 267(@200wpm)___ 213(@250wpm)___ 178(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53349 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 267(@200wpm)___ 213(@250wpm)___ 178(@300wpm)
This explained the reasoning behind their desire to broadcast the wedding. Nate should have been concentrating on the complexities of bringing that about, but instead there was one question that wouldn’t leave him alone. It nagged at the back of his skull, until he knew he had to ask.
“Why did you both fight it?” he asked.
This time, Liz’s look was unambiguous. It was a look that said she wanted to know what the heck he was doing and whether he was actually trying to lose them an important client. But Nate needed to know. He couldn’t let this conversation pass without getting an answer.
Zach laughed. “I like people who ask difficult questions. I believe most innovation comes from asking the right questions. If I tell you more about us, then you’ll see where we’re coming from for this wedding.”
Liz clearly looked relieved, and Nate was grateful for that. He didn’t want to ruin things here at Married in Malibu. He just needed to understand. Was he messing things up with Tamara by putting their friendship first?
“Yuriko and I met while I was over in Japan doing some work with their tech companies. We’d both had problems in previous relationships. She’d had one relationship with a guy her parents thought would be perfect for her, but it ended up breaking down. I’d had… Well, let’s just say I was never the most successful guy when it came to women. And our families don’t exactly have the best histories when it comes to staying together.”
“It sounds difficult,” Nate said. It also sounded familiar. It mirrored so much of his own life and his family’s. What was the point in making yourself miserable by remaining in a relationship that was destined to fail?
“It was difficult,” Zach said. “The easy thing was to keep my head down and get on with my work. But I kept running into Yuriko. And when love hit me, it was as if a whole new version of me had just finished downloading. Like, I’d just been full of bugs and workarounds before, and then suddenly I was running the way I should. Everything was just right. I couldn’t act as though nothing had changed. All those reasons I had for not getting involved just melted away like obsolete registry entries.”
Nate got that. He glanced at Liz. She looked as though she’d understood only about half of it, and he knew her well enough to see she was worried about the time.
“Do you mind if I leave you in Nate’s hands for a little while?” she asked. “I have to check on a couple of things.”
“Sure,” Zach said. “It sounds like he gets where I’m coming from.” When Liz left, he smiled. “It’s good that you ask so many questions, Nate. When Yuriko mentioned Married in Malibu, I was worried that you’d all just be yes people, scared of throwing your ideas into the mix. But it feels like you get where I’m coming from, which is going to be important, given how closely we’ll have to work on the broadcast side of things.”
Then Zach began to explain some of what he wanted. The essence of it was simple: His company was going to release a patch to every device its software ran on. On the day of the wedding, that patch was going to give people the option to watch the wedding live.
“Initially, I wanted it to pop up on their screens,” Zach said, “but Yuriko correctly pointed out that people might start suing.”
That was probably true.
“So the hard part is making the broadcast compatible,” Nate said. “We could use an existing streaming site and embed a link, but if you want to do it more directly, well… we’d need a lot of server capacity.”
“Trust me,” Zach said, “if there’s one thing I have, it’s server capacity.”
They began to talk details, and automatically, Nate made notes for himself and for Liz. Even though Liz would be talking with Yuriko later, he jotted down the other information Zach began to naturally share with him as they talked—details about the cake, the setting, and number of guests.
“We’d like the wedding to be a perfect combination,” Zach said. “We want a contrast between modern and traditional approaches to capture the moment and to capture the essence and cultures of our families.”
Nate’s digital pen flew across his tablet as Zach mentioned his mother’s nut allergy and his fiancé’s preference to avoid pure white in the fabrics wherever possible. Was this what Liz did? He wasn’t sure if he was doing it right, but he didn’t miss a detail. He kept thinking about what Zach had said about falling in love and how it had made him feel like he was a completely different and better version of himself. Was there a Nate 2.0 out there somewhere?