A Wearable Parable

“What’s your product space?” asked the wicked venture capitalist.
“Uh, I’m interested in wearables,” said Cinderella.
“Ha! That market’s saturated. Everyone and their mother wants to do wearables. You’ll never get into Disrupt the Kingdom with an idea that vague.”
“I don’t have a mother,” said Cinderella.

“We’re obsessed with hacking the world of big data by leveraging the power of scalable machine learning analytics,” said the first stepsister.
“In the cloud,” added the second stepsister.
“Does it scale?” asked the wicked venture capitalist.
“I said that already,” said the first stepsister.

The wicked VC flew Cinderella’s stepsisters out to Disrupt the Kingdom.

As the stepsisters gorged themselves on catered açaí bowls and poké and some other foods with accent marks, Cinderella slumped in her chair at home, sipping a bottle of Soylent. “At this rate, I’ll never deliver value to users,” she sighed.
In a flash of fairy dust, a stout old woman appeared. With a swish of the woman’s white-gloved hand, Cinderella’s Soylent turned from plain to coffee flavored.
“How did you do that?” Cinderella cried.
“A seamless microscale accelerometer embedded in the glove’s fabric,” the woman replied, holding up her hand to give Cinderella a closer look. “My child, I sense great potential in you. You see, I am the wear-y godmother.”
“The weary godmother? You don’t look tired.”
“No, the wear-y godmother. Rhymes with fairy.”
Cinderella raised her eyebrows.
“The name’s a work in progress. There are only so many plays on ‘wearables.’ I thought about ‘the wear-wolf’, but this ain’t Red Riding Hood, honey.”
Cinderella perked up a bit. “So you’re into e-textiles and organic fibers and–”
“My child, I am an angel investor in the wearables space. I’ve come to help you out.”

With a swipe of the wear-y godmother’s smartwatch, a bevy of woodland animals came scampering to Cinderella’s closet-sized apartment bedroom. The godmother produced capital and tools at Cinderella’s every request. While the chipmunks gnawed cuts, the mice sewed seams. The squirrels foraged for materials, and the owls provided valuable mentorship. No sooner would a part emerge from the laser cutter than a beta-testing team of bluebirds would eagerly try out the product and tweet their feedback.
Quicker and quicker they iterated. Cinderella and the creatures failed fast and failed faster, until finally the prototype had reached the standard for their minimum viable product.
“Now off you go to Disrupt,” said the wear-y godmother with a smile. “There are only a couple more things you need.”
As she flicked her glove, Cinderella’s scratchy, logoless gray T-shirt morphed into a soft tri-blend version emblazoned with the words “Glass Slipper Labs.” Another flick, and her rusty old bike became a small vehicle with no driver’s seat.
“My first self-driving carriage. An early-stage version, but it’ll have to do. The catch is, I’ve been trying out a feature to up the mileage with an organically powered backup battery, except it’s still a little buggy–”
“I think the industry term is ‘compact sedan’.”
“– so you’ve got to be out of there by midnight or the whole thing turns into a pumpkin.”

Off the carriage sped. Soon Cinderella had arrived at the conference.
“We’re looking for seed funding to propel our vision of bringing dynamic AI-driven business insights to a multibillion-dollar market,” the first stepsister was saying to a man in a blazer and Nikes.
“Go Trees!” added the second stepsister.
Cinderella walked past them toward the free food table. She had eaten nothing but Soylent for weeks. As she stepped toward the organic granola bars, she felt someone’s foot under her slipper.
“Oh, I’m sorry–” she began to apologize as she turned around, and then did a double take. The owner of the foot was none but Peter Prince, cofounder of Castle, the most prestigious seed accelerator in all the land.
“No worries,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got to know, though: those slippers must be glass. Why aren’t they breaking?”
“Good question!” said Cinderella, regaining her composure. “See, it’s not your standard glass. These are made from a more durable alternative that I’ve been developing. Like Plexiglas, except with a more natural feel.”
“That’s neat,” said Peter Prince. “I was hoping to see some cool hardware tonight, but everything so far has been ML this, AI that. What else does it do?”
The more Cinderella talked about her design’s features, the more excited Peter grew. He was about to hand her his card and offer her an interview on the spot when he was distracted by the buzz of his watch.
“Sorry, just a notification. Wow, it’s 11:58 already – crazy how time flies when you’re networking with movers and shakers. You were saying?”
But Cinderella had already gone pale. She mumbled something about the yoga room and ran off.
Peter shrugged it off, but at the end of the night, he discovered one of the mysterious woman’s slippers on the ground. He brightened. This could be the key to tracking down the promising young engineer. But how would he match the shoe to the woman?
Then he remembered something she had mentioned. The slippers were individualized: they instantly molded to the primary user.

Peter Prince set out in his Tesla the next morning searching, with the help of quasi-legally obtained personal data, for every woman engineer in the kingdom. He knocked on the first door.
“Is this some kind of diversity initiative?”
“Not really.”
“Not interested, sorry.” And she closed the door.
He went to another apartment.
“So Google’s still trying to recover from the PR from that memo?”
“Actually, I’m not with–”
“No, thanks.”

But when he knocked on a door and the wicked venture capitalist opened, she was happy to let him in.
“Do you have a moment?” he asked.
“Of course! I was just finishing a meeting with the founders of the next billion-dollar startup, but you’re welcome to come in and hear their pitch straight from the source.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I’m in a hurry. I need to find the owner of this technologically groundbreaking slipper.”
“Well, look no further. Five percent equity says it’s one of these two right here,” said the wicked VC.
The first stepsister tried to squeeze on the slipper, but her foot was too large to fit.
“No matter – it’ll be her sister, then. Complementary cofounders, and all that.”
The second stepsister took the slipper and stuck her foot in. It slid in easily. Peter was about to cry out with joy when he was interrupted by a loud buzzing and a flashing red light coming from the slipper. The second stepsister’s foot had failed dual-factor toeprint authentication.
Disheartened, Peter turned to go, but at that moment, Cinderella emerged from her room to throw away her empty ramen cup.
“Don’t even bother,” said the wicked VC to Peter. “She doesn’t know any of the three Ds of ideation, and I’ve seen her use tabs instead of spaces.”
Peter sighed. “Just in case?”
The wicked VC rolled her eyes and shrugged.
As soon as Cinderella’s foot entered it, the slipper gave a small ding of approval. With a grin, she scurried into her room and came out wearing both slippers.
Peter whipped out his phone. “Do you prefer the window or aisle seat?”

A week later, Cinderella was on a plane bound for Castle headquarters (the self-driving carriage was still in alpha testing). With the woodland animals as the first employees, Cinderella enrolled in the Castle incubator program and launched soon afterwards. Peter and the wear-y godmother invested, Glass Slipper Labs expanded its scope to become the global leader in wearables, and they all lived haptically ever after.