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Asha is halfway through her PhD and working on an algorithm to develop empathy in artificial intelligence. When she meets up with her high-school crush Cyrus, now a charismatic creator and celebrant of secular rituals, she sees the opportunity to adapt her research into a revolutionary new social media platform bringing meaning into millions of lives.

She also falls back in love with Cyrus and they get married in a whirlwind of passion, ambition and excitement. Together with Cyrus’s best friend Jules, they are invited to join the super-cool startup incubator Utopia, and their journey through the cutting-edge world of tech innovation begins.

As their app takes off, Asha finds herself confronting challenges to her marriage, her dreams for the future and her independence, and discovers the brave new world of tech is still, like the old one, dominated by men and their ambitions.

Episode 6/10: Stretching the runway, beating the numbers and hitting the big time.

Tahmima Anam is a novelist, short-story writer and Harvard educated anthropologist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Costa First Novel Award, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her other novels are The Good Muslim and The Bones of Grace. The Startup Wife owes its inspiration to her own experiences as executive director of a music technology startup founded by her husband.

Reader: Preeya Kalidas
Abridger: Sara Davies
Producer: Celia de Wolff
A Pier production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4

Image: Tahmima Anam
Credit: Abeer Y. Hoque