"Don't worry, everyone.  I've got this.  Hello world, my name is Chad Roosterman.  I've never watched one of these shows before, and it'll be my first time dating more than two women simultaneously or running a startup, but I figure it can't be harder than I am."

That's great, Chad! What could POSSIBLY go WRONG?

Chad, tell us a little bit ABOUT YOURSELF. What gives you the CONFIDENCE to take on this CHALLENGE?

"Confidence isn't something you're given.  It's something you are.  I once repaired an ambulance while I was in it and fucked the Mormonism right out of a woman.  Not while I was in the ambulance, though, that would be silly."

And the one thing we never are on Dom, Incorporated is SILLY.

Thanks, for that, Chad!

Are you ready to meet your potential HAREM MEMBERS?

"I was born ready."

Our first INNOVETTE originally hails from RUSSIA, where she helped run the family business... until she was EDGED OUT. She'll get a rise in more than your VALUATION. Meet... AMBER!

"I'm not regretting my life choices so far."

Our second contestant knows the VALUE of HARD WORK as she grew up on a FARM. She has WELL DIVERSIFIED ASSETS and she gives great YIELDS all day and all night. Meet... JADE!

"...you provided them all with different-colored hairstyles and named them after it, huh.  Okay.  Hi Jade, hope you're not one of the spies."

Our third ENTREPRENETTE has a mysterious background... even to herself. She's an AMNESIAC hoping you can JOG her MEMORY. Vigorously. She'll put the TREASURE in your TREASURY BONDS... meet SILVER!

No response to that, eh? Moving on then!

Our fourth STARTUP-ETTE has a rags-to-riches story of her own, but is ready to DO IT ALL AGAIN for YOU.  She'd like to CHAIR your BOARD while she adds LIQUIDITY to your PANTS PORTFOLIO. Meet... IROKO!

That "amnesiac" part did, in fact, cause him to pause and take things even less at face value.

"'Ello Iroko!  I look forward to learning all the ways in which you have a distinct personality from the others, but for now, I'll just say you're pretty."

Awww, that's sweet. But we're just past halfway done!

Here's contestant number FIVE. She wouldn't say WHY she wants to win this game, but she did successfully CONVINCE our producers of her ENTHUSIASM! You'll love to see her BOTTOM LINE! Meet... PANSY!

"Hellloooo, Pansy.  You sure look like you're up to something, and I guess we'll find out whether that's a bluff or a double bluff."

Our sixth INNOVETTE is an Olympic bronze medalist in gymnastics, looking to TAKE HOME THE GOLD this time. She knows how to do the SPLITS as well as the STOCK SPLITS. She'll BEND OVER BACKWARD for you... Meet... LYCHEE!

"Gonna need sunglasses for a second to handle that incredibly bright-eyed look, there.  Looking forward to being flexible with you."

And FINALLY, we're very pleased to announce that season four will feature a DIRECT DESCENDANT of ALADDIN himself, 1/64th genie by blood. She'll make your WISHES COME TRUE and she never LIMITS your ORDERS. Meet... JEANNIE!

"Oh hey!  Never met let alone bagged one of your family before."

Why would SHE be on the show???

Any reactions, Chad? Who are you looking forward to... WORKING WITH?

"All of them, including the spies."

"Chad, you can leave the harem management to me, to free you up for more important business. I know how to keep your staff in line."

"I would prefer to work directly under you, Chad, not under Amber!"

Jade keeps a pleasant smile plastered on her face. Is she supposed to say something dirty right now?

"It is for Chad to dictate the organizational structure of this corporation."

That's... right, actually! But NOT YET!

After this commercial break, Chad and the ladies will decide on a BUSINESS PLAN!

Any PARTING WORDS before the break, Chad?

"I admit, the number one question on my mind right now is whether the first three seasons were also like this.  But as for questions numbers two through eight, well, we'll find out soon enough, won't we?"

HARDAFIL, the PDE-5 Inhibitor that also works for PDEs 6, 7, 8, and 9!

You'll be able to punch right through a sheet of titanium! With your cock!

When your partner has that vaguely dissatisfied look... HARDAFIL!

AND WE'RE BACK!

Chad, it's time for you to run your first STAFF MEETING!

You'll pitch your business ideas, and the LADIES will SHOW their APPROVAL of the ones they like.

"So I've never owned a dog myself, but I remember my college friends being pretty broken up whenever one died, and I was thinking:  What if there was a service where you sent them video of yourself with your dog, and they found a dog which looked just like that one and trained it to recognize someone who looked and sounded like you?  At scale we'd want to find actual actors, but for a start we could use videos of the owner and give the dog a biscuit each time the video showed them.  Hot-swappable dogs, the new one can show up the same day the vet puts the old one down."

"It sounds like a novel idea to me, but then I can't remember anything, so I might be wrong."

"I'm worried that we shouldn't call it 'hot-swappable dogs,' that makes people think of frankfurters."

"My company tried something like this before the pivot and it was a total shitshow, literally, taking care of all the inventory. You find yourself just wishing a golden retriever would finally kick the bucket because you have too many in stock."

Oh, shit, she forgot to flirt.

She'll just cup her own boobs for no reason.

Okay, so that was a completely dumb idea that he was tossing out to see who pretended to like it, and now he genuinely does not know whether Iroko is serious that her company already tried it.  God help Silicon Valley.

...no it can't possibly the case that Iroko's own company happened to try exactly that thing.  She's either joking or lying... presumably joking because a spy would expect the lie to get caught.

"Well, be it far from me to contradict somebody with so much prior experience," he says, dipping an agreeable nod at Iroko's boobs.  "Next idea.  How about if we find some people who are really good at understanding dogs, and use that to build a dataset that translates dog body language into human language?  The hardware for the dog collar could be our moat against somebody else just taking input-output samples from our product and using that to train another multispecies language model more cheaply."

Pansy smiles at Chad. "Oooh, I love it when you talk like that. Tech-speak is hot." She flips her hair.

"Are all of your concepts dog-related and if so, why?"

"I mean, I can come up with others, but the question is, what do people still care about enough, in this cynical age, to spend money on.  And one possible answer is, their dogs."

"Is that true? I never had a dog, it was just training all the time, day and night. Do we get to do any market research or do we just decide on the spot?"

"Market research is how you end up with three hundred identical companies all trying to sell software as a service as a service to YCombinator alumni.  We should find an idea so good that we don't need any market research to believe in it, because if you need market research to tell you whether an idea is a good one, it probably isn't."

"What if you give us a few more options to choose from, before we decide yes or no about this one?" she smiles winningly at Chad. "I love to hear how you think."

Hmmm.  That sounded like somebody pushing back against a terrible, terrible idea without yet taking the risk of offending him, which he's guessing is a little bit more like what a regular contestant should sound like, compared to a mole who wants the company to fail but is constantly thinking about whether or not her actions get her caught out as a mole... though, of course, it's still just day one, here.

"It's not illegal to sabotage other companies so long as they're not in your own country, right?  Suppose we recruited some black-hat hackers, and offered a service to AI companies where we do our best to sabotage competing AI companies so long as they're not operating out of the same country or our own host country."

"I think we're not allowed to hire other talent during the show? We're limited to the talent in this room for the pivotal parts of the business plan."

Silver read the paperwork carefully.

"I don't know if I am a computer hacker. The only way to find out is to put me in front of a computer with a lot of code scrolling by and see what happens. How about anybody else?"

Pansy's not going to just admit anything like that!

"I know my way around. You can learn a lot of things when you don't have to sleep."

"I mean, we can always improvise the computer security part -- I'm sure there's directions online -- but the real question is, is any of us a lawyer."

"I mean, I've never passed the bar exam, if that's what you mean."

"Late at night in the farmhouse I would study legal texts by candlelight and I'm so sorry, but sabotaging foreign companies is illegal under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as the international Budapest Convention on Cybercrime."

Jade looks pained.

"I'm really very sorry. I don't mean to just shoot down your ideas."

"Let's just get everything up on a whiteboard so we can see what we've got!"

Iroko gets up and starts writing in big block letters:

• REPLACEMENT DOGS
• DOG TRANSLATOR
• AI COMPANY SABOTAGE SERVICE
•  

Amber narrows her eyes at Iroko but doesn't say anything.

"I have other startup ideas, of course, but how are we feeling about these three?  Both as a rank-ordering, and as pass-fail?"

There is a notable absence of anyone jumping up and advocating for any of these ideas.

There is some sycophancy, though.

"I suppose we keep going then.  Do we want to just rebuild OKCupid?  Everyone keeps saying how somebody should just build 'OKCupid from 2014' but nobody ever does it."

"Maybe we could add more explicit photos to it for people with premium subscriptions, that would drive revenue."

"Well, first of all, by the time we can actually ship and scale, people will already be assuming that any pretty female picture is AI-generated.  Present company excepted, of course.  But more importantly, as much as we might want people to post explicit photos that can only be seen by premium subscriptions, and then, pay for premium subscriptions, I'm not seeing how they find that in their own interests."

"In season one they tried to do a subscription website and they tanked. They couldn't get critical mass during the limited time shooting the show."

"Then again, it could have been because of what their actual service was."

"And that was?"

"Oh, right, you haven't seen the show!"

Jade forgets that people haven't seen this show. And all the other shows.

"So their company was called Vibester and they sold vibrators and then you could swap vibration patterns with your friends. But it turned out there are only three good vibration patterns and that pretty much does it for all clit-having people."

"I guess that slightly argues against any mostly two-sided system like OKCupid, where you need women to attract men and men to attract women... I don't know, it's not obvious to me that we wouldn't have enough of an advantage from the initial publicity boost of people watching us live.  The question is what grows faster."

"I think we're supposed to defer to you, so forgive the impertinence -- or don't! -- but I have an idea, if you'd like to hear it."

"I'll decide my general and personal policies on forgiveness later.  What's the idea?"

"I've always wondered what would happen if I got swept into a different universe quite suddenly. Like, would I be prepared? Would I be able to fend for myself, trade with the locals, and ultimately establish an empire of my own? So what if we sold kits to help people prepare for that low-probability but high-variance situation?"

"...like, a packet of synthetic rubies and directions on how to start an industrial revolution?"

"Exactly!"

Jeannie slightly smiles for the first time.

Maybe Chad isn't a midwit?

"Maybe I shouldn't ask this, but what would you, personally, say are the chances that I'm going to need a kit like that... sometime?"

"I couldn't possibly narrow that down to any useful range, I'm sorry. But isn't it better to be prepared?"

There's a little glint in her eye.

"Let's maybe put that one on the shortlist and, you know, put at least a little effort on it at some point.  It could go with the premium OKCupid subscriptions."

Iroko updates the list on the whiteboard accordingly.

He should probably keep going?

"Also in terms of problems our viewership might be interested in solving:  In my experience, there's a lot more women interested in having some light brutality in their sex lives, than there are men they know and trust to deliver it.  What if we put some backbone into figuring out a vetting system that scaled further than small-town BDSM circles, where half the time nobody gets around to warning the newbie about that guy they couldn't manage to kick out of the public meetups?  To the point where you could go on an app, and get a trustworthy man delivered to you?  To the point where it wouldn't even have to be the same man each time, because they'd all just be reliable and even, to some extent, interchangeable?"

"I admit, I generated this idea mainly by thinking of new things that would initialize to SAAS.  Sadism As A Service."

There are nods and smiles and pleased looks all around the room.

"Ohhhh. I really like that one," breathes Lychee.

They... like it?

Well, it got too many nods for them to all be moles.  He hopes.  He's aware that reality shows don't always, like, tell you accurately what they're doing.

"We'll shortlist that one too," HE GUESSES.  "Anyone else want to say their own idea?  It's probably okay with the producers so long as you get disciplined accordingly."

"It's not a new idea so much as playing off your last one, which I also really liked."

"What if, in addition to vetting sadists, we also trained them? We could really make this world a better place."

"I think that's a great idea," Silver lies.

"I volunteer to pilot the training program. These new sadists will need someone to practice on!"

"I think having novice sadists practice on the seven of you individually does not scale.  Really, so long as we can come up with a sufficiently good way of certifying sadists, there'd naturally be training programs intended to help them get certified... though, I suppose in that light, we might want to run the programs ourselves, just to make sure the trainers aren't entirely teaching to our tests."

"The more basic question is -- how can we tell who's a good sadist?  Women can give testimonials, sure.  How do we figure out which women to trust about that?"

"I scale further than you might think!" Pansy winks at Chad.

"You're a lot of woman, Pansy, but if you're female to the point of it being a scalable business then I might need to see some proof."

"Can do, sailor, you can dock at my port tonight if you pick me for the sleepover."

"It opens the somewhat disturbing question of what result of that sleepover would count as proof, and now I'm not sure I want to be anywhere near that bedroom."

Pansy pouts prettily.

Iroko watches all of this and wishes she'd thought of something better than that stupid boob-cupping.

At least he looked approving about it. Maybe she's still okay.

After the break: the ladies will try to PERSUADE Chad to go with their FAVORITE business ideas!

But first, a word from our sponsors!

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And we're back!

The haremettes will now take turns joining Chad in the BOARD ROOM where they will plead for the business idea they like the most!

They'll go in RANDOMLY SELECTED PAIRS, except for one lucky lady who will get Chad all to herself!

The first pair will be...

JEANNIE and JADE!

Jade squees.

"The Board Room! It's so exciting to be in here instead of just watching on the show!" She bounces a little bit.

"How do you want us to give you our feedback, Chad? I'm sure we each have thoughts about which business to pursue."

"Well, you know, there's people who are very dispassionate in their evaluations of ideas and who would pride themselves on not being persuadable by naked seduction.  I'm not one of those people.  I heard once that all mental faculties are correlated with each other; therefore, so are seductive excellence and good taste in startup ideas.  And at least one of you is probably smarter than I am.  So going with the opinion of whoever does the best job of seducing me is probably the wisest course of action."

"You've got opinions, anything is fair game when it comes to persuading me of them."

Jade blushes furiously and makes a little choking sound.

"Thank you for stating your criteria so plainly. Am I just competing against Jade or against all of the girls?"

"I'm not sure what it would mean for you to be competing just against Jade, and not the others?  We only get to choose one business idea, and then later I only get to choose three girls."

"I am purely trying to understand your algorithm. It sounds as though you want us to compete -- sexually -- and it is by this basis alone that you will choose a business idea. This sounded... implausible... to me, though I guess the network's interest is primarily in having an exciting television program, and so selecting an entrepreneur who would make business decisions this way might fit their goals."

"I hoped that maybe you would choose the winner of each small conversation by sex and then engage your entrepreneurial spirit in a subsequent round. But I infer from your confusion that actually, it's just sex."

"Very well."

Jeannie drops to her knees in front of Chad and begins to undo his belt buckle.

This is sufficiently surprising, and is going to take him long enough to think about, that Jeannie may possibly be able to get past the belt buckle before he actually thinks of a reply to say out loud.

Should she be taking off her top right now? What would the top sluts from previous seasons do? The pressure!

...but he will successfully realize, though not very much in words, that if a 1/64th genie said she wanted to be on this show, the producers would absolutely never say no to that, no matter how much Jeannie otherwise didn't seem to already get the vibe.

He'll put a hand on her head, with the sort of gentle pressure that would otherwise prevent her mouth from going straight for cock.  "Jeannie, I did say that anything was fair game to persuade me, and I meant that, but I feel like I should warn you that literally just having sex with me is probably not going to be that persuasive.  I mean, anyone could do that.  It doesn't even need words.  Also you haven't said which business idea you favor and you should probably do that part first."

Jeannie stops what she's doing but doesn't stand up.

"Oh, I was planning to tell you the business idea afterwards so that you'd be more likely to remember it. I was also going to write it down for you, so you could remember it past the other interviews."

She waits for a response rather than immediately diving back in.

He might have a teaching situation on his hands.

Chad would be a poor dom -- at least, his kind of dom, in his own ideals about that -- if he flinched away from that.

"There's a saying among humans, 'Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.'  We might have to teach you about that part.  Meanwhile I won't be offended if you just make a lot of logical and cogent points and then, you know, maybe try to distract me sexually while Jade is trying to make her points.  Unless, of course, you agree with Jade."

"If we're mainly talking then I think Jade should go first."

Jeannie takes a seat that is still within dive-bombing range of Chad's crotch, just in case, and looks expectantly at Jade.

Jade still has her top on. That's probably good? It seems like she should say words now?

"Right! Okay! Business ideas!"

"So, I have some concerns about... pretty much everything that's been proposed so far. I'm sorry. I didn't want to undercut you in front of everyone."

"I think... you have a hard problem. There's a balance to strike between building a successful business, doing it fast, and doing it in a way that brings network ratings."

"Huh.  I'd always figured that building a startup was an easy problem, which is why everyone else has already done it, and now everyone has millions of dollars."

"Well... it's actually pretty well known how to start a business? It's just that most successful businesses are boring and hard work."

"Like, I am pretty sure you could make a profitable laundromat business. Or liquor store. Or you could install flooring in apartment buildings. There's a lot of wear and tear on apartment building floors."

She should totally be taking her top off right now, right? Ahhhh this is confusing.

"Sure.  But let's face it, anyone as awesome as you and the other contestants would be wasted on starting a liquor store; it wouldn't bring in more than you could make stripping at a hedge fund."

(Chad does briefly think about the win conditions for him and whether they actually rule out just starting a liquor store.)

Yep, they sure do! No way you're going to hit victory-level KPIs with a boring-ass liquor store! You will need, at the very least, a sexy new take on liquor stores to hit the required numbers!

"Oh, sure it could, eventually. We'd need to scale up. And meanwhile, we can keep things interesting by being tremendous sluts!"

She chokes out the last phrase with some effort, and then dramatically, clumsily, rips off her top.

Her lacy bra is pretty but not particularly revealing.

She's wide-eyed and panting a little.

That's fucking adorable.

Or she's the spy pretending to be that hesitant, in which case it's a different kind of adorable.

"You think we could scale a liquor store far enough to hit our KPIs by the end of the season?  Or is this more of an intro to a different straightforward way of making money?"

Chad will also reach out and lightly flick one of Jade's nipples while he's talking, just to see how she reacts to that.  He is a sadist on more than just a physical level, and if Jade is embarrassed and forcing herself to be slutty then Chad will of course want to make her task more interesting.

Jade squeaks and takes a step back, and then hastily takes a step forward again. She couldn't actually feel the flick much through the bra, it was just the suddenness of it.

"I've watched every episode of this show and all the other shows like it and I think it's so weird that people are always trying such harebrained things. Why don't they just do normal things that work? Maybe the producers pressure them? Maybe it's the way the show is cast? We could actually win this way!"

Jeannie feels up Chad to see if Jade's antics are working. Collecting data is essential.

Chad has rehearsed, extremely carefully, not flinching if a haremette makes a sudden move on his crotch.  If he flinched on recorded television, he'd have to move to another country out of shame.  Jeannie will find that Chad's lower Chad is stirring, but not fully hard.

To Jade:  "I figure that anything within the producer's rules is fair game, and sure we could keep it interesting by being sluts.  But literally starting a liquor store isn't going to meet their KPIs unless I'm missing something, or it's somehow an extremely high-traffic liquor store or has a big online presence?"

Jade pouts without actually meaning to. She really thought the sensible business plan idea was sensible!

Then she notices that she's pouting and tries to memorize exactly how it feels from inside in case she wants to do it again on purpose later.

"If you are finished I will speak?"

She waits for Jade's sad nod and then continues.

"I think you already know what kind of company I would like to build. I'd like to make an entirely new product or service. I am excited about the isekai kits. I realize they appeal to a niche audience but I have ideas for how to tailor the kits to individual circumstances and strengths, and this would help differentiate us from any copycats who tried to undercut us. I just want this product to exist, and it will be easier to build something with a team than by myself."

"But if you don't like that idea I would also support Sadism as a Service."

"Why Sadism as a Service but not, say, rebuilding 2014 OKCupid?"  Jeannie is at least posing as extremely analytic and, sure, if that's what she's useful for then Chad will take that and run with it.

"The original OKCupid was subsumed and subverted. I haven't looked into the details but I assume there were market forces at work there and not just stupidity. I expect we would run into the same problems they did."

"I like Sadism as a Service because I would like for that to exist. I would use it. And to my knowledge no one has tried it before."

"I think this team might be especially well-suited to build it."

"The original OKCupid was bought out by a bigger rival, the PlentyOfFish/Match.com empire, that didn't like the superior competition to their user-bilking operation.  A bunch of people say they miss it.  That's why it was one of my top candidates, in a sense it's a pre-validated idea and we'd already have a strong idea of what to build.  Does that change your view?"

"Why would the same thing not just happen again? Or would you welcome it if we were bought out?"

"I think I would find it disappointing to make a derivative service and then just sell it."

"Also, if that worked, then this is basically a replicable money printing machine, and that doesn't seem likely to work. What would stop it?"

Jeannie stops to think.

"Maybe if we attempt this we will find out what stops it. Maybe they just come and kneecap us."

"I think this is actually how ideal capitalism is supposed to work?  If some guy buys out 2014 OKCupid and ruins it so that they can have a crappy monopoly, what's supposed to happen is that somebody else goes off and builds 2014 OKCupid, and this happens again and again until Match.com runs out of money or somebody just refuses to sell.  That's the idealistic capitalistic concept of how Nature heals and why there aren't just monopolies everywhere -- it's supposed to cost Match too much money to buy out anyone who builds a rival, it's supposed to be free money for anyone who does."

"I don't think Match kneecaps anyone who tries it.  I think startup-capable founders just haven't gotten around to it.  But if they did come after us on a televised reality show that sure would be an interesting publicity-adventure for them and us."

"All right."

"I don't really want 2014 OKCupid for myself, I don't think I get anything I personally want out of that, but it is not up to me."

"Do you still want to pass on that blow job?"

"Up to you, I'm not going to fight you unless you're really bad at it and then that's a training issue.  You could always try it just so that your later rivals would have a slightly more difficult time seducing me.  Slightly."

Chad has obviously had a good dose of Hardafil in advance.

"How about this. After you talk to the other girls, if you are in danger of making a dumb decision, come back and I'll blow you out of it."

"Noted.  But, Jeannie, if you could just blow men out of terrible decisions, the world would be a different place and one in which there was a much easier solution to a lot of our problems."

"Unlike Pansy, I am not globally scalable."

Snrk.

"Yes, but if in general you could just blow men and have them not make dumb decisions, I think some other girls would join in on it.  Probably call it the Open Phellatio Project or something like that.  And if not, there's always Pansy."

After the break, we'll see how PANSY and LYCHEE try to influence CHAD!

But first, THIS MESSAGE.

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"Hi, Chad! I'm so excited to talk to you about the plans for the company!"

As Pansy enters the room, she's slipping something into the pocket of her microskirt.

"Oh. Me too. Definitely." She winks.

"Oh, I've been quite excited for a while now."

"I'll bet you have," purrs Pansy, as she settles herself on his lap and puts one arm around his neck. She traces her finger lightly along the other side of his neck.

"What have you come up with so far?"

He'll trace a finger along her neck and use slightly more fingernail.

"Now, should I really be prejudicing you by telling you what the other girls thought, before I hear what you have to say?"  This hardly seems like best practice with possible-spies.

Pansy squirms prettily. Her skirt is very micro and if Chad keeps that up, she's going to get cave dew on his pants.

"Seems like you've got us at a disadvantage, then!"

"That's why I'm the dom and you're the victim.  Now, opinions, my potential dear?"

He'll use more fingernail to emphasize the question.  If he ends up with Extract of Pansy on his pants, well, such are the acceptable hazards of being manly.

"I think we went too quickly past all the dog ones at the beginning. They probably weren't going to work as stated, but I'm sure we can workshop them into something good!"

"What if, when you got your replacement dog, it came with dog language translator module? Kind of an upgrade, so you don't have to feel so bad about losing the first dog?"

Pansy will just nibble on Chad's ear while Lychee is talking.

"Think the conventional wisdom there is to start with a Minimum Viable Product?  First we've got to figure out how to ship the basic pre-adjusted dog, then we can work on developing further add-ons for upsales.  Or develop the translator first, then, use it to record all the data off your previous dog to use in training a new dog."

He'll just put his hand on Pansy's short skirt and start tracing paths here and there.

"Do you think dogs worldwide all speak the same dog language? Like, what if we train the dogs somewhere cheap and unregulated, and then ship them to more wealthy countries... will the dogs speak the right language when they get there?"

Pansy will grind her hips and moan very quietly in his ear.

Well, he's used to that sort of thing, at this point in his life.  With a name like 'Chad' he'd almost have to be.

"It's the sort of thing we could test, but I wasn't planning to do anything unregulated with dogs, that might not be ethical.  And we'd initially be trying to develop the tech ourselves, on-hand, here in this highly developed country -- outsourcing the work would come after we'd verified the basic process ourselves, and were trying to scale further than the number of dogs we could handle."

"Oh good, then we wouldn't run into dog dialect issues right away. That's great, you've really thought of everything!"

"I'm not sure that's my actual vote, though. It does sound like it might take a while before we get to a really compelling product and we don't necessarily have that kind of time. The two dating ones are probably faster."

Pansy comes up for air.

"Like the sadism one. Sadism will get us where we want to go."

"It's what's for dinner, what makes the world go round, and forcibly causes the heart to grow fonder."

He'll give Pansy a nice sharp pinch somewhere as he says it.

"But the key question is, how do we monetize humanity's darkest desires?"

Pansy's spine straightens abruptly when Chad pinches her, and she squeaks.

"Monetization seems completely straightforward?"

"Don't we just make money on targeted advertisements that the sadists will deliver when their victims are at their most vulnerable?"

"If I'm going to all the trouble to deliver some guy with a spanker to a slightly scared woman's apartment, I am by good goddamn going to make more of a fee off of somebody than Google paying me six cents to have the guy tout her a Pepsi."

"But what if he doesn't let her have the Pepsi unless she does his bidding, and then he pays us also?"

"...so if I imagine myself as the woman, here, I want to know that I'm the customer and not the product, but maybe that's just way too 1980s thinking for the modern world.  I mean, I'm not against 'the first time is free' as a market philosophy, but the obvious thought is that she has to pay for the guy to come back."

"Or she could just pay to come."

Pansy licks Chad's ear.

"Hmm.  We'd need some way to get the guys to actually go along with it, or verify whether they did go along with it.  But I'm liking the trend of both things you're doing with your mouth, Pansy."

"Maybe there are more ways to monetize sadism than I thought! I'm feeling good about this idea."

"Do you, um."

"Need to me to demonstrate that?"

"Your lap looks pretty full."

"Oh, I can make room!"

Pansy shifts so that she's straddling Chad's right leg, and pats the other leg invitingly.

Lychee takes her cue and perches daintily on Chad's left leg.

"Did we convince you?" she asks brightly.

"Well, you know what they say about guys who can only go a couple of minutes before they end up convinced, if you know what I mean."

Next up, can Chad withstand the THREE-WAY persuasion of IROKO, AMBER, and SILVER?

Stay tuned to find out!

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"Hey, Chad! I'm excited to pick a winning idea with you!"

"Uh. Yes. Me too. Excited. As you can see."

Silver does not actually look excited.

"I'm ready to get to work. What are the remaining leading ideas, now that you've talked to the other four? Do you need a tiebreaker?"

Amber scoops up Chad's necktie and seductively strokes the end of it.

He'll run a finger lightly over that black choker Amber's wearing.  "Only new idea that got added is 'just open a liquor store' or something equally mundane and straightforward, but I didn't see how to meet our required KPIs that way."

"As for the other ideas -- why, anything is in the running if somebody makes a sufficiently persuasive case."

"Who was best at persuading you so far, and what did they say?"

Amber sidles forward, straddling one of Chad's knees and working her way up the tie until she's touching his neck too.

His voices lowers seductively.  "I'll tell you after you've made your own move, Amber."

Amber pouts prettily.

"Well, I'm bold enough to say what I think!"

"Sadism as a Service is the clear winner. You saw how popular it was in the room with all of us, and I feel pretty confident that will generalize."

"Pfffft."

"Expand on your scorn," Chad says to Silver.

"In some important senses I was only born three months ago, but even I can tell that the seven of us are hardly a representative sample of consumers."

"Valid, but I think the case is more that it says something about there being a large-enough fraction of customers for us to meet our KPIs -- if only we could actually manage to build a service that works, and also somehow convince people that it worked.  I think that's my big qualm about Sadism as a Service, the question of how we make it work and then also convince people that it works."

"Free samples? Real videos of people happily using the service?"

"We could also start our own porn site that way."

"Testimonials! Client reviews of specific sadists!"

Iroko has been eyeing the Chad/Amber Mutual Neck Fondling Society and trying to figure out how to get in there. She approaches Chad from the side and clamps her hand on the back of his neck.

Silver stays a few paces away, her arms crossed.

"People will assume it's all staged."

He'll place a light finger under Iroko's chin, then.  With fingernail.  Just barely light enough to be threatening.

"They'll assume anything on our own website is false," he says agreeably towards Silver.  "I suppose if the service actually works, people might... well, the problem with word-of-mouth is that a lot of people who use the service will be reluctant to come out and say on Twitter what a great time they had.  And as for offering free samples to journalists, they'll lie out of sheer existential habit and because 'it worked fine' doesn't make a good story."

Iroko will jump, a little, at the fingernail, but then settle herself back down.

"This is why I think we should just go with the OkCupid clone. It's much easier for people to believe it's a real service. They get it. It's not such a leap of faith."

"Now that we told you what we're interested in, won't you please tell us the current standings?"

"I want to know, too, who's pushing for what. I'll... if you'll tell us, then I'll kiss someone else here. Whoever you say."

Silver rolls her eyes.

"Jade wanted us to do something straightforward like a liquor store while acting slutty enough to keep up ratings, but didn't have an answer to how we'd hit our KPIs."

"Jeannie wanted us to do something entirely new and still liked the isekai-kit concept, but failing that supported Sadism as a Service.  Jeannie worried a clone of 2014 OkCupid would fail the same way as 2014 OkCupid.  I said that OkCupid had been bought out by a rival with a crappier, more extractive service that didn't like the better competition; and that people cloning the bought-out service is how capitalism heals in that case."

"Lychee thought we could workshop one of the dog concepts into something good, but conceded that it might be hard to scale it up fast enough, and failing that endorsed one of the two dating businesses."

"Pansy endorsed Sadism as a Service, Lychee suggested having the sadists recite ads in order to monetize, and Pansy wondered about getting the sadists to do the enforcement of payments."

"I think that was the highlights of everyone's standing."

"As for who I'll have Iroko kiss, I think I'll save that particular debt as a surprise weapon."

Amber looks satisfied.

"I mean... I'll kiss her, just for getting you to tell us what's up."

She arches an eyebrow at Chad. Is he into it?

"I mean, realistically you'll kiss whoever I tell you to kiss, whenever I tell you to kiss them, or suffer the consequences.  For now, you'll go spend fifteen seconds licking Iroko's ear, just to make it clear how things are going to work around here."

Iroko looks slightly strangled.

Amber, however, looks delighted. She leans over to Iroko, keeping her legs surrounding Chad's knee, and brushes Iroko's hair back from her ear. She starts delicately licking, working her way from the top of the ear, down the side, and occasionally darting the tip of her tongue into the ear canal.

Iroko's eyes unfocus a little bit and she makes a small squeak.

Silver waits patiently. No point in talking business with Chad watching the ear show.

It's a lovely show.  He'll keep careful track of when the fifteen seconds are up; and then, of course, not say anything, to see how long it goes on and who if anyone calls a stop to it.

Iroko pulls herself together. Can she actually manage to kiss Amber, if she tries?

She can! Amber stays close when Iroko turns her head, and now the two of them are making out while Amber is still half-draped over Chad.

Well, he'll start feeling up both of their asses, then.

With a heavy sigh, Silver takes off her top and gets in there.

He'll give a heavy sigh of his own and nod apologetically at how both of his hands are already occupied.

Silver can just get her boobs in his face, then, if she angles in from the side just right.

He'd usually go straight for the teeth, but Silver seems a bit held-back and also he's already juggling two hands, so he will initially apply only tongue to any boobilic targets of opportunity.

Incidentally, is either of Amber or Iroko exhibiting any interesting properties assically?  Wetness, squeaks, squiggles, having not been wearing panties, any of that.

They both have excellent asses in different ways. Iroko's is round and inviting; Amber's is toned and firm. Nobody is squeaking or squiggling too much as they're pretty absorbed in the kiss.

It's hard to tell if Amber is missing her panties or just wearing a thong without delving deeper into the matter.

Well he's of course going to delve at least exactly deep enough to figure that out.  It doesn't do to not know when a woman's not wearing panties.

Okay, that gets Amber's attention.

No panties. Wet.

Then he'll briefly brush her Tease Button a few times, and then promptly go back to feeling up her ass just like that part never happened.

Iroko wonders why Amber is kissing her so hard all of a sudden.

Silver removes her nipple from Chad's mouth for a second.

"So. OkCupid! Let's do it!"

"You two are allowed to distract me, especially if it seems like she's getting somewhere.  -- Why not Sadism as a Service?"

Nipple goes back in his mouth while she talks.

"Well, for the reasons you named, for a start. It seems very hard to get network effects to help scale the service up. Many customers won't want to talk about using the service."

"Second, when I think about people who want to be topped, sexually, I'm not sure that population is accustomed to paying for sex. There's a huge barrier to acquiring new customers."

She'll squish the other boob into the side of his face to emphasize the point.

"And third, let's say a customer hits it off with a sadist. What's to stop them from just making it a regular thing without giving us our cut?"

Amber, hearing all of this, realizes that she needs to break away from the kiss and focus on business or she's going to lose control of the situation.

She goes for Chad's belt buckle. It's a little hard to reach but she's determined.

He won't stop her!  He's cruel, but not so cruel as to deny a woman access to his genitalia.

To Silver, "It's not as if an OkCupid user is going to pay us all that much either, as individuals.  For Sadism as a Service... we either need a large payment the first time because afterwards they can cut us out of the loop, like how Taskrabbit ended up; or, we need to provide some ongoing service.  Maybe a bond that the sadist posts with us to guarantee ongoing good behavior?  Phone app that records audio of the whole encounter, but the recording stays local and nobody on our side listens to it, unless one of the participants files a complaint?"

"Ah, but with OkCupid we can make it up in volume! It's a proven business model! There are so many things we can charge for... premium placement of your personal ad, ghostwriting your messages for you to match the other person's profile..."

"If you all are determined to offer sadism we can make that a secondary product for people on the main platform who are interested in that but not seeing enough action. That's how we'll find them in the first place."

"Iroko! You talk while I blow!"

Iroko is startled, still dazed from the kiss.

"Uh, okay!"

She thinks for a second.

"There's no way we're going to scale a large service in the short timeframe we have. We'll never get to those later offerings! We need to show results fast!"

Meanwhile, Amber has penetrated the various protective layers surrounding Chad South and is providing emphasis for Iroko's points.

It is possible to give a blowjob that a man cannot just talk through, or think through, but if he's not otherwise close to an orgasm it will take some element of surprise or overstimulation.  He will pat Amber on the head to acknowledge her current efforts, if she hasn't yet managed to fully distract him, and reply to Iroko.

"Sure, we'd need to scale OkCupid to a lot more people -- maybe a thousand times as many users -- to get equivalent revenue to the Sadism Service if we can get large payments from individuals that way.  But OkCupid could easily be twice as viral over ten growth periods, considering how much of a bar Sadism faces to virality.  And we don't actually have a strong theory yet about how Sadism pays us."

"Sadism is its own reward!" jokes Iroko.

"No, but seriously. Um."

Amber pulls her head up for a second and wipes her face with the back of her hand.

"High membership fee for customers. Training fees for would-be sadists."

And then dives back in.

"Ah, yes, sorry, I admit I'm having a little trouble multitasking!"

"In my previous business we did see some really good results from charging both parties in the transaction in different ways. So here, nominally we make money on the masochists seeking sadists, but also we make sure to deliver them a really high quality service by training the sadists ourselves and charging them for it."

"This all seems so complicated."

"Why not just make money in a simple, straightforward, proven way?"

She shifts her weight, knocking her hip into Amber's head.

With heroic effort, Amber does not bite down when she gets clonked in the head, but she does grunt angrily. It's muffled because her mouth is so full.

"No sabotaging my own pleasures, especially when it involves mechanical force, my cock, and nearby teeth."

"I sincerely apologize," Silver says to both Amber and Chad. "It won't happen again," she says to Chad.

"So... Sadism as a Service, then?"

"Apology accepted, we can talk penance later," he says to Silver.

To Iroko, "What's the real reason you wouldn't want to do the easier thing?  Too uninspiring by comparison, or do you really not think it's easier?"

"I find it exciting to build new things that haven't been done before. I think we can do this and I'd like to be on the team that does it. I think the other idea is dull and the market is crowded. I like to go high end and really excite a customer base, even if it's a small one. People are going to love us. It's going to radically improve their lives."

Amber is doing her best to excite the high end of Chad's customer base.

If just one woman was saying they found it more exciting to build a new untried business, he'd think they were a spy.  But there's too many different women saying it for all of them to be the spy.  Jeannie -- who he is privately rating, at this point, as one of the least likely of spies -- seemed to basically feel the same way.

There's something to be said about making your startup try to do something that inspires the engineers... isn't there?

It'd be an easier call, if not for Silver feeling more inspired by OkCupid; he currently has Silver down as the second least likely to be a spy after Jeannie...

...Amber's getting kind of distracting, here.

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What CORPORATE EDIFICE will you be ERECTING?

"Sadism as a Service, because as the saying goes in startups, you gotta do what makes your employees wettest.  We can pivot to 2014 OKCupid if the moonshot isn't mooning."

Jeannie, Pansy, Lychee, Amber, and Iroko look pleased.

Silver looks resigned.

Jade can't help herself, and blurts out, "Oh no! You're repeating the mistakes of seasons two and three! You're trying to get too fancy!"

Iroko counters, "Fancy is excellent. Fancy is how you get an engaged customer base promoting your service to others."

Silver nudges Jade. "I think he already made up his mind, are you sure you want to be on the wrong side, here?"

"I should probably be pretending to be completely confident in this idea, but I'm not actually.  Just, if I wasn't into at least trying my hand at doing the crazy, I wouldn't exactly be on this show, would I.  I shalln't punish Silver or Jade if they go on speaking their mind about that."

"All right." Jade squares her shoulders.

"I don't really expect you to go for my idea, here, given what you just said about wanting to do the crazy. But... seriously. Can't we just do something simple that will obviously work? It doesn't have to be a liquor store like I said before. It can be something bigger and beefier."

"Chad will give you something bigger and beefier, you don't need to worry about that."

"Well, the 'who bells the cat' question here is what a straightforward business looks like, such that we hit the producer-mandated KPIs.  The producers didn't set up the KPIs with intent to let us win by being boring.  They want hot-startup growth rates on whatever we're doing.  Which in turn seems to imply something Internetty and that represents a qualitative improvement over previous solutions."

"It'd be nice to have something like that, which is also straightforward, but what is that thing?  To me it feels like the hard part isn't saying that the list of nice qualities would be nice, it's coming up with any specific thing which actually has that bunch of nice qualities."

"You want internetty but also simple and straighforward? That's obviously the OkCupid idea. You already had it."

"Nobody has really argued successfully against it, it's just that they're all tremendously slutty masochists and they're getting wet thinking about dial-a-sadist."

"My head -- the top one -- thinks that's pretty persuasive."

"My heart says, you don't win by doing things that don't inspire your employees, and so the majority tilt among the masochists ends up decisive for me.  Maybe in a week it becomes clear that it couldn't possibly work and we swap to OKCupid, but -- we should at least take our first run at the thing that gets them excited."

"You're the boss."

Jade remembers how to make the pout face and makes it, but remains quiet.

EXCELLENT, we have an AMBITIOUS, PROMISCUOUS business idea!

Next up, Chad: please identify the TOP TWO and BOTTOM TWO girls!

"It's a bit early for that!"

No no, you don't need to HIRE or FIRE anyone! This is just a way for you to give a PERFORMANCE REVIEW. Feedback is the key to great employee performance, if you know what we mean!

"...Huh.  All right, I can see how this fits in with the theme, and I can't in good conscience refuse after having agreed to do this show at all.  But for the record, this is not normally how I'd treat a bunch of slutty masochists, and I want to make sure my slutty masochists know that."

"Just out of curiosity... how would you normally treat a bunch of slutty masochists?" Lychee's eyes are big and innocent.

"With great respect for their individual talents and... vulnerabilities, which need not be reduced to a rank-ordering.  It's not about who's more ticklish, it's about you being helpless and me doing what I want."

Lychee blushes and ducks her head.

"All right, then.  I'd normally ask for a chance to review my notes in private, but I admit, I was keeping a running tally in my head.  Top two --"

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"All right, then.  I'd normally ask for a chance to review my notes in private, but I admit, I was keeping a running tally in my head.  Top two, Silver and Iroko."

Silver's mouth turns up slightly at the corners and her shoulders drop a little bit.

Iroko fist-pumps and jumps up and down a little bit, and then tries to arrange herself in a more dignified posture.

"Silver, at least on surface appearances, often seems to say what she thinks straight out and it's almost always been something I can immediately understand as sensible.  Iroko has been a positive organizing factor, first to start listing out items on the whiteboard."

"And then if I've got to rank the helpfulness of other contributions so far -- sorry and this is not usually the way I'd do things -- I'd put Jeanne, Amber, and Pansy ahead of Lychee and Jade."

Jeanne, standing at parade rest, remains stoic throughout this announcement.

Amber and Pansy look stricken and then relieved in turn as Chad reveals the twist in the sentence.

Lychee and Jade both look like they're about to cry.

...it is at least a little odd that they wouldn't have been more braced for the possibility, but maybe showing your emotions is something that the producers carefully select candidates for?  Lychee and Jade weren't top of his list for being spies.  Chad wasn't braced for seeing that much emotional reaction, but he is just a generally Braced Sort Of Person and is hopefully not reacting too visibly himself.

"All rankings subject to rapid change in the face of further experience!" Chad says reassuringly.  "I'm not the kind of guy who just makes up his mind!"

Jeannie presses her lips together.

Lychee sniffles and tries to pull herself together.

Jade blurts, "I knew this could happen but I didn't think it would happen to me! I really tried to give you ideas that would work!"

"And I could always turn out to be horribly wrong about everything!  Just because I'm the dom doesn't mean I'm smart!"

"Even so, you are in fact in charge here."

"It's not always easy, but all of you, so far, would outwardly appear to be worth it."

SILVER and IROKO, you may now take JADE and LYCHEE to the punishment chamber!

"Wait, WHAT?"

"Oh, right, I guess you didn't realize what it would MEAN for us. Since you don't watch the show."

"...Right.  Well, if they're overly mean to you past where it stops being fun, let me know and I'll be overly mean to them."

And which of the remaining ladies will SPEND THE NIGHT with you, Chad?

It takes a second for him to shift gears, but this is also a predecided decision.

"Pansy.  We'll see how her scalability handles my 99.999% uptime."

Pansy wiggles seductively.

"Oh, I've got this."

NEXT WEEK on DOM INCORPORATED...

Chad and the entreprenettes SECURE OFFICE SPACE... RECRUIT the FIRST SADISTS... and someone is FIRED!