I immediately told her she couldn’t be more right. And not because I actually knew she was right like I was hoping she was. I don’t know whether I was truly planning on making a million bucks, or just wanted to impress a girl. But with time, I found out I liked playing the guy she wanted me to be. The one who goes once a week to a fusion restaurant without knowing what fusion cuisine means; who surprises his girlfriend with a trip to London on a Wednesday morning for no special reason, just because he feels like it. Nelly says a man is measured by his most ambitious dream, and mine started the day I met her.

There was only one problem with our dreams—she realized them, and I didn’t. She beat me four years ago, whizzed past me leaving a trail of dust when she was appointed VP at Segal & Zuzovsky, while I was still stuck in career limbo as a development manager in a series of mediocre start-ups whose idea of a company fun day was an egg-and-spoon race at the Yarkon Park. At first she teased me that I couldn’t keep up. But with time the banter died down and was replaced by tedious exchanges such as whose turn it was to take out the trash and which form to fetch from the bank. Petty requests that only reinforced my fear that all the expectations she had of me at the beginning had disappeared along the way, as if she had resigned to spending her life with a lesser man.

I honestly thought the start-up I had joined two years ago, Lucid Memo, was going to change everything. The whole business was based on a Jewish professor of neuroscience from Harvard who immigrated to Israel after reading the book Start-up Nation. She moved here and hooked up with an Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur, some guy called Amichai Miner; they decided to devise a technology that would enable people to share memories. Today I can’t believe I thought it stood a chance; I guess I just didn’t think it through at the time. I even gave up part of my salary in exchange for options in the company. All I wanted was to make good on my promise. To score a knockout against life itself. I worked my ass off, anywhere between fourteen and sixteen hours a day, including weekends. Including holidays. More than I wanted the money, I wanted to get to the moment I could tell Nelly I made an exit, that the company was sold to some Chinese investment fund. To see how she would smile despite herself, exposing that small gap between her two front teeth she always tried to hide.