Mutex
“Mutual exclusion for friend group crises. Only one of you is allowed to be unhinged at a time. The lock is held by Sarah until Thursday.”
The Problem
Your friend group is a shared resource with zero concurrency control. Tara got dumped Sunday. Marcus thinks he has cancer (it’s heartburn). Jenna’s mom is “fine,” which means a 2am voice memo is inbound. You have four emotional file descriptors and seventeen people racing for them. Something is going to deadlock. Probably you.
The Solution
One lock per friend group. Whoever holds it gets the floor — crying, oversharing, eleven-paragraph voice memos, unsolicited tarot. Everyone else gets EAGAIN and joins the queue. The lock releases when the situation resolves, the holder falls asleep, or the bartender cuts them off.
- ① Marcus — chest pains (heartburn)
- ② Jenna — mom (“fine”)
- ③ Devon — landlord email
- ④ You — existential, low-pri
Lock Acquisition States
Lifted directly from pthread.h, adapted for people who need to be witnessed.
The Priority Scheduler
Not every crisis is created equal. We reorder the queue by severity so Marcus’s heartburn doesn’t starve a real one.
Deadlock Detector
The classic case: two friends both holding a lock the other one needs. Our cycle detector breaks ties by paging the person with more therapy hours logged.
-9 Marcus. He had 14 unanswered texts anyway.Pricing
TAM
The Ask
$5M seed. Builds: a fairness-preserving scheduler, a sentiment model to classify “real crisis” vs “Mercury retrograde,” and a referee mode where we put two friends in a Zoom and the loser gets SIGTERM.
Series A pitch:“We’re Kubernetes for people who can’t let things go.”