BeauShack ManHouse—the backstory

This used to be the home of tech startup CEO, Jayson Sanders; owner of the topt. dating app.

When topt. started out in 2016, it was as a gay dating app where guys would indicate whether they were a sub or a top, with the idea that guys who wanted to get railed would come to this app and match with a top in their area. Well, the idea took off and it started making the rounds on all the gay news blogs. Eventually, too many people had made accounts for Jayson's piddly little 16 TB desktop server to handle and he used the money from sales to get an enterprise server, which he set up in the spare bedroom of his flat.

After another surge in popularity, he decided to retool the app to be open to women, transgender people, and nonbinary people, but there were certain programming aspects that he couldn't get over by just reading an app development manual. Suddenly, he found he needed an office, so he got a $150,000 loan and opened topt.hq in Suite #417 of Lonetree Plaza.

It was no co-incidence that he set up shop here, one floor directly above Back to the Bible Ministries in #317, an infamous Christian evangelical PAC and one of the loudest voices in support of California Proposition 8 in 2008. When Jayson put on the topt. website that they were "topping Back to the Bible", the ministry attempted to sue for defamation, but the judge didn't understand the reference and dismissed the case as frivolous. When Back to the Bible terminated business in 2019, topt. expanded downwards, placing their customer support and R&D area in 317, adding 10 new servers and a new IT consultation office to 417.

With over 1 million active users at the end of the 2019 fiscal year, topt. signed a deal with Meta, Inc. This would allow topt. to add a "Log In with Facebook" button to their login screen and would give users the option to export their topt. profiles to Facebook and vice versa. More importantly, however; it gave Facebook additional marketing data on topt. users. While, officially, the Facebook deal was opt-out; in secret, the opt-out button had not actually been implemented in any more than cosmetic form. While the code to make the button actually work had been written, Jayson had instructed the development manager to comment it out so that all registered users were opted in. When a whistleblower leaked the story to TechCrunch in June of 2020, Jayson issued a statement that an "unknown actor within the company" had been giving Facebook unrestricted access to user data and that a thorough investigation was taking place. In fact, all he did was uncomment the opt-out code. It's estimated that his duplicity made topt. an extra $13.5 milion during Q3 2019 and Q1-2 2020. The whistleblower was identified as Elijah Woodard, a former R&D programmer, whom topt. international sued for $500 Million for breach of contract and divulging trade secrets. Woodard settled out-of-court for a smaller, yet still quite substantial, sum.

After the COVID-19 lockdown lifted in June of 2020, despite the news about Facebook, 2,400,000 additional users registered with topt., making the app one of the most popular on the iTunes App Store. At this point, topt. was ported to Android, as well. The app became an internet meme in 2021, given its original purpose and its logo's resemblance to the Greek letter beta (β), being given an unofficial slogan by a Tumblr user: "topt. always in beta", a double-entendre.

While the marketing department's first impression was to change the logo so it no longer resembled beta, Jayson liked the double-meaning and felt it was appropriate. Rather than having the logo redesigned, he decided to begin selling licensed merchandise with the logo on it, with various sexual double-entendres; such as a matching set of two teeshirts, "i got topt." and "i topt. that". They also adopted beta in their online marketing, using the slogan, "don't be a heta, be a beta."

In version 1.2 of the Android app and version 1.63.1 of the iOS app, released in February 2022 after the Kids Online Safety Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives, topt. rolled out a new live messaging system with end-to-end encryption. The idea being that people could now message each other "the raunchiest, pearl-clutchingest smut" without fear of being observed by government entities. The iOS version required Touch ID to re-login if the app is left idle for more than 5 minutes. At first, multimedia posts were not allowed, being restricted to text only. However, after user requests, limited multimedia support was allowed. Users were now able to send pictures, video, and voice, but only with the app's built-in camera and microphone features, and only if both parties have consented to being sent multimedia posts. For a brief time in late 2022, the app saw a surge in popularity with privacy advocates when it turned out that topt. messaging had stronger end-to-end encryption than Signal. This data was the result of a network error, which Signal demonstrated by replicating it, but they simultaneously congratulated topt. for protecting their users' "pillow talk".

In March 2021, Jayson signed in independent deal with cryptominer, Zephyria, allowing them to install their software onto users' devices. This was done without board assent and completely isolated from the main development. In order to conceal Zephyria from the network manager, he restructured the company to lay off much of the network specialists and then replaced them with cryptocurrency enthusiasts. By establishing a botnet using topt., multiple devices at a time could mine a single block, allowing Zephyria to go largely undetected for most of 2 years, with the only noticeable change being a new requirement of 64-bit Android devices, where 32-bit devices had been acceptable before. The deal generated a personal fortune of $25 million for Jayson, with which he was able to fund a lavish lifestyle of esports, yachting, and imported wines. This was compounded by a new deal with Google, allowing them access to data from topt.'s Android users, which brought the company $98 million. In order to deter suspicion that anything was happening behind the scenes, Jayson requested his own salary be reduced by 25% and to redirect that money to a pay raise for the company's 745 employees.

In January 2023, a topt. R&D programmer discovered the Zephyria scheme while trying to trace down the cause of an odd battery drain that began while testing the retail version of the Android app. Unable to find any answer in the code, he connected his Samsung Galaxy S20 to his developer terminal and discovered 12 MB of code present in the retail version that did not appear in the master build files. To verify his suspicion, he built topt. independently and installed it onto a different device, then observed the code being executed on both versions. While the manual version ran as expected, the retail version kept making calls to a library called "com.zxy.netserv.app". Looking into the matter further, he found posts on HackerNews that referred to the same library calls being made on a Google Pixel that had been infected with a cryptominer through a questionable ad-blocker app made by a company called "NoAdTech.app", a known front for Zephyria Currency Technologies of Taipei, Taiwan. Rather than go directly to the press with the information, he decided to release the story on 4chan using a multi-hop VPN. Within days, the story migrated between 4chan, Tumblr, Reddit, HackerNews, and finally The Los Angeles Times and CNN. The employee in question never quit the company, as doing so would have pointed an arrow directly at him as the one who leaked the story, fearing assassination.

topt. COO, Brandi Frerichs, issued a statement about the app's involvement with Zephyria, stating that the board of directors had been intentionally kept in the dark by CEO, Jayson, who had apparently restructured the company so he could install a loyal deployment manager. She also stated that the board of directors had unanimously voted to remove Jayson from his position and replace him with vice-chairman, Jermaine Taylor effective 27 February 2023.

In March 2024, topt. was sold to Grindr for $36.9 million plus stock options. The topt. main office is now called Grindr San Fran and continues to employ the same staff hired by topt. The topt. app was deprecated and replaced by Grindr's main app; current users were migrated to Grindr beginning on 14 March 2024 and completing on 1 April 2024, causing some users to believe topt. was playing an April Fool's prank by changing their logo to Grindr's.

The House.
Jayson had commissioned BeauShack ManHouse on a plot of land overlooking San Francisco Bay. The project cost just under $10 million to design and build, with Jayson's husband, Todd—an interior designer with his own studio in Sausalito—serving as design lead. The house, itself, was designed and built by Margrave-Delaplace, a team of architects who were noteworthy for building celebrity mansions. The house was designed with the Sanders' in mind; the guest room was intended for Todd's brother, Kyler Lopez—better known as Kitsune Shuntaro-chan, a Vtuber who specialises in classic Doom mods. While the formal dining room had been intended for fancy family dinners and things of that kind, it turned out that they preferred to take their regular meals in the kitchen breakfast nook, so the dining room was repurposed for esports.

When Jayson was ousted from topt., he, Todd, and Kyler moved to Todd's family home in Sausalito.