Bruised (Hunt Brothers Saga)

by Timothy S. Allen

  “Mmm,” I said, thinking about it.

  There really wasn’t much to tour. There were about eight people in here, and while by San Francisco and New York standards there was quite a lot of space, it reminded me of Claire’s office, except Andrew didn’t even have an office. I saw him because he waved to me immediately and stood up.

  “I think Andrew will take care of me, thanks,” I said.

  “OK, do enjoy!” the blonde gal said, nicely enough. I wondered just how different her reaction would have been if I had tried to flirt or, probably worse, dressed up in a suit and tie. I’d heard the stories of the bespectacled coming to San Francisco, only to get laughed at in silent—and sometimes in public—for dressing so “stuffily” and “ridiculously.”

  I walked to Andrew Patel and shook his hand. He had a weak grip, which already felt like a massive red flag and began to confirm my suspicions from the flight about his leadership. Obviously, that did not correlate perfectly with how effective or ineffective of a leader he might have been, but if Edwin Hunt liked to repeat anything besides “the art of the deal” or some variant of that phrase, it was how you could judge a man based on his handshake.

  Not that he ever realized some cultures just don’t value handshakes as we do. But whatever. I’m Chance, not Edwin, so I’ll make my own judgments... and so far, Edwin kind of has a point.

  “Good to see you, Chance.”

  Then again, the way in which he spoke suggested some measure of confidence. I won’t pretend that Andrew had the charisma of a President or the charm of a socialite, but he at least wasn’t some bumbling fool or awkward programmer type who had stumbled onto a goldmine of an idea.

  “Perhaps it would be best to convene outside for some privacy?” he said.

  “That would be great, sure,” I said. “Most San Francisco offices don’t have, well, a private office, huh?”

  “Oh, no, I want my peers to feel like they can approach me and they’re on the same level.”

  It struck me more and more with each passing moment how unlike the cultures of the west and east coast were. Edwin Hunt didn’t just want his employees to know they were beneath him, he would often go out of his way to remind them of their inferior status. Andrew Patel wanted to share an office with an employee.

  It amused me, thinking about Edwin Hunt having to share an office—hell, share a hallway; no, not even, share an entire floor—with anyone besides a young, cute secretary. The very thought almost made me burst out laughing as Andrew and I walked outside.

  “So, tell me about your situation,” I said as we began a slow stroll through the hilly streets of San Francisco. “You want $5 million for 10 percent, correct?”

  “Um, yes,” Andrew said.

  There was something in the way he answered that made me believe he’d pulled those numbers out of a hat. I had examined their product and their numbers enough to know that he probably hadn’t had the most rigorous analysis of what his company was worth, but this was even less than I had assumed.

  “And how did you come to that?”

  “Well, we currently make about $5 million in revenue a year, and it seemed like with the market size that was a good number to push for.”

  Revenue. Not profit.

  “Let me ask you something, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You said revenue. What is your profit?”

  Immediately, Andrew became tense. Not in a confrontational or negative way, but in a way that suggested he had perhaps exaggerated some numbers before. That, or he just didn’t know how to run a P&L ledger or any sort of number crunching. He was a programmer at heart, not an MBA studnet.

  “Honestly, Chance, we are losing money each month.”

  There it is.

  That news in itself wasn’t a death kneel, but what it did do was tell me two things. One, Andrew was a terrible negotiator and would allow me to create quite the sweetheart deal for myself and Morgan. Second, for as much as Andrew had a great business idea—one with enormous potential at that—he did not have the business skills to run it. Perhaps my thoughts earlier about taking it over and inserting myself or Morgan into the company were not all that dumbfounded.

  “Well, I appreciate the honesty,” I said. “We’ll need to look more closely at your numbers to come up with an appropriate evaluation, and I’ll show you how we did it.”

  I knew I was taking a risk, of course, given that some other investor could blindly agree to $5 million for 10 percent. And really, they would have not made the worst decision in the world. The hiring of a CFO could easily position them to be worth far, far, far beyond $50 million within five years.

  But Morgan had a relationship with Andrew. I was beginning to form one. If he started to feel like he was losing his grip on the sale, I could always offer my expertise as a CFO or, at worst, financial consultant. Andrew seemed honest enough to know his weak points, and me filling them would have to be a nice benefit.

  I felt my phone vibrating but ignored it. I had a feeling, though, when I checked, I would not particularly feel certain about what the text really wanted to say, regardless of which girl it was from.

  “Of course,” Andrew said. “This is all new for me, you know. All of the money we’ve raised so far came from my parents and family.”

  “As does happen with many startups,” I said casually, although thinking about how much money they must have gone through to that point made me wonder if the Patels were like the Hunts in their coffers. “The important thing is to make sure we both work out a deal that makes sense for both of us. But let’s not do that in front of your employees, OK?”

  “Well, if you think that’s best, but I like to be open and honest.”

  Oh man. It really is a different world out here.

  “And you can be open and honest about the end result, sure, but a lot of these negotiations need to be private for the sake of not just you but us,” I said. “It’s pretty standard.”

  “OK,” Andrew said, although he did not seem particularly convinced. “We can do that. Hold on, I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call.”

  I caught a brief glimpse on his phone that showed one of his programmers was calling him. I took the opportunity to look down at my phone and see that not only was I confused by the one text, I got confused by two texts.

  See, they said the same thing.

  “Meet up soon?”

  But one came from Layla and one came from Claire.

  The context immediately before that particular message was rather drastic. Layla and I had at least reached a point of civility, and perhaps she saw it as me finally being open to meeting her again. Claire was doing it under the guise of business.

  You know, you’re assuming a lot. It’s not as if Layla has actually expressed an interest in getting back together. She’s just apologized.

  And Claire... well, let’s not go down that rabbit hole.

  I locked my phone and looked back at Andrew. I didn’t know what the numbers would show yet, but the idea of an acquisition or at least an investment larger than 10 percent seemed like the most obvious choice at this point. Maybe Andrew wouldn’t sell the majority of shares in the company, but we could easily acquire enough to hold voting power.

  The opp was too good. The chance was too good. The timing was too good.

  I just had to hope that we didn’t get usurped, as I had last time, at the last second.

  And if we did...

  Well, I wasn’t going to take it as easily as I had with the Taylors and Burnson Investments.

  Chapter Seven

  Over the next three days, Andrew and I sat down and hammered out a couple of options that he said he needed time to figure out.

  The first one was $5 million but with a 30 percent purchase. That would leave us second only to Andrew, who would own 42 percent of the company. It would allow us to have a say, but not necessarily to have control of the company. It was the best I could get, but knowing Andrew, it was also something I was willing to take on.
>
  See, I had in my head that the kind of growth Virtual Realty could have would come after Andrew exited his role as CEO. Oh, he was invaluable to the team as a visionary for the product. I would have paid him $1 million a year out of the Hunts’ retirement fund just to keep him around. But as a CEO? He needed a little bit more seasoning.

  Maybe I needed a little more seasoning as an investor, especially given that this was just our second deal—not yet even completed—and my first couple of ones, well, I had a little bit of trouble keeping my dick in my pants. But I couldn’t spend time contemplating that. I had to move, I had to move fast, and I had to move with purpose—contemplation and reflection would come at the appropriate time.

  Andrew liked that idea best, although he was uneasy about me eventually purchasing more shares. That, however, was the point, and I had to admit, I began to feel a little like Edwin Hunt here.

  In the back of my mind, I knew that in two, three years, the company likely would not have the kind of growth Andrew would have hoped for with him at the helm. Once we hit that point where we realized we had not achieved that profitability, I would be able to make a move, put myself or someone else in the company, and then watch it explode. It was a little Machiavellian, sure, but it was also from an honest place in that I wasn’t making the move to fuck over Andrew but actually to help him.

  The second option was $1 million at a hair over six percent. This option would keep us as passive investors, and while Andrew was paranoid about me coming in and having a larger say than he was comfortable with, he was equally uncomfortable with the idea of us investing and being nothing more than a dollar amount. Plus, $1 million for his company would only go about ten months before it burned out—it wasn’t long enough for them to generate self-sustainability.

  I had given him the second option to make him feel like he had choices, but I think we both knew that only one option was really viable—the $5 million for 30 percent one.

  Well, in the context of us, that was true. In the context of all funding options, that wasn’t true. I had to hold my nose and hope Morgan worked his friendship enough and that I had made a good enough impression on Andrew to give us a fighting chance.

  When I boarded the plane that Thursday morning, I felt pretty good about where we stood. We had not agreed to anything, but Andrew’s words and actions suggested that he had great interest in joining us. We joked, we laughed, and we bonded over things like growing up in rich families, travels, and the pressures of having to succeed from overbearing parents. It was surprisingly vulnerable and honest, but I never let myself lose focus on the task at hand—sealing the deal.

  Sealing the deal in a polite, win-win manner, not in an Edwin Hunt-style manner.

  Just before I boarded the plane, my phone rang. With a sigh, not really looking forward to more questions about hanging out this weekend, I grabbed it. But it was not Layla or Claire.

  It was Morgan.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  He sounded flustered and worried, as if someone had just told him I was being held hostage.

  “I’m at the airport, our plane’s boarding in about ten minutes.”

  “Go somewhere private and quiet, please,” he said urgently, his voice a sharp whisper.

  Now I began to worry something besides business had transpired, although I had my doubts—a family emergency would not have required me to go somewhere private and quiet, at least not for the sake of secrecy.

  But that only made my worries even more pronounced—a family emergency would be sad, but as fucked up as it may have sounded, it was preferable to business concerns. Family would bring us together and push the politics of business to the side; a business emergency would have made things much, much worse than they already were.

  “Yeah?” I said. “I’m in the corner. No one can hear me.”

  “Good. Chance, Edwin’s also going after Virtual Realty.”

  No.

  “Does he know?” I said.

  There was just no way he didn’t know. This was too much of a coincidence—just minutes before flying home to New York City, right when I had left Andrew, Edwin Hunt was swooping in?

  That was too coincidental. He had to have known in some fashion. He was, once again, trying to take advantage of me in some fashion.

  Naturally, this pissed me off even more.

  “I don’t think he does, it’s not like Virtual Realty is a secret among potential investors.”

  Well, that was true, and that did make my fears seem a little on the deluded and paranoid side... except that had I had the exact same thought with the Taylors, I would have considered the whole ordeal ludicrous and, well, here we were.

  “Even if he does, though, it doesn’t change anything,” Morgan continued. “You have to continue to be the boots-on-the-ground person. Father is getting suspicious of how tired I am, albeit not about this particular deal. Right now, he thinks I’m just drinking too much. But if he finds out you and I are doing something on the side...”

  “It would make him easy to cast you out of the business heirdom.”

  “Which maybe wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but you know what I mean,” Morgan said. “Apparently, he hasn’t said this, but the rumor going around is that he would just use the buyout to purchase the IP of Virtual Realty, shut it down, and then give it to his largest realty company for their own use. He believes a company like that with that kind of technology will experience a boon.”

  Well, duh. That wasn’t the problem—that was the goal. The problem was that I could easily see Edwin Hunt persuading Andrew that he had his best interests at heart and would take good care of the company, only for a little over a half-dozen people to realize less than six months later they were out of a job. Even if it made the most financial sense, it would not make for a good ethical decision.

  Not that Edwin Hunt ever believed in ethical decision making. The only thing that mattered to him was the bottom line.

  “So he’s going to fuck over a startup to make his largest investment happy, which in turn will make him rich.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Doesn’t your dad ever tire of money at the expense of his soul?”

  A long pause came on the phone. Even as his brother, I had never fully understood the dynamic between Morgan and Edwin Hunt. It was always difficult to pin down. I had always assumed that Morgan felt overshadowed by his father, but whenever I said something critical, at best, Morgan would clam up as he did now, and at worst, he would call me an idiot who didn’t know any better. The angriest and most scalding I had ever seen Morgan came when I said no one should aspire to be like his father.

  “I wish he did.”

  That was about the closest I would ever come to hearing Morgan criticize his father.

  It made me wonder if maturity and age, or maybe just fatigue, was getting to him. I never saw them talk about anything much beyond business. That didn’t mean, of course, Edwin was a father who did nothing but make money. He came to Edwin’s games as a kid when he could, but that wasn’t that common of a thing. It seemed, if I was being generous to Edwin Hunt, he just stuck to what he knew and that was business.

  That didn’t excuse his unethical business behavior, though.

  “In any case, Chance, we have to move fast on this deal,” Morgan said, his voice still sharp and quiet. “I know these kinds of deals can take a couple of months to execute, sometimes longer depending on their size, but we need to hammer out something as soon as we can.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said. “Do you want me to stay here in San Francisco?”

  “I wouldn’t, too weird,” Morgan said. “Dad is on the next flight out there right now.”

  The next flight.

  I guess things are going to move really quickly one way or the other.

  “You should just come home, but stay in touch with Andrew. Use the Wi-fi on the airplane to text him, I’ll reimburse you for it. Act
ually, don’t. I still don’t trust that you aren’t being tailed.”

  How ridiculous was it that even now, Morgan wasn’t being crazy so much as he was being justifiably overly cautious?

  “But when you land, send him some messages. Maybe you’ll text him in the middle of talking shop with Edwin—”

  And then it hit me.

  “Do you think Andrew is going to say anything to your father about us talking to him?”

  Nothing could have spelled doom for us faster than that. I would lose my monthly stipend from the family. God knows what would happen to Morgan’s reputation and standing in the Hunt family. I should have known that it wouldn’t be us that fucked ourselves over, but a potential client who just didn’t think much of saying we’d approached.

  And Andrew did not exactly strike me as the type of person who could keep a secret, what with the way he wanted our talks to be open to everyone on staff.

  I think my words hit Morgan just as hard, because he clammed up just as much as I did and didn’t say a word for several seconds.

  “Stay in touch with him,” he finally said. “Make it abundantly clear he shouldn’t be telling anyone about anything. Frankly, we shouldn’t know that he’s talking to my father. I only know because Edwin announced it in a board meeting I got invited to, not an every day occurrence.”

  “Understood.”

  At that moment, the flight crew announced that boarding would begin.

  “I have to go, Morgan,” I said. “Unless you want me to stay here. You know I have no qualms doing that.”

  “I know, and then you and Edwin run into each other and Edwin wonders why you’re out there without a job.”

  “I could say—”

  “No, Chance, come home,” Morgan said. “Stay in touch with Andrew. I have to go.”

  He didn’t even say bye before he hung up, leaving me to wonder who had walked into his office or who had summoned him. I let the phone drop, the call ending before my eyes.