The Term Sheet: A Startup Thriller Novel

by Lucas Carlson

  “I know you are, dear. I know you are. If it were up to me, I’d give you another month to figure out how to get out of this mess. But if I don’t get your rent payment in two days, I have to evict you. Don’t take it personal. You’re young. It could end up being just what you need.”

  As David poured two cups of tea, Helen began putting on her yellow plastic poncho.

  “What about the tea?”

  “How about you just deliver that tea to me this Sunday with your rent?”

  “You got it.”

  Helen walked out and closed the door behind her. A few moments later, David heard another knock.

  “It’s open still, Helen.”

  “Who’s Helen? Your new girlfriend? She seems a little old for my taste, but to each their own, brother.” Andrew walked in with a big smile. “I was expecting this place to be vacated by now.”

  “Yeah, that was my landlady telling me that if I don’t pay in the next two days, I’ll be evicted. I’m surprised it took this long to get to this point.”

  “You look pencil thin, are you even eating anymore?”

  “I started running.”

  “In the rain?”

  “I like the rain.”

  “I guess that’s what guys do after breaking up with their girlfriends.”

  “She broke up with me. You look fatter.”

  “I know, right? Jeni’s the coolest girlfriend I have ever had. She grew up in the South and deep-fries everything. I put on ten pounds in the last month. That reminds me, Andrea asked about you a few days ago. She was sad when she heard I quit Cryptobit and wants you to come by and talk. The more I get to know her, the cooler she is. Like a startup Yoda.” Andrew paused and David looked at the floor. “So did you watch it?”

  “Pitch Deck? No. I didn’t even know it was going to be on.”

  “I emailed you last night. They didn’t tell me it was going to be on either, but when I saw our faces in the promo, I emailed you immediately.”

  “I was on a coding binge. Plus my email is hooked up to Cryptobit now, so I didn’t get any messages until this morning when I turned it back on.”

  “Yeah, they featured us as the big finale. Every time they went to commercial, they teased you with a clip of us standing there dumbfounded. We look like idiots.”

  “Great.”

  “How’s the waiting list?”

  “Let me see. As of right now… 263,404.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’ve got an extra folding chair waiting for you if you want it.” David pointed to his card table. “I had an idea recently for how to get some quick cash. Enough to prevent my eviction at least.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Chapter 33

  Brandon was standing at a wall of whiteboards. His job was to write whatever Shawn called out as he poured over documents and posed new hypotheses. They had spent weeks collecting data, thinking through possibilities, and drawing and redrawing larger and larger grids. When Brandon suggested they use an app developed by the CIA that did much of the analysis for them, Shawn stared at him in disgust, then said, “I’ve got a better idea. Erase everything. Start again.” Brandon didn’t make any more suggestions.

  “Which hypothesis have we not ruled out yet?”

  “Can we order pizza? I’m starving,” said Brandon in a high-pitched whine. “We skipped lunch and everyone else has gone home already.”

  “Pizza is for closers. Now focus. Give me the next hypothesis and let’s try to disprove it.”

  “Seriously Shawn, I need food or I am going to collapse. If we don’t eat, I’m going to go home to my girlfriend. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  “You’re using the word ‘seen’ loosely, right? You only met on Second Life, didn’t you?”

  Brandon blushed.

  “Focus, Brandon. Stop complaining. We’re missing something. I can feel it. Hunger will keep your head clear. What’s the next hypothesis?”

  “Fine. Let’s see. Hypothesis forty-three: foreign governments are behind the attack.”

  “Okay, what are the supporting facts?”

  “The nicknames we found in the forums: China and Germany.”

  “It would be rather naive of a Chinese terrorist to sign emails with his country’s name, wouldn’t it?” asked Shawn.

  Brandon brought the marker up, ready to draw an X. “So are you suggesting that this disproves the theory?”

  “No, it’s just supporting evidence. Seems odd though, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess.” Brandon dropped his hand from the board.

  “Go on, are there any more supporting facts?”

  “Just the funny email address professing his love of China.”

  Shawn had a puzzled look on his face.

  “Erase everything again,” barked Shawn.

  “I don’t think we n—”

  “Erase everything, I said. Now.”

  Brandon started erasing.

  “Faster.” Shawn stood up and ran to the board and began to erase with Brandon. “Quick, spell the email address out loud to me.”

  Brandon ran to Shawn’s desk and pulled out a paper and began to recite: “M - E - H - A - R - T - C - H - I - N - A @ G - M - A - I - L . C - O - M.”

  “H. A. R. T. You sure it’s heart without an E?”

  “Hart without an E, that’s right.”

  “Why no E?” asked Shawn.

  “Maybe MeHeartChina with an E was taken?”

  “This has been nagging me for forever—since I first saw the post, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Why heart was misspelled.”

  Brandon ran to his laptop computer across the room and began typing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking up an anagram website,” said Brandon.

  “Your generation is so lazy. Next thing I know you’ll be asking for a pocket calculator to figure out half of twenty.”

  “I don’t need a pocket calculator for that, I have my Android.”

  Shawn stared at the whiteboard while Brandon kept typing away.

  “Got it,” yelled Brandon. “The Marachin.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You know, the Mexican singers?” said Brandon with a dumb grin.

  “You fucking idiot. No, it says The Chairman. As in chairman of the board.”

  “So?”

  “Who is the only chairman who’s come up in the investigation so far?”

  Brandon leafed through the papers sitting next to the laptop. Shawn walked slowly to a wall next to the whiteboards with pictures pinned on it and strings connected between the pictures. Shawn pressed his finger firmly on David Alexander’s picture. A dozen strings sprayed out from his picture around the board in every direction. Shawn dragged his finger steadily across the line to the upper right corner of the board.

  Brandon pulled a piece of paper from under a pile excitedly and stood up.

  “Of course! Doug Kensington, Chairman of System, Inc.”

  Brandon looked up at Shawn, whose finger was squarely sitting on Doug’s face on the board.

  Chapter 34

  Richard Curtis leaned toward Shawn and whispered in his ear: “You really have friends in high places.”

  Richard stood up and walked to the podium to address the joint FBI and Secret Service task force.

  “Good morning, everyone. You all know Shawn Douglas by reputation. We have gone through his reports and notes in great detail with our original team. But as of today, thanks to the president’s request, he is officially a member of this team. Shawn, can you give us an update on your latest findings?”

  Richard waved his hand to welcome Shawn to the podium. Shawn ignored Richard’s frown and walked up to the front of the room with a wide smile.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Shawn with a nod of his head and a slight smirk toward Richard. “I am glad to be part of this team. As you know, our un-subs are not professionals.
They have left us a series of sloppy clues, starting with the pseudo-anonymous online forum posts that originally caught my attention, and then re-using one of their email addresses to sign up for an encrypted chat service. It’s my belief that they’re currently planning another attack, a larger one this time—”

  Richard stood up. “I just want to be clear, Shawn. You have no proof of this hunch yet, correct? This task force was set up to investigate the terrorist event of July 11th, not to track leads on any future attacks. That’s the FBI’s job. Right now we’re only halfway through investigating the tips and leads we have around the July 11th attack.” Richard sat down smugly.

  “Correct, I have no proof, sir. However, even though we’re not dealing with the most sophisticated un-subs, I believe our good leads have run dry on the original attack. They got lucky. While you have been investigating the remaining open leads, I have been working on the assumption that there will be another attack. The service that the un-subs are now using has proven difficult to crack. The NSA has been unable to decrypt all the traffic and figure out what our un-subs are planning. So I went to Portland and asked the service’s creator, David Alexander, for his cooperation. He is an extremist libertarian hipster type and wouldn’t budge. He told me he would rather shut down the entire service than compromise the security of its users. So we’re looking for ways around him. We tapped the backbone Internet connection to both his house and the cloud servers he is using. We already had a significant presence in the cloud, so that wasn’t hard. However, his system is decentralized and full of fake messages that they call spoof spamming, which makes tapping any one user’s messages particularly difficult. Our techs have been trying to get the full registration list from his servers, but haven’t succeeded yet.”

  One of the men in the back of the room raised his hand. “Have you looked into whether David Alexander is part of the terrorist group? Maybe the service is just a cover.”

  “Yes, we have tapped his cell phone, email, and bank accounts and we’re physically surveilling him. He recently repurposed his service to encrypt emails as well as chat. He has been testing it on his own email account, which made it particularly difficult to see who he has been in contact with. However, our NSA found a flaw in his implementation that let us see meta-data. He seems like a normal guy, for the most part. He is up to his neck in debt and is about to be evicted from his apartment, which makes it unlikely that he’s part of a terrorist group. But we haven’t ruled it out completely yet. We’re exploring all the angles and will keep you updated when we get our next big break.”

  Richard stood up again and made his way to the podium.

  “Thank you, Shawn, for your update. Let’s continue with Special Agent Abanks and his update on the progress with the latest leads.”

  The meeting dragged on for another hour, reviewing dead end after dead end. Occasionally, one of the men in the room would ask a question, but for the most part everyone stayed quiet. When the meeting ended and everyone began shuffling out of the room, the man from the back of the room came up to Shawn and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Douglas, you do good work. I’ve been impressed with your reports. I’m glad that they got you roped in. Special Agent James Benny.” James reached out his hand with a smile.

  “Thank you. Please just call me Shawn.”

  “Shawn, I’d like to help. I know some of the guys on this task force are pretty anal about politics and protocol. A few of them are pissed that you’re on the team. But the only good leads we have in this case have come from you. I couldn’t care less about protocol, I just want to see the motherfuckers behind this in jail before they hurt anyone else. Can you give me the list of all the people David has been in contact with lately? It seems weird to me that he is refusing to help—I want to work on the assumption that he is not part of the conspiracy and try to disprove it.”

  “Sure, but if you think he is a terrorist, wouldn’t you want to prove it, not disprove it?”

  “It’s a CIA technique called the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. If you try to prove that there are only white sheep, you need to account for every sheep in the world to make sure. That’s a lot of work. But if you want to disprove that only white sheep exist, you only need to find one black sheep.”

  “I see, so you want to try to disprove that David is innocent.”

  “Precisely.”

  Chapter 35

  “David,” said Andrea with a warm smile and open arms. “It has been far too long. You’re looking good. How has life been treating you?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  David hugged Andrea halfheartedly.

  “That good, huh?”

  David sat down and made himself comfortable in one of Andrea’s blue swiveling chairs. He swiveled it back and forth. Andrea looked at David intently with her soft grey eyes. David was always impressed with how radiant and vibrant Andrea looked. He noticed that she had cut her blonde hair, which settled well with her face.

  “Well, let’s see. I was kidnapped and interrogated by the Secret Service, my girlfriend broke up with me, I made a fool of myself in front of eight million people on national TV—”

  “Yeah, I saw that. It wasn’t that bad. Many people never get exposed to millions of viewers like you did.”

  “Thanks for saying so, but yes, it was that bad. I had an acquisition offer rescinded, my cofounder quit and took a day job with you, and I was nearly evicted from my apartment.”

  “Nearly? How’d you get out of that mess?”

  “I found an ad behind my couch for the auction website I used to buy the jellyfish website in the first place. In the excitement of Cryptobit, I forgot that I even owned the thing. I put it up for sale in a quick auction. I got a quarter for every dollar I originally spent, but that was enough quarters to pay rent for a couple more months.”

  “David, can I ask you a question?” Andrea said as she leaned back in her chair.

  “Sure.”

  Andrea looked directly into David’s eyes. “When are you going to forgive yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Terrible things have happened to you. Clearly. You can’t choose the cards you’re dealt in life. Sure you have been dealt some pretty crummy ones recently, but how you react to life is always in your control.”

  Andrea paused as the words sank into David’s consciousness.

  “These things that have happened to you are not your fault. But you’re carrying them around like a ball of pain. You carry it with you and flog yourself with your misfortune. And you flog those around you. Your girlfriend, maybe? So again, I ask, when are you going to forgive yourself?”

  David fidgeted in his seat. He felt something deep inside his belly like a cannonball coming up to his throat. He tried to respond, tried to say something, anything, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Andrea continued: “These things didn’t happen to you because you weren’t good enough. They didn’t happen to you because you are failing at being an entrepreneur. These things happened to you precisely because you are succeeding at being an entrepreneur.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that,” David managed to muster.

  “I know it doesn’t. This is life, though. This is how it works. Let me tell you a story. I know you might not believe it on first glance, but I’ve been around the block a few times. This is not my first rodeo. The startup I did right before MochaToca started out as a huge success. We had created an analytics company right as online advertising started to take off. For years, it felt like we could do no wrong. It was the fastest growth I had ever experienced or seen in my career, even faster than MochaToca.

  “We raised twenty million dollars over four years and hired a hundred and fifty people. We made millions of dollars, but we were hiring ahead of revenue and running out of cash quickly. I had almost finished putting together our next round of financing when…we…when life happened. One of our founders was sued for sexual harassment a few days before the investment w
as set to close. Then our biggest customer dropped us without notice. The investment fell apart and I went to the bank to get a loan, but we were spending so much and had so little left that the banks wouldn’t lend us a dime. I went back to our investors who got cold feet. With no other options, I had to fire most of the staff, which of course stalled our growth. This led to a death spiral and within a month, we shut down the company. I was devastated. For months it ruined me. I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and just sat on the beach for six months trying to figure out what I did wrong. Do you know what I learned on that beach?”

  “Never trust investors?” David asked tentatively and with a slight smile.

  “Dear goodness, no. If I were in their shoes, I would have made the same decisions. No, what I learned is that when they say nine out of ten startups fail, they’re not just talking about the bad ones. It’s equal parts luck and preparation, and all I can do is bring my best every day. I stopped taking it all so personally. There was nothing I could have done differently. It was like a sudden wave that came out of nowhere and ripped my ship in half. A wave isn’t good or bad. It doesn’t care, it has no motives. It’s just a wave. Mother Nature. I just happened to be in the way. And I projected the darkest parts of me to that wave. I blamed the world for what was inside of me. For the ball of hurt I was carrying around.”

  Andrea paused.

  “David, it’s not the startup troubles that are making you feel this way. Who made you feel not good enough? When did that happen to you? You know it’s not your fault, right?”

  David looked up. His eyes filled with immense pressure.

  Chapter 36

  After Pitch Deck, David received 112 congratulatory emails from friends, family and strangers, 92 consolation emails, also from friends, family and strangers, 243 sales inquiries predominantly from IT vendors and outsourced programming companies in India, 23 emails from eager job seekers who wanted to work for David, and 6 investors asking for opportunities to get to know David better.