Trade Secrets

by Kathleen Knowles

  “Oh. Her name’s Sheila Garrison. She’s a VC, and they’re probably going to invest in us. I met her by accident last week up in carpet land.” The technical people made a distinction between linoleum land, their domain, and the upstairs offices where the businesspeople resided: carpet land.

  “Does Erica know you know her?” Gordon from engineering apparently had heard them talking and asked, with an edge to his question that Tony wondered about. Gordon was both older in age and in longevity with GHS than the others present. He was a bit gruff and standoffish, but he was kind and generous to his colleagues. Tony was surprised he’d even come along on an outing like this because he was far senior to everyone else, including Abe, who had been in his job for only six months.

  “I don’t know her. We just met for the second time. Why do you ask?”

  Gordon paused, looked at Abe, and something nonverbal passed between them.

  Gordon said, “Erica doesn’t like for different parts of the operation to know the other parts very well. She likes to have all the information and us peons to have little or none.”

  “Sheila’s not even part of the company. Why should it matter if we know each other?” Tony was mildly irked but intrigued. There was too much to learn when you were new to a company.

  “It’s probably fine. Erica is, well, eccentric, in case you haven’t noticed.” Gordon shrugged. Case closed.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she is eccentric, but that’s not important.” In reality, Tony was hugely enamored of Erica, though only in an intellectual sense. She was, after all, a young woman who’d started her own company. That was monumental. Gordon was likely still rather sexist. With some men, especially older ones, that attitude never seemed to go away.

  Abe said, “We aren’t at work, so let’s talk about something else. I just saw the new Iron Man movie. Anyone want to know what I think?”

  After a chorus of good-humored “noes,” everyone laughed, and Lara said, “Go for it.”

  * * *

  Tony had a choice, exactly the sort she hated to make. She could file Sheila’s card away and forget about it or…she could call. She suspected she was being hit on, but she couldn’t credit it. She wasn’t the sort of girl that Sheila’s sort of girl dated. Sheila was a pretty and polished business pro. They dated only their own kind, not Tony’s kind—the plodding, awkward, lab-rat type. Yet here was the card with the phone numbers in her hand. Sheila had handed it to her with the admonition to call.

  While Tony was no virgin, she had miniscule experience with women. She’d carried on with a few other coeds at Cal, but sex at college wasn’t hard to come by. Since she’d left Cal, she’d been too involved with graduate work, studying for her license, then working long hours at the biotech start-up. GHS looked like it would be a similar situation—long work hours, intense concentration. Start-ups demanded mega amounts of time and energy. Sheila likely had leisure time to date, but Tony didn’t. Still some sort of interest was there, probably friendship. That’s what Tony’s default pessimistic assessment said. But maybe not.

  Yet, as she had been prompted at Coupa Café to walk up to Sheila, Tony called Sheila’s cell and left a low-key message.

  Great running into you at Coupa. Call me back when it’s convenient.

  Then she attempted to force her mind into work mode.

  She left her phone on her desk and went to the lab, where Abe was ready to show her what he was up to.

  He said, “Our objective is to scale down the assay so it works with two drops of blood, even if the blood has undergone some hemolysis and isn’t super fresh. Erica’s microcaps have preservatives, but she told me she wants to demonstrate the Leonardo to some investors before it is actually working so she wants to send the samples to us for testing.”

  “Oh. Hm. You mean like she’ll take the samples and then put them in the cartridge and take them to the lab? Isn’t that kind of underhanded?”

  “Yeah, but don’t you ever say that to anyone. Besides, it’s just for show. Erica can wow all the outside people like investors. As soon as we perfect the assays and the engineers get it together, we’ll be in business for real.”

  “Testing real patients,” Tony said. She recalled how Erica’s eyes had glowed as she described the parade of people coming into the drugstores.

  “Righto. Okay, Tone. While we’re working on this, we’re the guinea pigs. Here are some lancets and some microcaps. Let’s play vampire. I want your blood,” he said, in a bad horror-movie accent.

  Tony didn’t mind Abe’s shortening of her nickname, because it seemed like a sign of affection. They went to work with a number of assay kits and other reagents from different manufacturers to see what gave the best results with smaller quantities of reagents. The trial-and-error process would identify what they needed to change and by how much.

  Science isn’t glamorous. It’s time-consuming and painstaking, and frequently an experiment doesn’t work at all. But Tony didn’t mind. She loved working to find a method that would yield the right result and was sure she and Abe would figure it out.

  * * *

  Sheila watched Roy banter with Erica Sanders. She could swear he had a crush on her. She’d never seen him act like this with a client. As far as she knew, he didn’t date, and hadn’t since he and her mother had divorced when she was thirteen. Roy had devoted himself to taking care of her and was a wonderful father. He certainly deserved to have some romance in his life, but not with Erica, for tons of reasons.

  As much as Roy teased and laughed and attempted to draw out Erica, she didn’t seem interested. Her whole persona was detached, as though she lived on a different plane of existence than other humans. She came alive only when she talked about her company, her hopes for Leonardo and all the people who would be helped. All else seemed irrelevant to her, even money, unless it was for GHS. She even wore the same clothes she’d worn on the other two occasions they’d met: gray pantsuit, blue shirt.

  Despite Sheila’s misgivings, Roy had insisted on generous terms for the final funding agreement. Sheila had used the same framework for GHS they had for software companies with similar income projections, allowing the start-ups to exaggerate their projections to some extent. The prospective clients would show charts, which, in venture-capitalist jargon, were known as hockey-stick graphs: the company’s income was expected to remain flat for three to five years and then suddenly shoot up in a nearly perpendicular angle. The goal for VCs ultimately was the “exit.” Their client companies would either go public or they’d be bought, and either move would usher in a huge payout for all investors. Pacific Partners was the lead company for GHS Series 2, meaning they had the biggest stake of all the VC s who were participating: twenty-five percent. Roy had told Sheila that if all went well, she’d be awarded one percent. If Erica’s projections were correct, Sheila could net well over a million dollars and could possibly receive a bonus as well.

  Erica’s confidence was infectious, and because of her talk of industry partnerships she’d signed, she’d received a valuation for GHS of three billion dollars. Roy had insisted to Sheila that their rate of return didn’t have to be that high because GHS income would be enormous. Sheila went along finally because, essentially, Roy was her boss, and he was the final arbiter of the deal. They were going to pitch in thirty million dollars. Roy had talked it up with their partners, and they’d all agreed.

  “She’s a bona fide unicorn,” Roy said, meaning GHS was a start-up already valued at one billion dollars or more. “This is going to be our greatest triumph.”

  With the GHS deal done, Sheila had more time to think about Tony and whether she’d call. She considered calling her, but Sheila always let romantic prospects call her, especially the intellectual types, who could be as skittish as feral cats. She’d run into a few software engineers and programming whizzes she’d been interested in, but for a variety of reasons, nothing had worked out with any of them. Tony seemed to be a bit more personable than the software people. She had,
to her credit, made the move to talk to Sheila at Coupa Café.

  She was in her office reading yet another prospectus for an online delivery service that the world didn’t need. Too late, you lose. She threw the prospectus onto the “reject” pile. Her cell phone rang and showed a number she recognized as GHS, but the exchange wasn’t Erica’s or that of her finance director, whom Sheila had spent some time speaking with. She felt a spark of anticipation, realizing it could be Tony.

  “This is Sheila.” That was her customary crisp greeting.

  “Hello?” The voice was tentative and low.

  “Yes, hello, this is Sheila Garrison speaking. May I help you?” In spite of all her mindfulness practice, Sheila sometimes still succumbed to impatience.

  “This is Tony Leung.”

  Sheila blanked, not recognizing the name.

  “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

  “You know me by Antoinette.”

  Sheila’s spirit leaped. “Oh, yes. Antoinette. I know who you are. Is Tony your nickname?”

  “Yes. That’s usually what people call me. I don’t want to be associated with Marie Antoinette.”

  “Ah, no. She wasn’t a very popular queen.”

  “Nope.”

  After a longish pause when Tony didn’t continue, Sheila asked, “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, fine. Thanks. You?”

  The conversation was quickly deteriorating, so Sheila decided to take over.

  “I’m outstanding. Since you called, and I’m glad you did, why don’t we do lunch sometime soon?”

  “Yes. I was wondering if you wanted to get together,” Tony said in a relieved tone. Sheila avoided laughing. That was why she’d given Tony her phone number.

  “What about next week? I’m fine with Thursday.”

  “Sure. Thursday’s good. You’ll have to pick me up. I don’t have a car. I take the train to work.”

  “No problem. What time?”

  “Is noon okay?”

  Sheila wanted to laugh again, but she simply said, “Right. I’ll pick you up, and I’ll choose the restaurant. Not Coupa Café. That’s crazy-busy, and I don’t want to see anyone I know.”

  “Why not?” Tony sounded alarmed.

  “Oh, because I want us to have a calm, quiet lunch.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll meet you out front, so you don’t have to go through the whole security thing.”

  Hm. That fit with what Sheila knew about GHS and Erica’s security concerns. She didn’t want to have to sign another NDA just to go to lunch with Tony. Would Erica find something objectionable about that? It didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t deter Sheila. Once she was set on a path, nothing would stop her.

  “Bye-bye. See you next week.” Sheila keyed her phone off and smiled before she returned to her prospectus reviews.

  Chapter Three

  To Tony’s surprise, Sheila arrived to pick her up in a metallic-blue Volt. A Mercedes or BMW would have been more likely, given her profession.

  Sheila drove well, navigating downtown Palo Alto’s crowded streets calmly. She announced where they were going, then fell silent as she drove. But the absence of conversation didn’t feel uncomfortable to Tony. It seemed normal.

  Once they were seated at a table in Trefoil, an unpretentious place on Santa Clara Street, Tony took a closer look at Sheila. She was better looking than Tony had first thought. Her hair was precisely cut and somewhere between bronze and red, her eyes dark brown. Most striking was her air of serenity. Tony couldn’t find any other way to put it. If she felt nervous about their meeting, she didn’t show it. Sheila didn’t fidget or have any other anxiety tells, like not making eye contact or playing with her hair. In contrast, Tony’s psyche was permeated with social unease, but she’d worked hard over the years to hide it. She didn’t think Sheila was hiding anything. She was as she appeared. After they were seated, Sheila put her menu aside and looked closely at Tony. “You don’t like being called Antoinette?” she asked. “Other than the association you mentioned?”

  Tony had a canned answer. “It’s too pretentious and too long.” Too girly as well, but she rarely said that. It was her mother’s idea, and she objected to her mother’s ideas on principle. Always.

  “Yeah. The let-them-eat-cake and all.”

  Before she could stop herself, Tony said, “Cake isn’t what cake means to us. Back in the eighteenth century, it meant the scum left on the pans they baked the bread in. Marie Antoinette said if the peasants didn’t have bread, they could eat the scum from the bread-baking pans. Nice, huh?”

  “Nasty. No wonder you don’t want her name.” Sheila appeared unfazed by Tony’s pedantic digression.

  “Nope. I like your name though. Is it Irish?”

  “It sure is. Means heavenly.” Sheila snorted.

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Tony was horrified she’d used such a cliché, but it was too late. Sheila sipped her lemonade and smiled benignly.

  They gave their orders to the waiter and then returned their attention to one another. Tony was almost beginning to relax, as though Sheila’s calm was contagious. She’d certainly moved from nervous to neutral anyhow.

  “What’s it really like working at GHS?” Sheila asked.

  Something about Sheila and the way she asked that question made Tony think she wanted to know for real and wasn’t simply making conversation or satisfying a getting-to-know-you curiosity. Sheila didn’t seem like a woman who asked trivial questions anyway.

  “It’s exciting, it’s hard, it’s sometimes confusing. And it’s certainly challenging.” Tony wasn’t surprised when Sheila said, “Tell me more.”

  She wondered how forthcoming she ought to be. She had no idea if Sheila had a personal relationship with Erica—if it went beyond the investor-client connection. Tony didn’t want what she said to Sheila to get back to Erica, whether it was positive or negative. In the few weeks since she started, she’d noticed Erica was clearly everyone’s number-one topic. Even Abe, who was as mild and noncommittal as anyone, had an opinion, and it was clear that their CEO awed and frightened him. To answer Sheila’s question, though, Tony concluded she ought to stick to her own experience and to spin it positively, which it was. Mostly.

  “Oh, with a start-up, as you probably know, it can be chaotic. We’re—the immunoassay group, I mean—are working on essentially miniaturizing the assay.”

  “What do you mean, immunoassay? You realize I’m ignorant when it comes to labs, though I can comprehend software as well as any non-tech person.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, say you want to know if a person has a certain disease. Their blood will have certain molecules—proteins—and the immunoassay is designed that a reagent—an antibody to that protein—will react by binding to it. The reagent has another chemical attached—a fluorescent or light-producing chemical—which is measured by an instrument that detects that light. This can be done with radiation as well, but we prefer fluorescence. The amount of light measures the amount of the protein of interest in the person’s blood, and that amount says whether the person is sick or not.”

  “Oh. Very clear. Thank you.” Sheila beamed.

  Tony changed the subject. “How did you ever end up being a venture capitalist?”

  Sheila sketched her background for Tony. She was still a bit embarrassed that she worked for her father, though, in her heart, she didn’t believe anything was wrong with it. Fathers had been bringing sons into their businesses since the beginning of time. She just had to be competent, and she was.

  When she finished, Tony’s expression was awed, but surprisingly she said, “You get to work with your dad? That is so cool.”

  Sheila blushed slightly, but Tony’s reaction pleased her.

  Tony added, “It would be super if I could work with mine. We aren’t in the same type of work, though. But he’s totally behind what I do. Your dad must really be happy to have you around.”

  “Oh, yes. He is, and it’s great. He made me work my way up, however. He doesn’
t believe anyone shouldn’t earn what they receive.”

  Tony grew somber. “Oh, that’s the best way, I would think. What’s your daily work life like?”

  Sheila laughed. “You’d be surprised just how boring it is. I mostly go to back-to-back pitch meetings. One right after the other. It’s extremely exhausting. I sometimes want to say, ‘Yeah, okay, you can have the money, please. Just. stop. talking.’ I have to struggle to stay focused. I either want to say yes to everyone—I have what my dad calls ‘happy ears,’ or if I’m out of sorts, I want them all to shut the fuck up.”

  It was Tony’s turn to laugh. That description, along with the curse word, brought Sheila down from the pedestal Tony was dangerously close to putting her on. She was a mere human who sometimes was bored or frustrated or inattentive and was certainly irreverent. Along with her obvious love and admiration for her father, which was very like Tony’s own, she now seemed more ordinary and at the same time infinitely more attractive than the more rarefied, yet superficial portrait of her that Tony’s psyche had painted.

  They moved on to more general topics, such has music and movies.

  After they finished their entrées, they perused the dessert menus.

  “I think this occasion warrants dessert, don’t you?” Sheila asked, archly.

  “I agree.” Tony matched Sheila’s tone. “If we can share.”

  “Of course. That seems like a good idea.” Tony couldn’t tell if Sheila was making fun of her or flirting.

  When they received their strawberry ganache and its two forks, Sheila said, “I read about all the tests the GHS is offering. They want to use Erica’s invention to do the tests. Is that what you’re using?”

  The intimate act of sharing a piece of cake, or so it seemed to Tony, was causing her to want to be open with Sheila. Or maybe it was the glass and a half of wine she’d drunk.

  “Uh, no. We have to first make sure our immunoassay will work with super-tiny blood samples. Then the engineering group will design all the robotics and the servomechanisms to mimic what we do at the bench.”