Sophia of Silicon Valley

by Anna Yen

  Jonathan whispered to me, “Another one of Scott’s personal touches.”

  Seconds later the movie began and I clapped, hooted, and hollered when I saw Treehouse’s logo and my coworkers’ names on the big screen. I couldn’t imagine how proud Scott and Jonathan must have felt knowing that the movie, and the company, wouldn’t have existed without their business acumen and prowess.

  From the second the movie started, I was transported to a different world. Each of the characters were Amazing—and the story was exciting, touching, and funny all the same. When the closing credits began to roll, I stood up cheering, even though I wished the movie weren’t over. Tears fell down my face. Damn cartoons! The lights turned back on and Jonathan asked if I liked it.

  “I loved it,” I said.

  “Which was your favorite character?”

  “Oh, by far the little gadget woman! She was hysterical!”

  “Did she look familiar?” Scott asked, winking at Jonathan.

  I envisioned the character in my head: A-line bob, Asian, black dress and heels that didn’t do much to hide her vertically challenged frame, bossy and stomping around all the time telling the heroes of the movie to “chop-chop.” It took me a moment, but I put it all together and then frowned, uncertain of whether I wanted to know the answer to my next question.

  “Was that character supposed to be me?” I asked.

  Scott and Jonathan just grinned and shrugged. I considered this for a moment longer—Should I be offended?—then exclaimed, “I don’t care. I loved it! I know you always say it’s about the story, but the animation is amazing!”

  In the early afternoon, my fingers were dancing along my keyboard when I noticed Scott standing in my doorway. I turned back to my computer and said, “I’m drafting an email. Sit, I need two seconds.”

  Just as he took a step into my office, my mobile phone vibrated loudly on top of my desk and Rajesh’s name appeared on the screen. Shit! I froze my eyes on Scott, hoping he would catch my gaze and not see the name of the person calling. My entire body was still, except for my hand that reached for the phone to turn it facedown. I blindly pressed buttons in an effort to send the call to voicemail.

  “Your two seconds are always two minutes, and tardiness is a character flaw,” Scott said, speaking into the palms of his pressed-together hands.

  “Then you are deeply flawed,” I joked, secretly trying to ruffle Scott’s feathers so he wouldn’t focus on my phone.

  “I’m not always late,” he whined as he brought his hands down to his sides.

  Phew. He didn’t notice the caller ID.

  Like a teenager, I rolled my eyes and returned to the computer, then exhaled a sigh of relief.

  Scott continued, “I see those medicinal herbs worked wonders. You’re back to your ornery self.”

  “Wonders. They worked wonders,” I responded, turning to Scott with a huge ear-to-ear smile. “I am still going to see the oncologist this afternoon, though.”

  “Didn’t you say you weren’t—” He was interrupted by the sound of my phone roaring again. “Does your phone ever stop?” he asked, watching me fumble around with the phone, which I accidentally let land on the floor.

  Scott’s eyes looked down at the phone. “Hey, it’s your dad. Answer it.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll call him later,” I said as the phone fell silent.

  “How are you feeling?”

  I glared at Scott and said, “You know I hate when people ask me that.”

  “Yes, I know. I also know I don’t agree with it. It shouldn’t bother you.”

  “It’s worse coming from you. You never used to ask me how I was. So now that you ask, it’s almost as if you’re expecting something to be wrong.”

  “Do you really want to argue about this?” he asked. “Remember, if you shout you owe me a dollar.”

  “We’re not arguing.” I bit my bottom lip and smiled, then changed the subject before I angered Scott.

  The phone on the floor began vibrating again, giving me the heads-up it was about to ring. We both looked down at it and I picked it up quickly. Damn this phone!

  “Hello?”

  “I need your health insurance information, please,” said Dad.

  I braced the phone between my ear and right shoulder so I could rifle through my purse to get the information my father asked for. As I was doing so, the phone slipped and fell to the floor, sending its thin metal battery cover flying across my office.

  Scott leaned over to pick up the device, but instead of giving it back to me, he examined the front, then the back. I grabbed it and apologized to Dad, but just as soon as I began relaying my insurance ID number to him, the phone slipped again and crashed on the floor, this time disconnecting the call. I give up!

  Scott leaned over and picked up the phone. “This looks like a pile of gravel,” he said, referring to my device’s dents and chipped paint. “Didn’t you just get it?”

  “Yes, I did, and I know. It looks awful,” I said. “But I love it.”

  “Let me see it again.”

  I turned my shoulder and held the phone close to me, then narrowed my eyes to glare at him. “Why?”

  “Just let me see it.”

  “No,” I cried, turning my shoulder as if to block Scott’s outreached hand.

  “Just give it to me,”

  “Why do you want it?”

  “Sophia, just give me the goddamn phone.”

  I reluctantly handed over the device, hoping he wouldn’t see anything he wasn’t supposed to see.

  “Why do you love this phone?” Scott asked.

  “It’s light and text messages are really easy—way easier than my flip phone,” I responded.

  “Ashley drops the phone all the time, too. Why do you guys prop it on your shoulder like that?”

  “Because we’re usually multitasking,” I responded.

  “There are studies about that, you know. It’s totally inefficient,” Scott said.

  “Again, you’re one to talk, Mr. CEO of too many companies.”

  “That’s different,” he returned. “What about your BlackBerry? You carry that around with you, too, right?”

  “Yes, I love my BlackBerry! I’d never give that up.” I wondered why he was asking me all these questions. I assumed they had nothing to do with me, so I tried to change the subject. But Scott continued to ask me about my phone:

  Wasn’t it a hassle to carry a cell phone and a BlackBerry? Yes, they’re heavy in my purse.

  How often did I hold the phone on my shoulder? Almost always.

  Was this why I was always dropping the phone when speaking with him? Yes.

  How easy was it to use the phone’s speaker mode? It’s a four-step process.

  Scott sat down in the chair facing my desk, held my phone in the palm of his hand, and turned it around to consider every angle. He lifted it up toward the ceiling, and then moved his hand up and down as though weighing it. Then he began to press buttons, which should have made me panic, but I knew the look on his face: his lips were pursed, his head was tilted slightly to the left, and his laser-focused eyes were on the beat-up Panasonic phone. Scott shut me and the rest of the world out and thought of nothing else except how he could make a better phone. I left him sitting there while I finished my email, knowing he would find a way. He always did.

  Chapter 18

  The afternoon of my personal Amazings premiere, I went to get that second opinion from the oncologist that Peter referred me to, Dr. Alan Madden. Peter had warned me Dr. Madden was known to be opinionated and skewed heavily toward the blunt side, so when he introduced himself that afternoon, I raised my hand to stop him from saying another word.

  “Before we get started, please refrain from saying anything negative. I don’t want to know about statistics or what ifs. No offense, but I don’t even really want your opinions—unless there’s something you feel very strongly about. The only things we should ever talk about are the things you are absolutely certa
in of and the things that I need to do to stay healthy. I’m a next steps kind of a person. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

  Dr. Madden’s stunned expression told me he wasn’t accustomed to people speaking to him that way. In that moment I wondered if I’d crossed a line—He is the head of the department, after all. But when he raised both of his hands in the air as though to surrender and said, “I understand,” I knew he was the right oncologist for me.

  Dr. Madden was medium height, wore tinted round glasses, and had a mustache. A few strands of his close-cut brown hair were standing straight up, and his white coat over his blue shirt and tie made him look as though he belonged in a lab.

  After the doctor reviewed my medical records, including the scans and pathology report, he said, “You have quite the medical history.”

  “That’s right. A walking medical wonder,” I said proudly.

  Madden asked me a bunch of questions: did I still take these medications, how were my blood sugar levels, how was my blood pressure. He stood up from his computer. “You’re really going to make me work for my money here, aren’t you?”

  “Yep!” I tilted up my chin and grinned.

  The appointment lasted only fifteen minutes, and in the end, Madden agreed with my self-prescribed treatment—that because I showed no signs of cancer, I didn’t need chemotherapy. “Doctors don’t have crystal balls, and none of this is exact science,” he said. “Let’s just watch you really closely, because—”

  “Because you don’t have any idea who you’re dealing with,” I interrupted mischievously.

  As I sat across the table from the CFO of Ion, Rajesh Patel, I provided the same answer when he asked me his first question: “What makes you think you can handle Andre Stark?”

  Feeling confident in my abilities, I winked. “You don’t have any idea who you’re dealing with.”

  My interview with Rajesh took place in Ion’s uninspiring round, mustard-colored conference room, which fit perfectly with the depressing tone of the entire building. Only fluorescent lights glowed above and it felt like a dungeon—no windows or natural sunlight. I’d seen Rajesh’s photo on the website—he looked friendly enough. But there seated right in front of me, he wore a stiff smirk that made him look vaguely snakelike and untrustworthy.

  “How did you get in here?” Rajesh asked.

  “Your assistant brought me in,” I answered matter-of-factly, wondering if that was a trick question.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry. What do you mean?”

  Rajesh’s tone remained calm, but his words were biting. “I looked at your CV, and nothing on it suggests you’re the right person for this role.”

  Clearly he didn’t find my earlier response witty.

  His stare and smug expression told me that he really expected me to take the bait. My face turned bright red, but my silence was deafening. Rajesh must have been uncomfortable, so he asked again, “How did you get in here? You must know someone.”

  I did my best to sound confident in my answer. “Grant Vicker recommended me.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” He nodded and looked at my résumé. “Didn’t we have a call scheduled last week?”

  “Yes, but we weren’t able to connect. Something came up at Treehouse and I had to manage it. Thank you for your understanding.”

  Or maybe not.

  “I see here that you didn’t go to an Ivy League school,” he said.

  “Well actually, Santa Clara is—”

  “We only hire people who graduated from Ivy League schools. It’s a natural filter,” Rajesh said smugly. “Correction: we hire only the top one percent from Ivy League schools.”

  Is this guy trying to unsettle me, or is he really an asshole?

  I started to doubt I had any shot at the job, so I dropped any pretense of being polite. “So where did you go to school?” Rajesh Patel might have held the key to my future career, but I knew that he wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer, either. From what I could find online, prior to joining Ion he was just a cog in the wheel of a large Japanese automobile manufacturer. He’d left his controller job in India to become CFO of Ion—a huge stretch, if you asked me—and when I looked at his poorly populated LinkedIn profile, I wondered why Ion didn’t have someone with more experience. Someone who had at least lived through an IPO, or someone who had been a public-company CFO before.

  Rajesh didn’t respond to my question but instead said, “I didn’t think you were a good candidate, but Grant spoke highly of you and your phone interviews a few weeks ago with our VP of communications and VP of finance were positively received, so let’s get started. What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

  “I’m a people person and have strong communication skills—people feel at ease around me and trust me because I feel familiar to them for some reason. I’m told it’s a unique skill set, one that can’t be learned.”

  There was absolutely no reaction from Rajesh, just another question. “And what about your weaknesses?”

  “I’m not good with spreadsheets,” I said, once again dropping any pretenses.

  “What was your major again?”

  “Finance. I can read a financial statement and spin a story from it, but no one should trust me to create those documents from scratch.”

  Rajesh uncrossed his legs and said very softly, “We’ve interviewed a lot of terrific candidates, and I am personally of the opinion that someone with investment banking or research experience is the best fit.”

  “Then why are we wasting each other’s time?”

  Rajesh seemed surprised by that, but continued with his interview anyway. “How is it working for Scott Kraft?”

  “Can you be more specific?” I asked. “And just to be clear, I don’t work for Scott. I actually report to the CFO, Jonathan Larsen.”

  Rajesh ignored the Jonathan part and went straight to Scott. “Scott Kraft is notoriously hard to manage. So how is it that you’ve survived for almost three years?”

  “I didn’t find him challenging at all,” I said, pleased that I both answered his question and defended Scott.

  For nearly an hour, Rajesh peppered me with questions. Each one felt like a bullet shooting through my confidence. Then, abruptly, he stood up and told me that I would hear from someone in the next few weeks. To me, that sounded like code for when hell freezes over, but at that point, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to work here anyway. I left Ion’s office totally humiliated, and as soon as I sat in my car, my tears flowed.

  I slumped down next to Peter in the back booth at the Dutch Goose and did little to hide my red and swollen eyes. Kate, who sat across from me, noticed my puffy appearance and asked with alarm, “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Why are you crying?” Peter inquired as he put his arm around me and pulled me close. “No one cares if you’re late.”

  “That’s not why I’m upset,” I snapped before I reined it in and continued, “although I am sorry I’m late.”

  “So what’s wrong?” Peter asked.

  “They were mean to me.”

  “Who was mean to you?” Kate frowned.

  “Ion’s CFO—Rajesh. What an asshole! He had the nerve to ask me how I even got into the building! The whole thing was humiliating.”

  “No. Come on, he couldn’t have been serious,” Mark said. “I bet he was just testing you.”

  Ugh. Just like a man to assume the woman is overreacting!

  “That’s what I thought. But he wasn’t. He really was surprised that I got an interview!” I said. “He was such an unbelievable jerk! He told me Ion only hires Ivy Leaguers and that I don’t have the background or experience to do the job.”

  Kate looked angry, as though she might slam her fist against the table. “What a fucking asshole! You don’t want that job anyway, then! You can stay at Treehouse!”

  “That’s true,” I responded, trying to convince myself I was way better off staying put w
hile teardrops continued to roll down my face. But my family had made sure I had skin more than thick enough to handle what Rajesh Patel could dish out! Duck feathers, duck feathers. It occurred to me that maybe my tears were a sign of mourning—sadness that I’d failed to reach my next milestone, and that I actually really did want the Ion job.

  My ringing telephone interrupted our conversation and I picked it up without looking at the caller ID.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Sophia?”

  “This is she,” I shouted over the loud music playing in the background.

  “Sophia, this is Rajesh from Ion. I’ve spoken with Andre and he would like to meet you in person.”

  Guess you got over that Ivy League shit pretty quick, eh?

  Rajesh didn’t give me many options regarding dates or times—he only said, “Andre is very busy but he can speak with you in two weeks—Labor Day weekend—at ten o’clock a.m. Otherwise it could be months before another window opens up. My assistant will send you the specific date and details. You’ll be interviewing with him during a short flight to Reno, but the jet will bring you back after dropping him off.”

  Strange, but okay.

  Barely thirty seconds after I hung up with Rajesh, the cell phone rang again. I glanced at the screen: scott kraft.

  Peter must have noticed my petrified look because he asked with alarm, “What is it?” Upon seeing my phone, he said, “Oh.”

  Barring a major world catastrophe, I never missed a call from my CEO. So I picked up the phone and began walking outside.

  Sound normal, Sophia. Just sound normal.

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “We didn’t get to finish our talk the other day.”

  “I think you got sidetracked by my . . . what did you call it? My ‘pebble’ phone?”

  “Gravel. I said gravel.”

  “Oh, okay. Gravel. So what’s wrong? Why are you calling me?”

  “That conference—did you get me an invitation?”

  Sadly, no.

  “I’m still working on it, Scott.”