Sophia of Silicon Valley

by Anna Yen

  While Jacob led me approximately seventy feet to the opposite, parking-lot end of the building, he explained Ion’s curious layout. “All of our battery engineers and testing are downstairs, and I can bring you down there later, but this is where finance is located,” he said. “At twelve, six, and nine o’clock are our top executives: Rajesh is closest to you at twelve; our cofounder and CTO, T.J., is at six; and Andre and his assistant are at nine. In the middle of the office—where the hands of a watch might be centered—is PR, sales, and customer service.” When I asked where the marketing department was, Jacob responded, “We don’t exactly have a marketing department. Andre doesn’t believe in that. He believes that PR and test-drive events are the best way to spread the word about the Model A and any of our future cars. To date, that’s all we’ve really needed.”

  Ion’s approach to marketing was interesting to me—nearly all the companies I’d worked with at Global Partners and Sterling, Rich had assigned the biggest budgets to the very department that didn’t even exist at Ion. Is that good or bad? Even Treehouse relied heavily on Samba’s marketing strength. I noted Andre’s unique perspective, and filed it away as something I would probably include in Ion’s roadshow presentation, then turned my attention back to Jacob.

  “Until you get to know who’s in which department, you can probably tell the teams apart by what they wear. The guys wearing the Ion polo shirts and khakis over there are our sales guys,” he said, gesturing toward a group of men in their late thirties. “And the more casually dressed folks in jeans are in customer service.” I examined this team and noticed there was only one woman.

  “Is there a dress code for each department?” I asked curiously.

  “Ha, no. It may look that way, but that’s just how it naturally ends up. Anyway, everyone else over there is PR, and they’re led by our VP of communications, Roberto, who I imagine you’ll work fairly closely with.” Jacob was indicating a group of twentysomething women seated around a tall Latino man.

  Jacob stopped in front of a vacant workstation—one among six in the finance corner. He introduced me to my “office mates”: Rex, Tom, Ryan, Matt, and finally Miles, who sat back to back with me.

  “Hi, we’ve spoken. I’m Miles, the VP of finance.” He looked like a short, skinny weasel with a butt cut. Miles shook my hand and said, “Most of my morning is clear so I can get you up to speed.”

  Then, nonchalantly, as though it was a regular occurrence, he added, “We’ll talk. Unfortunately right now I need to go fire someone who works for me, but it will only take a few minutes.”

  “Oh dear. What happened?” I asked, not meaning to be nosy, but hoping that I could be sure I didn’t make the same mistake.

  “Oh, she gave me some wrong stock option figure that ended up in our first draft of the S-1 and we had to tell Andre so now he is pissed. She’s our stock administrator, so she really should be giving me the right information.”

  Yes, but she reports to you, so shouldn’t you be the one taking the blame here?

  “To be fair, she wasn’t given the right information in the first place, but Andre is angry, so Rajesh wants someone’s head to roll. I feel sort of bad, but the stock administrator is going to be the one to take the fall,” Miles continued before telling me to go ahead and get settled and that he would be right back.

  Jacob looked as alarmed as I was, but when he noticed me trying to catch his eye, he smiled uncomfortably and said, “Anyway, welcome to Ion. I’ll let Rajesh know you’ve arrived.” With red flags about Miles flying high and my nerves on edge, I repeated what I’d told myself when I was thinking about interviewing for this job: Nothing is forever unless you want it to be.

  I shook off any thoughts about Miles and pulled from my purse two sets of the IPO checklist I’d printed last night. It was the list that Jonathan and I had used for Treehouse’s IPO, and not dissimilar from what we’d used at Sterling, Rich, although I’d tailored it slightly to make it relevant to Ion’s business. Then I took a deep breath and walked a short distance toward Rajesh. When he saw me approaching, he said in a saccharine, uptight tone, “Welcome, Sophia. We’re glad to have you here. Would you like me to walk you over to say hello to Andre?”

  I found Rajesh’s offer odd. Does he think women need to be escorted? Does he think I’m afraid of Andre? Red flags were raised once again and I quickly concluded that I didn’t fit in at Ion, but I was resolved to be myself.

  “Thanks, but no,” I said to Rajesh in a defiant tone, trying to establish myself as a strong and independent person. “I can walk over myself. Besides, he looks busy right now.”

  Rajesh peered over at Andre, who was drawing something on a sheet of paper. I thought it would be best if I got right down to business, so I handed my new boss the IPO checklist and asked, “Do you have time right now to go over some things? This would probably be a good place to start.”

  Rajesh quickly flipped through the document, looking somewhat stunned at its length. “I think the most critical thing for you to do right now is to get our roadshow presentation together. Here’s what our investment banker Jack Wynn, Miles, and I drafted, but we haven’t gotten sign-off from Andre.” He handed me a forty-two-page presentation and sat down at his desk; I could tell he wanted me to go through it with him, but the name Jack Wynn was ringing in my ears.

  Oh God. Him again?

  “Sophia, do you want to sit down?” Rajesh asked.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, completely forgetting that I’d told Miles I would meet him at our desks. “This presentation—it’s quite long, isn’t it?”

  “We have a lot of information to get through.”

  “It’s been my experience that twenty slides is the maximum for an investor meeting. We just need to convince them on the investment highlights, not explain every financial detail of our business.”

  “I’d like to see what you come up with,” he said, as if daring me to do better.

  “I’ll draft an outline and run it by you and Andre to make sure I’m not operating in a silo.”

  “Andre is a visual person so outlines don’t work for him. Drafts are almost worse because he gets caught up in how the graphics look, so we always do our best to show him what we think will be final versions. When do you think you can have this completed?”

  “I’m not sure. It will take me at least three weeks to nail down the story, and then the graphic designer will take a few weeks as well. Do we have a target roadshow date?”

  “If all goes well, we’ll leave for the roadshow mid-January. And what do you mean, graphic designer? Andre doesn’t believe in consultants. He says if they’re good enough to hire as consultants, they’re good enough to bring in-house. I thought you knew how to do PowerPoint.”

  Andre thinks this. Andre doesn’t like that. Does Andre control everything around here?

  “I do know PowerPoint. But everything about Ion is sleek, beautiful, sexy, and futuristic. Clip art isn’t going to fly, Rajesh. We need a graphic designer.”

  My boss shook his head with disapproval, but I knew it meant something more. Rajesh was probably afraid of Andre. That was why he let Miles fire the stock administrator, why he didn’t ask for Andre’s feedback, and why he was resisting a graphic designer. What’s there to be afraid of? I decided to fight the graphic design battle later, confident I would get my way somehow. I always did. I just need to figure out how.

  “Is there anything else I should know? What Andre doesn’t like?”

  Rajesh spent the next five minutes sounding like a child who’d memorized a list of rules: Andre didn’t like the color blue; Andre didn’t like BMW mentioned in the same sentence as Ion; Andre wouldn’t talk about the licensing portion of our business; Andre wouldn’t provide a road map for our next cars.

  Well, this is going to be a barrel of laughs.

  Andre was rocking back and forth at his desk, drawing something on graph paper, when I approached him later that day. He looked halfway between startled and confused when I bro
ke his concentration with a cheerful “Hi, Andre!”

  “Uh. Hi,” he said in his slight South African accent, continuing to rock.

  First I had Mr. Pull at His Socks. Now it’s Andre the Rocker?

  “It’s Sophia. The IR person. We’ve already met,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Our new VP of IR. Right. Hello. Welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I responded. “How did Burning Man go?”

  Andre looked at the floor and mumbled, “Fine,” which put a quick end to that part of the conversation.

  “I’m working on the roadshow deck right now, so if there’s anything you feel strongly about, please let me know,” I continued.

  “Did you see the first version of it? From the bankers, Miles, and Rajesh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I hate it!”

  I assumed you would.

  “Hate is a strong word, but let’s see if we can fix it. I’ve gone through it a couple of times now, and I’m going to start all over. The key to making this IPO great is going to be convincing investors that there’s really very little risk involved as far as our ability to manufacture the cars and to sell them. There are a lot of naysayers out there since no one has ever been able to bring an electric car to market before—”

  “Not since the golf cart,” Andre added proudly. He grinned as though he’d made a hysterical joke.

  “Yes. The golf cart. Anyway, I think we should redo this presentation with only three messages in mind. First, we have to show them the cars. Second, we have to show off our management team. The talent you’ve recruited is really amazing, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. But we can’t bring them on the roadshow. I want them here focusing on getting our car finished.”

  “I’m not suggesting they come. We can take care of number one and number two through a sizzle reel. We can show the prototypes of our cars along with snippets of each executive talking about all their past professional accomplishments and what they bring to Ion.”

  Andre nodded. “Roberto has a lot of professional-grade B-roll.”

  “Great! That’s great!” Never mind that we’re going to need a professional to put this film together; I’ll deal with that later. “And I’ll script every executive so they say exactly what we need them to say.”

  “Okay. I like it. What’s the third thing?”

  “Oh, the third thing is—we have to convince investors we can sell enough cars to make the financial forecasts that the analysts are estimating. Since we are the ones guiding those investors to those numbers, we have total control. Based on what Rajesh tells me our twelve-month forecast will be, we only need to sell cars to less than one percent of the total midsize luxury car market.”

  Andre sat up. “How did you come up with that?”

  “I just looked at the number of midsize luxury cars that were sold last year and divided that by the number of cars we think we’ll sell by the end of next year. That’s one percent. That’s it!”

  Andre made a note.

  “Even better is that I checked how long our reservation for the Model A list is. If only half of those people who are waiting for the Model A actually buy it, we’ll easily make our twelve-month revenue estimate,” I continued. “Oh, and one more thing. I don’t suppose we could take a few Model A prototypes on the road with us?”

  Andre smiled. “Speak to Colette in communications—she can organize it. We’ll have two or three cars meet us in the largest cities we visit. We can even offer test-drives.”

  He stood up, looking pleased with himself, then took a few steps toward the Asian woman sitting in front of him. She was talking to Roberto, the VP of communications.

  Andre motioned at me to come over.

  “Sophia, this is Roberto,” said Andre. “And this is Ji-yan, our executive assistant.”

  “We’ve spoken on the phone. Welcome to the jungle,” said the Latino man whom I’d noticed standing in the PR department earlier this morning. He had dark skin and smoky brown hair that was cut short enough to be professional, but long enough to show his big, loose curls. His athletic, slender body was dressed in a pair of loose jeans and a fitted blue button-down shirt; the look was nicely rounded out by trendy black-rimmed glasses. Hot rockin’ babe.

  Before I could embarrass myself and say something stupid to this beautiful specimen of a man, Andre said, “Roberto, can you show me the latest designs for the new home page? I sketched something out here that I think may work better, but let’s have a look.” Then he turned to Ji-yan and asked her, “Can you please put Sophia on my calendar for a weekly?” before walking away with Roberto.

  Awesome! I wonder if Rajesh gets his own weekly one-on-one, too.

  Ji-yan was a pretty, petite-framed woman with long stick-straight black hair and perfectly lipsticked pink lips. She had a very warm, calm energy about her, which made me want to be her friend.

  “Hi. I’m Ji-yan. Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “Andre works out of our Hawthorne office most days and is generally only here Tuesdays and Wednesdays. His days here are really packed, though, so do you mind heading down to Hawthorne on Thursdays?”

  “Sure, I’ll go. Where exactly is Hawthorne?”

  “Southern California. Andre’s other company, Stark Aerospace, is there, and our design and engineering teams are in a building on the same property. A small group of our battery engineers go down every week, so you can just catch a ride with them tomorrow.”

  “Oh! Do we have a corporate jet?” I asked excitedly.

  “Ha. No, no.” Ji-yan smiled. “Only Andre flies in a private jet, and that’s his. The head of our battery team has his pilot’s license and a small propeller plane. People who need to work with the design team fly with him from Palo Alto Airport. I’ll tell him you’re coming—be there at seven thirty tomorrow morning.”

  On my long drive back to my new apartment in San Francisco, my mind swarmed with all the tips I’d learned from various coworkers I’d met that day, all of them falling under the topic of “Things Andre Doesn’t Like.” It certainly wasn’t the fun, warm, embracing culture of Treehouse, but I was excited all the same. Maybe IR wasn’t what Scott wanted me to do, or what I loved—but I knew I was energized by everything around it: the chase of the IPO, the thrill of bringing exciting products to market, and advising these powerful visionaries. I knew Ion wasn’t my be-all end-all, but it was exciting enough for now.

  Just before I reached over my nightstand to turn off the light, I checked my BlackBerry one last time. An email had arrived from Ji-yan.

  To: Sophia Young

  From: Ji-yan Chen

  Subj: Tomorrow

  Hi Sophia,

  Andre’s brother was badly injured while sledding in Colorado this evening. He’s going to be okay, but Andre is on his way to the hospital in Colorado so tomorrow’s meeting with him is canceled. You’re still welcome to fly down to meet the design team located in L.A., but Andre won’t be there.

  Thanks, JY

  Chapter 22

  The receptionist looked terribly frayed when I walked through Ion’s front door the next morning. She was on the telephone and other lines were ringing. There was a frantic air about our empty lobby, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. As soon as I set foot onto the second floor, though, panic rose up inside me. The eerie scene in front of me made me feel something was going on. Ion’s second floor was completely deserted, even though our parking lot was as full as it had been the day before. The space was silent except for the drone of unanswered ringing telephones and Ji-yan’s soft voice in the distance. Sure, the empty office could have meant free bagels downstairs, or perhaps an emergency meeting, but I walked toward Ji-yan to find out. She was speaking to someone on the phone when I approached; when she looked up, her eyes were wet and her expression was grave. What felt like hours but was only minutes later, she hung up and said, “Oh, thank God you’re here! I wasn’t sure whether or not you decided to go to Hawthorne after all. Roberto is
at the crash site dealing with the press and Jacob is there working with the police investigators.”

  “Wait. What crash site?”

  Ji-yan didn’t hear me, she just spoke into the floor, seemingly to herself. “The guys in Hawthorne won’t be any help. Rajesh should be here, but I can’t find him anywhere. He’s not answering his home or mobile phones.”

  “Ji-yan,” I said more loudly. “What crash site? What happened?”

  She looked at me as though I’d startled her awake, then said, “I’m sorry, but you’re the only VP here, so you’re in charge and you need to handle the incoming calls.”

  “What is going on? What crash site?” My thoughts went straight to Andre. Oh God, no.

  “There was a plane crash this morning. The one you were supposed to be on. No one survived,” Ji-yan whispered, although there was no one around to hear.

  Suddenly I was having trouble breathing. I was supposed to be on that plane. But Ji-yan’s sobs forced me to focus; I walked to her side, leaned down, and wrapped my arms around her shaking shoulders.

  “I just spoke to all three of them last night,” she said. “I needed them to take some samples down to the designers.”

  Her phone rang and then a second line rang a split second after. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  In one fell swoop Ji-yan answered both calls and asked them to hold before she informed me that everyone was in the downstairs kitchen watching the breaking news coverage of the crash. “I’m going to ask reception to forward all crash-related calls to you. Oh, and Roberto says we can’t release the names of the passengers until the coroner arrives, so keep that in mind.”

  Martin, John, and Joe were their names. I had met them only yesterday.