“Will that be acceptable to you, Arthur? Or are you on a tighter deadline?”
“No, no,” said Hastings. “That will be more than acceptable.”
“Good.” Dan gave Hastings his best benevolent executive smile. “Is there anything else you wanted to discuss, Arthur?” he asked. “Because we’re almost there—I can see the ‘dreaming spires’ up there just ahead—and I don’t want you to feel like I haven’t answered every one of your questions.”
Hastings smiled back. “Yes, that’s about it. Just a few housekeeping questions. And we can do those via email if necessary. I don’t want to keep you from your next appointment.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Arthur. It’s always a relief to talk with a real professional.”
v. 3.2
Five hours later, Dan and Lisa were sitting in the Morse bar at the Randolph Hotel. The rest of the day hadn’t gone any better. The staff at Validator’s UK office in Oxford—sixty people, down from eighty-two just two weeks before—had appeared at first to be more receptive to the plan than their fellow employees in Grenoble and Versailles… but Dan soon realized that what he was seeing was merely the classic passive-aggressive British genius for appearing to agree with you even as they made you feel like a jumped-up incompetent turd from the Colonies.
By the end of the Q&A session, every member of the audience had his or her legs crossed and torsos half turned from Dan, who nevertheless tried to look collegial by sitting on the edge of a table with his sleeves rolled up. The final question, asked by an advertising manager in a chalk-striped vested suit—“Will our employee options ever resurface from their current submergence?”—so dripped with disdain that the young man might well as have just spit across the intervening distance.
This pleasant interlude was capped by dinner in the employee lunch room with the UK director, who obviously wanted to show his contempt for Crowen because he’d had to fire twenty-two sales people he’d personally hired when he was UK sales manager. On Dan’s last visit six months before, they’d had dinner at Oxford’s trendy Living Room restaurant, where they were joined by the Master of Christchurch College. Now the three of them sat in plastic chairs at a plastic table, and ate a ghastly steak-and-kidney pie washed down with some sour plonk. The director had an explanation for this rebuke, saying he had to deal with some “personnel problems.” This, of course, was a less-than-subtle rebuke in itself.
The bartender brought them two brandies, and Dan and Lisa clicked glasses. “To a merry day in Merry Old England,” Dan trenchantly toasted, then took a long slug. “Only Old Blighty can make me feel this bad.”
Lisa slumped back into her upholstered chair. “Sweden tomorrow. Stockholm.”
Dan shook his head. “Can’t be any worse than today. At last I won’t have to try to be witty.”
“I thought you did just fine, considering,” said Lisa, taking a drink and pursing her lips. “After all, they just saw one fourth of their staff disappear. You were never going to do better than a draw with these folks, and I think you got at least that. Once the stock comes back up, they’ll forgive you, just like everyone else in the company.”
“If the stock comes back up. The economy’s already looking shaky. And let’s not forget what’s going to happen any day now: the eTernity IPO.”
“Better sooner than later,” said Lisa. “Get it over with.”
“What do you think of those guys? Ever dealt with Alison Prue?”
“I only know what I read,” Lisa replied. “Every new company looks great, because they’re all about potential, not reality. ETernity’s got good products, an okay business model, and a lot of talented young people… but it’s a long way from there to being a proven success.”
“Tell that to the stock market.”
“I don’t have to. The analysts are already doing that. But I’m not sure anyone is listening right now. Certainly not the small investors. They never do.”
“How well do you think they’ll do going out?”
“From what I hear, they’ll do very well: $27, maybe $28 per share at opening. Probably settle there too, at the end of the day.”
Dan whistled softly. “And us? What’s the damage?”
“Down $2, maybe $4 by the end of the day. Then we’ll get most of it back in the days that follow—once the reality of the challenge that eTernity faces, and Validator’s built-in advantages, start to sink in.”
“I guess I can live with that.” Dan downed the rest of the brandy and ordered another. “Hey, I almost forgot. What was that report you were talking about in the car today with the FT guy? It saved my ass. How come I’ve never heard of it? It sounds like it could be really useful.”
“It doesn’t exist,” said Lisa with a tiny smile. “I made it up on the spot. I’ll write it on the plane in the morning.”
“Jesus,” said Dan, shaking his head. “You’re good. That’s about the third time you’ve saved me on this trip alone.”
Lisa, finished her drink. “That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Cosmo thought you might need me.”
“Cosmo was right.”
“He usually is,” said Lisa, signaling for another drink.
v. 3.3
Feeling no pain, Dan slowly made his way up the grand staircase of the Randolph Hotel, passed the Gothic revival stained glass windows, and eventually reached the second floor. Using his right hand to balance himself along the wall, he shuffled down the narrow hallway to his room, the Edwardian floorboards under the carpet squeaking with the weight of each step. He fumbled with the magnetic card for a while, but finally gained entry.
The bed was turned down, with a chocolate carefully placed on each pillow. Music was playing on the stereo. Most impressive of all, the curtains were open, revealing the vast, yellow floodlit Georgian face of the Ashmolean Museum across the street. The sheer romance of the scene was almost unbearable to Dan in his current state. And here I am, he thought woozily but with perfect clarity, a lone businessman on the road. What a waste.
He pulled off his suit jacket, then sat heavily on the bed, stripped off his tie and kicked off his shoes. He rubbed his face with his hands. Looking up, he saw that the screensaver on his laptop was glowing. With a groan he moved to the desk, sat before the device, and tapped the space key. The screen opened up to a list of new email. The clock widget in the corner of the screen said it was 3:00 p.m. in Silicon Valley. He never should have looked; now he’d have to answer the most important messages.
It took nearly an hour. Thank goodness he had empowered Donna to read his email, strip out all the spam, and send the non-critical messages to the right people. But that still left a score or more desperate emails waiting for Dan by the end of each day on the road. There were requests for interviews and speeches, introductions by friends to other people who wanted something, messages from the various companies and foundations for which he served as a board member, and personal notes from friends and family.
Growing sleepier by the minute, Dan tackled the business messages first. He answered most of them with no more than a sentence, deferring longer contact until he got home. He erased all the links to coverage by him in the media—Lisa got those too, and showed him all the important ones. He begged off most of the parties and gatherings, replying by cutting and pasting the same polite but pointed paragraph.
Finally, with his chin almost resting on his chest, Dan opened three emails he’d saved for last. All were from his wife. The first was tagged “Aidan.” The other two were both empty, and tagged “Did you get my message?” and “Are you there?”
Too tired to feel any anxiety over the subject lines, Dan yawned and punched the key to open the first email:
Dan:
I hope you’re doing okay. You sounded worn out when we talked yesterday. I know how difficult this has been for you. Having to sell a plan you don
’t believe in has got to be hard—and having to pretend you do believe in it must be doubly awful.
You’ve got that right, honey, Dan thought to himself.
So I really hate to bring this up, but I’m very concerned about Aidan. You’ve been so busy, I’m sure you haven’t noticed, but I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong with her. Her grades have slumped—I checked with the school’s grade site, and she’s got an “F” in two classes right now.
As you know, she’s hardly ever even gotten a C in all of her school years. And that’s only part of it. I got one of those automated calls today saying that Aidan had an unexcused absence from her Geometry class. I called the office and told them she’d had a doctor’s appointment—but I was lying. And when I hit her up about it last night, she told me her period had started and she was in the bathroom and late for class and didn’t want to get hassled by her teacher, so she didn’t go.
I knew she was lying. She cut class. And tonight she was talking a mile a minute, then she turned moody and emotional. I’m sure she did more than just cut school.
Oh, Dan, I’m so worried about her. And I feel so helpless. If I accuse her and I’m wrong, she’ll never forgive me. But if I’m right, it could be even worse not to do something.
I know how busy you are, honey, but I could sure use your help on this. Is there any way you can come home earlier than you’d planned? And if not, can you call and talk to Aidan? I need to hear your opinion after you’ve had a chance to talk to her.
“No, I can’t come home early,” Dan said bitterly to the screen. “Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with?” I’ve got 32,000 lives, he thought—32,000 families—depending on me to get the company through this clusterfuck. They trust me. They depend on me. And I have to pretend like I know what I’m doing… and I don’t. And all you’ve got on your plate are the problems of one single teenage girl—which probably aren’t real anyway. Aidan’s always been a good girl—and you’re telling me you can’t handle it?
He rubbed his face again. Jesus, Annabelle, do I have to do everything? I thought we were in this together. He believed himself misjudged and abandoned—and that was a satisfying feeling.
But neither the booze nor the anger was enough to cover Dan’s gnawing sense that he was wrong. That it was always a mistake to question his wife’s judgment. And worst of all, that he was being a poor husband and father.
He started to type a reply, but realized he didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t even formulate a proper sentence. He closed the laptop and dragged himself to bed.
v. 3.4
The Pacific Ocean was black and endless and almost indistinguishable from the sky, except for a few bright stars that burned their way through the scrim of the plane’s thick windows. Sydney to Tokyo. Eleven hours—just two to go. Alison flicked on her overhead light and looked around.
Jenny Randall, eTernity’s business development director and the only other woman on the road show, sat beside her, reading Jane Austen. “I figured this might be my only chance,” she’d said when Alison had first noticed it. The six men on the trip—four from eTernity, two from the underwriter—were all camped out asleep in various states of discomfort. Alison could hear at least two of them snoring. And after ten days and 23,000 miles into the twelve-day trip, the chartered airplane cabin smelled of dirty clothes, sweat, and over-applied deodorant—hotel sinks and laundry services notwithstanding.
Alison knew she should be asleep too—she’d been up for twenty-two hours—but after the raucous, upbeat presentation in Australia, she was still pumped with adrenalin. Can this IPO really happen? she asked herself. More important now, could it really be as big as some analysts were predicting—$45 per share? Nobody in tech had seen that kind of launch since the crazy old days of the Dot.com bubble.
Over the last two months, she had formed her two management teams—one for eTernity under Armstrong, one for the road show; she had checked every fact and parsed every sentence of the company’s prospectus, and helped put together the road show presentation materials. She had been so relentlessly focused that she’d scarcely had time to think about the ultimate goal itself.
And some of that had been intentional. ETernity would become a publicly traded company—with new reporting requirements, thousands of new shareholders, and the incredible wealth that was about to be dropped on her and her team. The implications were so great that Alison—as had always been her way—had put her head down and spent all her time making sure all the steps between now and then were done to the best of her ability.
But now it was real. The reaction at Sydney, and the growing excitement at each of the stops leading up to it, had proved that. More than, it was starting to look better than real: eTernity was not only going to go public in the new few days or weeks—depending on when the underwriter thought the market was ripe—but it also might go out in one of those supernova tech IPOs—like Apple, Netscape, Google—which had came to define its era. The company was going to be the latest phenom, the standard by which the next few years of tech company offerings would be defined. The media attention would be ten times what it was now… and so would the scrutiny.
And not least—oh God, not least—was the fact that everybody on this plane, and nearly every one of the people back at the office in San Francisco, was about to become immensely, insanely rich. She had tried not to do the calculations for her own potential wealth, but she couldn’t help herself. Frightened, she had stopped counting at $175 million. On paper, she reminded herself. Between the employee lock-out period and the time it would take for all of the shares to vest, it would be twenty-four months before she’d be able to sell her thousands of shares of stock… if she wanted to. And why should she? Despite the impending arrival of legions of new owners, eTernity was still her company. From here on, every share she sold would be that much reduction in her power and influence over the company. Selling would be like cutting away her own flesh.
Alison glanced over at Jenny, who was still lost in her reading. What loyalty does she have in the company? she wondered. This company is my dream; what is her secret dream that sudden riches will finally make possible? How long will she stay when she doesn’t have to stay any more? And what about everyone else? Everything changes now. Everything.
She looked out the window again, into the endless darkness. As she did, she spotted a solitary light below on the ocean. An island? A freighter? A cruise ship? Whatever it is, she thought, it’s a sign of life.
Forty-five dollars per share. It took her breath away. She remembered those early meetings in Arthur’s office when they were meeting with representatives from the underwriter—Dan Crowen’s old bank, ironically—and how they had predicted $22 per share at the high end. These days they admitted to being conservative at twice that amount. Forty-five dollars. It was unbelievable. At that price, eTernity—a company with $120 million in sales—would have a market cap of $2 billion. It was a value the company had planned to reach in six more years or more.
It would be nice, Alison told herself, if this stratospheric valuation was the market’s vote of confidence in eTernity’s products and management. But she knew it was just as much a reaction to the sudden shift in Validator Software’s fortunes—and to the fact that the once invulnerable giant had made an unforced error and opened the door to this plucky young start-up.
Why did they do it? she asked herself for the hundredth time. She was certain, despite any real evidence, that it hadn’t been Dan Crowen’s choice, no matter what the media said. No, this was Validator’s decision. But why? Why cripple the company he had built from nothing with his bare hands? Had he grown old and senile and nihilistic? Was he determined to take down his own creation and destroy his legacy? No, she thought, it can’t be that. Too many people over the years had made the mistake of betting on Validator being crazy.
He must have had a purpose for making this move
, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what it was—or how, now that the Validator sales force was gone, the company could recover in time. In less than five years, eTernity could catch it, maybe even pass it.
So maybe the answer was the simple one: Validator Software had just made a dumb business decision. Alison shook her head. What an unbelievable piece of good luck. Wherever you are, Cosmo Validator, I thank you with all my heart.
Enough thinking, she told herself, driving away the reverie. The die is already cast. All you can do is make sure you play your part the best you can. She pulled open her laptop—the blue flash of the screen almost startled her—and began to read her messages. One of the smartest things her team had done was to insist on the extra lease price of a jet with broadband Internet access. Needless to say, it had led to a fair amount of funny YouTube videos and creepy Japanese porn in the back of the plane, but it had also made them all much more productive. Even more important, it made them feel linked to the company back home.
Alison answered a few emails and messages. Nothing really important, other than a nice “go get ‘em!” note from Arthur Bellflower and some Google Alerts filled with coverage about the eTernity IPO. Most were the same: speculation but no facts. Good, good. No one at the company had shot their mouth off and violated the SEC Quiet Period—thanks in no small part to a speech she’d given a month before. Employees still talked about it; few had ever heard so much menace and implied threat in her voice.
There were some Tweets calling for Alison’s attention, but she stayed away from Twitter. Eight hours earlier, still giddy from the Sydney presentation, she had Tweeted twice about how well the event had gone. Literally within seconds, she had received an instant message from the underwriter’s attorney telling her, in so many words, to shut up before the Feds read these things and suspended the IPO. Red-faced, Alison did exactly as she was told. Her worst nightmare now was that she would be the idiot who wrecked the deal. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t send a Tweet, post a blog entry, or discuss the IPO with anyone outside of the players themselves until after Going Public day.
Learning Curve Page 8
