Chapter 100: Rescheduled
[Gardner Analytics Folsom St, SoMa January 8, 2016 9:38 AM]
The deck was printed. Three copies, tabbed, each one hundred and twelve pages. Sarah had checked the tabs twice. Priya's curation appendix was six pages of data lineage with a seventh page footnote she had written at two in the morning and refused to discuss. Oyelaran's operations appendix included a slide he called "the boring one" and everyone else called page ninety four.
Ethan had rehearsed the opening three times. The opening was forty seconds. It named the market, the margin, the moat, and the month. It did not use the word "opportunity" because Sarah had banned it during the second rehearsal and he had agreed.
The conference table was set. Monica's laptop was open to the financial model. Sarah's checklist was on the glass wall in red marker, uncapped, every box ticked. The coffee was Blue Bottle, poured, and going cold.
At 9:41 AM, Monica's laptop chimed. She read the email. She read it again.
"It's moved."
Sarah turned from the checklist. "Moved where."
"January twenty seventh. Rebecca's assistant. She says they have a partner conflict on the fourteenth and the next available slot," Monica scrolled, "is the twenty seventh. She's sorry. She's very sorry. There are three sorrys."
Ethan took the laptop. The email was from Karen, Rebecca Zhou's assistant. It was polite. It was specific. It contained no strategic content whatsoever. A partner had a board conflict. The next slot was twenty three days out. Karen offered three alternative dates, all in the same week, all Thursdays. She closed with "please confirm which works best for your team."
There was no one to be angry at. He looked for one anyway. Karen had done her job. Rebecca had done hers. A calendar had produced a conflict, and the calendar had no counterparty.
"Okay," he said. "What are the options."
Monica's pen tapped once. Suppressed excitement, or in this case suppressed something else. "We take January twenty seventh. We don't have a choice. The alternatives are the twenty eighth and the twenty ninth."
"Same week."
"Same week."
Sarah capped the red marker. Uncapped it. Capped it again. "We're doing the rehearsal."
Monica looked at her. "The meeting is in sixteen days."
"The rehearsal is in nine minutes. Everyone's here. The deck is printed. Priya flew in from a curation review. We're doing the dry run."
Sarah's voice had the particular flatness that meant she had already decided and was being polite about the formality of asking. Priya set down her "I survived peer review" mug on the conference table, deliberately, the way she set it down before a sharper argument, and looked at Sarah.
"I would like my two days back."
"I know."
"I was in Palo Alto until midnight reviewing token deduplication lineage. I am here because the meeting was at ten. The meeting is not at ten."
"I know."
Priya picked up the mug again. "I do not drink at celebrations. Celebrations are when people make promises they cannot keep. This is not even a celebration. This is a rehearsal for a meeting that is not happening."
Sarah opened the deck to page one. "Ten o'clock. You have the floor."
The rehearsal ran for sixty three minutes. Sarah asked questions Rebecca would ask and two Rebecca would not. Monica walked the financials. Priya took the curation appendix apart and put it back together in real time, found a lineage gap on page four, and fixed it on the whiteboard. Oyelaran's operations appendix got six minutes of questions and survived all of them.
It was the most useful hour of the month. Everyone resented it.
Ethan stood at the board end of the table for his forty seconds. The opening landed. Sarah said "again" without inflection. He ran it again. It landed better. She said "again." He ran it a third time. She said "that's the one."
Nobody thanked anyone. Nobody gave a speech about resilience or pivoting or making the most of it. The room emptied at 10:47 AM and left the chairs at angles and the Blue Bottle cold and the printed decks stacked on the table with nowhere to go.
Monica stayed. Her laptop was open to the runway model. She had been updating it during the rehearsal, not the deck, not the presentation, the model, because the runway did not care why the date moved.
"Six point one," she said. "That's where we are."
"With the burn at," he started.
"With the burn where it is, yes. Six point one. The overhang is accruing. Every week we don't close, Hooli's patent sits there and Sequoia's diligence gets one week harder. Twenty six days is three weeks of overhang we didn't budget for. The model says we land the close in late December if the meeting goes well on the twenty seventh, and the training window." She stopped typing. "The training window is the first week of January."
"I know."
"The close and the training window would be in the same fortnight."
"I know."
Monica turned the laptop so he could see the row she had added. It was labeled WIRE/TRAINING OVERLAP and the cell was red. She had not colored it. The model had.
"Three weeks," she said. "That's what fifteen days costs. Not the number. The compression at the other end."
He started to think about how to use the thirty one days. The thought produced three ideas before he caught himself. The first was a pricing refresh, Diana's work. The second was a patent prior art push, Lauren Kim's retainer. The third was a curation sprint, Priya's team. Three ideas. All of them things other people should do. He noticed the pattern and closed the tab in his head where the ideas lived.
The deck sat on the table. One hundred and twelve pages, tabbed, printed three times. It would be seventeen days stale when someone finally read it. The tabs would still be in the right places. The numbers would not.
Priya was putting on her coat in the doorway when she turned back. "The curation deadline. Does it move with the round?"
The honest answer was no. The curation deadline was a function of the training schedule, and the training schedule was a function of the hardware, and the hardware did not care about Karen's three sorrys.
"It doesn't move."
She heard him. She took a small notebook from her coat pocket, not the lab notebook, a personal one, battered, with a cracked spine. She wrote something next to a date that was already there. He could see the earlier entry from where he stood. It was October's date. She wrote January's date beside it, closed the notebook, and left.
The board room was empty by 11:15. Ethan stayed. The chairs were still at rehearsal angles. The whiteboard had Priya's lineage fix on it and Sarah's checklist on the glass and neither had been erased. The deck was on the table. The Blue Bottle was cold. Outside, it was raining in the particular way San Francisco rain happened, not hard enough to be weather, just enough to make the alleys smell like concrete.
He picked up the top copy of the deck and held it. One hundred and twelve pages. Twenty one days from being read. Four weeks of work that had been correct and was now, already, slightly wrong. The numbers in it were four weeks old, the runway had moved, and none of that was anyone's fault.
Monica's red cell glowed on the laptop screen from across the room. WIRE/TRAINING OVERLAP. The model had colored it without being asked.
He put the deck down. The chairs stayed at their angles. He did not fix them.
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