Betting on the Brainiac: a Sweet Romantic Comedy

20. Chapter Twenty

My plan falls apart with a text from Matt before my alarm even goes off Monday morning.

Big problem. VC walked. Need to regroup.

I shoot straight up in bed and re-read it, sure I’ve misunderstood. We lost our funding? How? On Friday, they said it was a lock.

On my way to the office.

I throw on jeans and a hoodie, shove my feet into my sneakers, grab my laptop bag, and head out. All the way to the office, I run through every conversation, slide, and spreadsheet we shared with the investor team during their visit. The numbers are good. There’s no such thing as a risk-free investment, but for people used to seeing the big picture—a key part of investing—we should have been an easy bet.

Inside, Matt is already waiting for me in the conference room. It’s small with fishbowl vibes. I shut the door and start to lower the blinds.

“Don’t,” Matt says. “They’ll know something is wrong. We’ll have to sit here and look like we’re talking regular strategy when they start coming in.”

This is not regular strategy. This is crisis management. The next round of funding was supposed to cover another six months of runway for us, the last push as we move into product testing and launch. It was supposed to cover payroll for everyone that will fill in those cubicles shortly—our executive assistant, our payroll manager, our accountant, our developers. All told, we have about two weeks of capital left before we can’t fund their paychecks.

“Did they say why they changed their minds?” I ask Matt.

“A conversation with Raymond. He mentioned that we’ve been patient with our unconventional staff, giving them time to bring their skills up to par.”

“Raymond, noooo.”

“He meant well by it,” Matt says, his voice tired. “But the squirrelly one couldn’t let it go this weekend and talked the others out of it. Worried we aren’t agile or business minded enough to compete in the startup space.”

“Business minded being code for ruthless?”

“Basically.”

I look out at the office. It’s quiet, but that will change in about ten minutes when Martha shows up to make sure the coffeemaker is doing its job, which is ten minutes before she’s even supposed to start work. But she likes having the coffee warm and ready for everyone. Martha is fifty-seven, a grandmother of nine, and we could no sooner get her to stop fussing over everyone than we could ask the sun to take a day off.

Martha had been the school secretary at Matt’s high school, and when he’d gone back to his twenty-year class reunion, she’d mentioned taking early retirement because she was immunocompromised. Her front desk post meant catching too many of the bugs that thrive in a school year. Poor Martha had been out sick so many times over the previous two years that she’d used up all the sick days she’d banked after thirty years of barely using any.

He’d recruited her to come work as our executive assistant and had a strict work-from-home policy for anyone with so much as a tickle in their throat.

Our entire corporate team is his social experiment, pairing older workers who are trying to stay current with technology and young developers coming out of coding camps who don’t have a lot of real-world corporate experience. It’s a boomer/Gen Z office team overseen by an elder millennial. And me, I guess. I’m technically management. Chief technology officer when forced to define it for legal documents. But since I work best in monk-like conditions, we have a retired air traffic controller named Brenda as the project manager, and she finds overseeing Matt’s unconventional hiring choices much easier than dealing with juggling 747s.

I don’t want to give Martha a layoff notice. I don’t want Victor—a coding camp graduate with the help of a grant for people convicted of nonviolent crimes—to have to try his luck in a Matt-less job environment. Ditto Lacey, a twenty-three-year-old mom whose childcare falls through about once a month, so her two-year-old daughter plays near Martha’s desk while Lacey writes documentation or sits in code reviews. Matt would let her work from home, but without getting into details, she made it clear that’s an even less ideal work situation.

There’s Bhani, who learned to code so she could talk to her son about his job, then turned out to have an aptitude for programming that makes me wonder how long I’ll have job security with someone that good learning by the week. Or Raymond, the former middle school shop teacher who liked working in CAD so much that he decided to learn more about programming and ended up getting a degree in computer science as his retirement hobby. It keeps him busy after losing his wife two years before.

“Matt.”

“Yeah?”

“We have to fix this. We need at least enough funding to cover payroll until Raymond and Bhani realize they’re perfect for each other.”

Despite the tired lines around his eyes, Matt gives a small chuckle. “You see it too, huh?”

“If there’s not an office pool on it we don’t know about, I’ll skip my October salary.” I think about it for a second. “Half of it, anyway. Still need to pay rent.”

“You’re saying you don’t have 1.5 million in your pocket, Oliver?” he says in a gruff English accent.

You don’t get to thirty as an Oliver without knowing Oliver Twist. “I never lock up my money, for I’ve got none to lock up.”

“No, that’s Fagin’s line. I’m Fagin.”

I give a half-hearted laugh. As if Matt could be anything but one of the truly good guys.

The office door opens and Martha comes in, giving us a wave and questioning glance through the conference room window. I paste a relaxed smile on my face.

Matt waves and turns back to me. “Game face, boyo. We need to solve this with a smile.”

For the next two hours, we go through the lists of venture capital firms and angel investors we’d initially put together to pitch our startup. I’d had an idea for software to help small and midsized farms compete with corporate agriculture, and Matt had ten more years of business experience and enough technical know-how to spot a good thing. When we went looking for our first round of funding, the list had almost twenty-five names on it. Now, removing the ones who’ve already invested or turned us down leaves only eight possibilities we haven’t tapped yet.

They’re all angel investors. We’ve stuck with venture capitalists because it allows us to retain more control of the company. Angel investors are rarely silent partners. They take an active interest in how their investments perform, and they generally require an ownership stake.

My phone buzzes with a text.

Where are you? The kitties are SO CUTE this morning and I’m hogging all of it.

A day that starts on the brink of financial disaster may not be the best day to straighten out the whole mistaken identity thing. I set my phone on the table and rest my elbows on my knees, pressing my eyes into my palms.

“You okay there?” Matt asks.

“Yep. Doing a system reboot. Don’t your eyeballs connect straight to your brain? I’m pushing on them, and it’s probably going to turn off any bandwidth hogs my brain is running.”

Matt sighs. “This is my job to handle, and I will. Go back to your coding cave and keep building something brilliant so everyone wants to throw their money at us.”

The office is full, and the low hum leaking through the glass reminds me both of what we’ve built already and why it’s so hard for me to work in here. It also reminds me of why it’s so important that I nail our deadline with the delivery of flawless software. Every one of those voices in the hum out there needs me to get this right.

I turn to watch them, some of them in the glassy-eyed trance that means they’re deep into debugging, some of them laughing with each other, a few in headphones, tapping away on their keyboards. “We need to tell them.”

“Not yet.” Matt shakes his head when I shoot him a concerned look. “Give me three days to see what I can come up with. If I don’t have a sure thing by then, we’ll tell them. They’ll still get a full two weeks of pay and as much time as they need during office hours to send out their resumes or go to interviews.”

Three days. Three days to find investors when the first time took almost four months.

We’re as good as done, but Matt has earned the right to ask for my trust.

“Okay,” I tell him. “But I’ll stay here to work. I can’t make you do this alone.”

“Again, they’ll know something is up. They probably already suspect it with you being in here this morning. Give them peace of mind for as long as we can. C is for cave. Hide in the cave.”

I give him my first real smile of the morning. “Matt, you just made a coding joke.”

“I could make more if you used Python. Now get out of here, so I can solve all of our problems.”