Chapter 27
C laire never texted me the rest of the weekend, a fact which put me profoundly at ease.
Perhaps the alcohol had simply made her a little more flirtatious and aggressive than normal, but she probably didn’t actually have feelings or that kind of attraction to me.
If she had, she would have said more than what she had.
Layla, on the other hand, kept it up. It was never quite to the point that it was stalkerish and annoying, and I probably didn’t help my cause by responding to her every so often.
I told myself that it was because I didn’t want to be rude, but that was a lie that I hadn’t confronted.
The most polite thing, if I really wanted to cut her out, was to do just that so I didn’t string her alone.
I knew the truth to some extent, but I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself, even in my own head.
Fortunately, Morgan had a flight to San Francisco booked for me that very Sunday with a meeting for Monday morning with Andrew Patel to discuss Virtual Realty.
He had already arranged the hotel room and everything—in that regard, the connection to a pure-blood Hunt sure made a true hell of a difference.
Even on the flight over, I remained vigilant about protecting myself, making sure to print off any documents I wanted to review instead of viewing them on my phone or my laptop.
I never got the sense I was being followed or monitored, but that was precisely the problem with Edwin Hunt.
If he wanted to spy on me or follow me, he would not hire someone so incompetent and foolish as to be caught at an airport.
Instead, he would have the best money could buy—and boy, money could buy some really nice investigators.
I made sure to sit against a wall while I read the work on Virtual Realty, the better to protect myself from potential witnesses, and I made sure that my plane seat was at the very back—a rather stark contrast to the private jets or, at a minimum, first class service I was used to, but I didn’t care.
I’d had my fun. I was here for a purpose, not for a feel good flight to stroke my ego.
Along the way to the Bay Area, I kept thinking that Virtual Realty, as incredibly good of an idea as it was, as quickly as it was taking off, and as well-positioned as it was to succeed, had something holding it back.
Its sales figures showed growth, but it wasn’t the kind of growth that something like this should have had.
The ability to give people a tour of the home without having them drive over should have been a game-changer in the housing industry—more people would be able to take an educated look at it.
I would’ve pegged the business at having sales in the seven figures, maybe even the low eight figures, by now.
Instead, while profitable and growing, it barely trickled into the seven figures, which seemed more akin to a niche business or a successful one-man operation.
This told me that either leadership was hiding something from us—which I didn’t take as insidious, just proper negotiating on their part—or they were incompetent but had stumbled across a wonderful idea.
The former scared me a little bit, but I knew from my time with Edwin Hunt how to sniff out all angles.
I also knew from myself how to do so without confrontation and without putting the other person on edge, of course, but if I had to flip the switch, I could.
A lack of information just meant the chance for someone to crack.
If it was the latter, it actually left me quite excited.
Morgan and I could bargain from a position of strength.
Maybe we could even hire people ourselves or, if it really worked out, I could hire myself into a certain role.
Who’s fucking laughing now, John Burnson? You see dollars, I see true value.
Of course, I had no delusions that we could invest and suddenly make myself CEO with a high six-figure salary. That was just ridiculous. And yet… it wasn’t too ridiculous.
My flight landed in San Francisco and I patiently waited for the other passengers to get up.
I looked closely at everyone to see if anyone had “stalled” or kept looking back at me, as if making sure I remained.
Paranoid? Sure. But with ruthless billionaires, you had no choice but to be paranoid if you didn’t want to get gruesomely fucked over.
As I waited, I pulled out my phone to see who had texted me. Morgan. Mrs. Hunt. A couple of college friends.
And wouldn’t you know it, Claire McLendon.
I breezed through everyone else’s text message, even Morgan, who had messaged me to remind me about the meeting time, 10 a.m. PST. That wasn’t going to be a problem, given that I would probably wake up at 4 a.m. here without even trying.
Once I got to Claire’s, I wasn’t sure if I was happy or disappointed that it was relatively vanilla.
“Have a safe flight to SF,” was all she wrote. No emojis, no exclamation mark, nothing.
It was the most Claire message that she could have written.
And I was fucking terrified that I was beginning to consider the meaning of her messages and her words.
That was a fucking dangerous sign for my ability to control myself.
And I didn’t have a choice—like Layla, I had intertwined a business deal into my interest. At least now I had experience and could spot it from a mile away.
No more.
No action.
… I hoped.
The next day at 10 a.m., I went to a small building on a sloped hill that looked decaying and out of shape but probably cost over $500,000 given its location in San Francisco. I knocked once, examining myself in the reflection of the glass storm door.
I’d made it a point to dress as casual as I could. I wore jeans, Puma sneakers, and a casual gray t-shirt. In New York City, the business owner would have asked if I was homeless. In San Francisco, wearing a suit would have drawn questions about my mental state.
I didn’t like being so dressed down. It felt like I was “dressing down” to the occasion. But, hey, we were here to make Virtual Realty a shot, not the other way around. I had to impress them on behalf of Morgan no, not even, share an entire floor—with anyone besides a young, cute secretary. The very thought almost made me burst out laughing as Andrew and I walked outside.
“So, tell me about your situation,” I said as we began a slow stroll through the hilly streets of San Francisco. “You want $5 million for 10 percent, correct?”
“Um, yes,” Andrew said.
There was something in the way he answered that made me believe he’d pulled those numbers out of a hat. I had examined their product and their numbers enough to know that he probably hadn’t had the most rigorous analysis of what his company was worth, but this was even less than I had assumed.
“And how did you come to that?”
“Well, we currently make about $5 million in revenue a year, and it seemed like with the market size that was a good number to push for.”
Revenue. Not profit.
“Let me ask you something, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You said revenue. What is your profit?”
Immediately, Andrew became tense. Not in a confrontational or negative way, but in a way that suggested he had perhaps exaggerated some numbers before. That, or he just didn’t know how to run a P&L ledger or any sort of number crunching. He was a programmer at heart, not an MBA studnet.
“Honestly, Chance, we are losing money each month.”
There it is.
That news in itself wasn’t a death kneel, but what it did do was tell me two things.
One, Andrew was a terrible negotiator and would allow me to create quite the sweetheart deal for myself and Morgan.
Second, for as much as Andrew had a great business idea—one with enormous potential at that—he did not have the business skills to run it.
Perhaps my thoughts earlier about taking it over and inserting myself or Morgan into the company were not all that dumbfounded.
“Well, I appreciate the honesty,” I said. “We’ll need to look more closely at your numbers to come up with an appropriate evaluation, and I’ll show you how we did it.”
I knew I was taking a risk, of course, given that some other investor could blindly agree to $5 million for 10 percent.
And really, they would have not made the worst decision in the world.
The hiring of a CFO could easily position them to be worth far, far, far beyond $50 million within five years.
But Morgan had a relationship with Andrew.
I was beginning to form one. If he started to feel like he was losing his grip on the sale, I could always offer my expertise as a CFO or, at worst, financial consultant.
Andrew seemed honest enough to know his weak points, and me filling them would have to be a nice benefit.
I felt my phone vibrating but ignored it. I had a feeling, though, when I checked, I would not particularly feel certain about what the text really wanted to say, regardless of which girl it was from.
“Of course,” Andrew said. “This is all new for me, you know. All of the money we’ve raised so far came from my parents and family.”
“As does happen with many startups,” I said casually, although thinking about how much money they must have gone through to that point made me wonder if the Patels were like the Hunts in their coffers.
“The important thing is to make sure we both work out a deal that makes sense for both of us. But let’s not do that in front of your employees, OK? ”
“Well, if you think that’s best, but I like to be open and honest.”
Oh man. It really is a different world out here.
“And you can be open and honest about the end result, sure, but a lot of these negotiations need to be private for the sake of not just you but us,” I said. “It’s pretty standard.”
“OK,” Andrew said, although he did not seem particularly convinced. “We can do that. Hold on, I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call.”
I caught a brief glimpse on his phone that showed one of his programmers was calling him. I took the opportunity to look down at my phone and see that not only was I confused by the one text, I got confused by two texts.
See, they said the same thing.
“Meet up soon?”
But one came from Layla and one came from Claire.
The context immediately before that particular message was rather drastic. Layla and I had at least reached a point of civility, and perhaps she saw it as me finally being open to meeting her again. Claire was doing it under the guise of business.
You know, you’re assuming a lot. It’s not as if Layla has actually expressed an interest in getting back together. She’s just apologized.
And Claire… well, let’s not go down that rabbit hole.
I locked my phone and looked back at Andrew.
I didn’t know what the numbers would show yet, but the idea of an acquisition or at least an investment larger than 10 percent seemed like the most obvious choice at this point.
Maybe Andrew wouldn’t sell the majority of shares in the company, but we could easily acquire enough to hold voting power.
The opp was too good. The chance was too good. The timing was too good.
I just had to hope that we didn’t get usurped, as I had last time, at the last second.
And if we did…
Well, I wasn’t going to take it as easily as I had with the Taylors and Burnson Investments.