14. Talia
Talia
Talia overslept the next morning, which wasn’t like her.
She was usually up at six to do a hyperefficient dumbbell workout on an app she liked before checking email, showering, and catching up on news while drinking a smoothie (macrobalanced, of course, for the optimal combination of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats).
But she’d been more tired than usual lately; it was probably just because there was so much going on with acquisition due diligence and startup life in general.
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Perhaps you ought to set two alarms for tomorrow morning.
She rolled her eyes. “Dismiss.” Queen Elizabeth disappeared.
The buzz in the Ideal Life office was palpable from the moment Talia walked in. Even though the company spanned three floors, it seemed like all the employees were gathered in the common area on the fourth.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Rachel, one of the engineers, said, “BiomeLabs made a huge announcement this morning, and their stock quintupled as soon as the market opened!”
“No way.” BiomeLabs occupied the offices above Ideal Life, on the fifth through eighth floors of the building.
They were a tech company focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and scientific research of the human gut microbiome.
Talia and a lot of Ideal Life’s employees were friends with the BiomeLabs teams, since they shared the same rooftop where everyone liked to eat lunch.
(Unlike where Sam lived on the coast, Palo Alto was warm and sunny most days.)
Another engineer, Michael, said, “My buddy Ernest just turned into a millionaire overnight!”
“I think half the employees there had enough stock options that they’re millionaires now,” Rachel said. “It’s so awesome.”
Someone on the other side of the common area said, “I should’ve bought BiomeLabs stock when it was still cheap.” Everyone, including Talia, laughed.
But then she realized she could buy BiomeLabs stock cheap. She could rewind to yesterday.
To be clear, Talia wasn’t being greedy. Sure, on paper, she was about to sell Ideal Life to Omni for $100 million.
But most of that was actually going to the venture capital firms, whose investments had been crucial for keeping the startup alive in the early days.
The small percentage of Ideal Life that Talia still owned would mostly be converted into Omni stock options, and per the postmerger employment agreement, those options wouldn’t vest for four years.
Put another way, Talia wasn’t getting much money from the Ideal Life acquisition anytime soon, and if she didn’t continue to work for Omni for four years afterward, she’d lose the Omni stock options and never be able to sell them to cash out.
Those kinds of employment agreements were nicknamed “golden handcuffs” for a reason.
Erin appeared with a box of donuts. Talia took a glazed one gratefully; she hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning because she’d woken up late.
“Nanobots!” Erin said. “I can hardly believe it.”
“Huh?”
“BiomeLabs’ announcement,” Erin said. “Their new product is nanobots!”
Talia’s eyes widened. “I thought microscopic robots were still a futuristic pipe dream.”
“Apparently not. But they did a hell of a job keeping it under wraps until the big reveal, didn’t they? Even Your Gossipy Tech BFF missed it.”
The Segovia twins swept into the room. Jonathan held up his phone while Jody said, “Well, Your Gossipy Tech BFF might’ve missed the scoop, but they’ve still got something to say, and we’re mentioned! New article just posted!”
Talia and half the room scrambled for their phones or started reading on their Omni 3Ds.
The Secret to Silicon Valley Success: High-End Sashimi?
Palo Alto, CA—Damn, what is in the sake in the Sugiyama building? Not too long ago, Ideal Life announced that Omni was buying them for a cool $100 million, and now their upstairs neighbor, BiomeLabs, has blown up the tech market with the announcement of viable nanobots.
If anyone could have kept that development mum, though, it’s BiomeLabs’ CEO, Eleanor Davies.
We’re not denying she’s a brilliant scientist, but that woman’s got less emotion than an AI chatbot.
One of the most competitive founders in Silicon Valley, everyone knows that if Eleanor Davies sets her scope on you, you are well and truly fucked—and you won’t even see the missile coming.
Now, you may be asking, did BiomeLabs violate SEC disclosure rules by not revealing their nanobot tech earlier?
Dear silly reader, how could you think that Davies could be so… unstrategic?
Here’s the timeline and details we uncovered that kept BiomeLabs within SEC reporting requirements but still allowed them to surprise everyone:
In BiomeLabs’ last quarterly earnings call—two months and twenty days ago—their head of research and development mentioned “molecular-scale engineering” without specifying applications.
This was possible because:
(1) Davies had previously created a separately funded “moonshot” division not subject to the same disclosure requirements as BiomeLabs, and
(2) regardless of corporate structure, she made sure the “molecular-scale engineering” fell under strategic intellectual property protections that limited how much BiomeLabs needed to share.
Then, just a few days after that quarterly earnings call, Davies quietly hired all the scientists from a small private research firm and licensed key technology from them.
Because this wasn’t an actual acquisition—it was a perfectly legal “acqui-hire” that got around government scrutiny—BiomeLabs didn’t have to announce anything, while also securing the necessary brainpower and tech to compress a three- to five-year timeline on their secret nanobots to “right now.”
And voila.
Perhaps Davies really is a highly tuned humanoid robot with killer business instincts.
Or maybe that Palo Alto sushi is the secret fuel for startup breakthroughs.
Let us know what you think in the comments. In the meantime, we’re going to try to book ourselves a table at Sugiyama.
Jody helped herself to a donut from Erin’s box. “It’s wild. I hear the nanobots are ingested via a pill. Then they go into your gut and get a close-up view of the bacterial population there—both the good bacteria and the bad.”
“BiomeLabs will be able to use that information to tailor nutrition to the specific needs of each person’s body,” Erin said. “They’d probably recommend we don’t eat donuts.”
“Yeah, but holy shit,” Talia said. “This is going to revolutionize health care.” Studies in recent years had already shown links between gut microbiome health and everything from the immune system to Alzheimer’s to depression.
If BiomeLabs could help change the bacterial makeup of the digestive system to maximize health…
no wonder their stock had shot up like that.
“If you’ll excuse me.” Talia wove her way through the common area to her office, where she shut the door. She immediately called Sam.
“Hey, look at you, calling without prescheduling a time,” he said when he answered.
“Oh, hush,” Talia said. “I have something important I have to talk to you about.”
“Go for it. I’m just arranging the display of new releases.
” Tuesdays were always the day that new books came out.
The publishers sent their boxes a week or two in advance, and on Tuesdays, Sam would open them and set the books up in front of the store.
Unveiling new releases was a special treat he reserved for himself, and Kenneth was happy to cede it, since it meant he got to sleep in late on those mornings.
Talia sat behind her desk. “Okay, so you know BiomeLabs?”
“The company above you that IPO-ed last year with disappointing results?”
“Yep. Well, get this—they’ve been in stealth R-and-D mode, but now that research and development has been revealed: They have nanobots.”
“What?” The sound of a stack of books crashing echoed through the phone’s speaker.
“Uh, you okay over there, Sam?”
“Forget what’s going on here. They actually made nanobots? That work? Hold on—I’m looking this up.”
Talia fired up her computer and did the same.
“Oh my fucking god…” Sam said, half to himself.
“Incredible, right?” Talia asked.
“That’s an understatement. I thought this technology was still a decade or more away.”
“So did everyone else. And BiomeLabs’ stock has already shot up this morning. They’re worth five times more today than they were yesterday. Which brings me to the reason I’m calling you.”
“What does that have to do with— Oh.”
“Yes. Exactly that, Sam.”
“You want to rewind and buy their stock.”
“It’s okay, isn’t it?” Talia stood up and started to pace the length of her office.
“I mean, it’s not insider trading, right?
Because the laws only cover stock trades taken before, like if the CEO of BiomeLabs acted on this information before the announcement was public.
Whereas I’m actually buying the stock after. ”
“Er, sort of after,” Sam said. “Because you’re in the after now, but you’re going to rewind to the before.”
“Yeah, but the law wasn’t made to cover that scenario, because it’s impossible.”
Sam made a noncommittal noise.
“Also,” Talia said, “I’m not an officer of BiomeLabs, so it can’t be insider trading if I’m not an insider.”
“I don’t know, Tal. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s ethical.”
But it wasn’t like she was taking today’s winning lotto numbers and then going back to buy a ticket.
There was something icky about that, something closer to the line of cheating.
Buying BiomeLabs stock, though, didn’t seem bad.
It wasn’t hundreds of millions of dollars. It was only bending the rules a little.
Talia frowned as she flopped onto the purple couch in her office. “I’m not hurting anyone. Think of it this way—what if yesterday I had just happened to buy BiomeLabs stock without knowing anything. It would’ve just been a normal stock market transaction.”
Sam sighed. She could hear the sound of books being stacked on top of one another, the quiet thump of hardcover on hardcover.
“You could buy some stock, too?” Talia said. “I could go back and tell you to invest your recent poker winnings.”
“No, thanks.”
“Why not? Six thousand dollars—minus the few bucks you spent at Taco Bell—would turn into thirty grand today. You could relax a little about the bookstore’s bills.”
“I don’t know…”
“How about this? I’ll rewind and talk to Past Sam about it. And if Past You is also unsure, then I’ll leave you out of it.”
He laughed at that. “Why do you think that the me from twenty-four hours ago is going to think any differently? Besides, aren’t you supposed to be on Omni’s campus yesterday?”
Crap. Talia had forgotten about that. As much fun as she’d had on the Segway and with impressing the Omni execs, she didn’t really feel like redoing that all again, just so she could put in a stock trade in the middle of it.
She couldn’t just rewind to yesterday afternoon when the meeting was over, either, because the stock market would already be closed.
Was having to go through the long Omni meeting worth it?
Talia thought of her student loans. College hadn’t been cheap, and she’d scraped her way through grad school on teaching assistant stipends.
So yes, it was worth it.
“Happy book-release day, Sam. I’ll talk to you yesterday.”
She called Sam from the Segway, on the way to the Omni meeting.
But Future Him had been right; Past Sam was still wary of buying BiomeLabs stock. He couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t want to do it, but it just didn’t sit right with him.
Talia had come this far, though, so she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.
She hung up with him, then invested all $5,000 in her savings account in BiomeLabs.
Maybe she could have fast-forwarded through the Omni meeting and it would have stayed the same. But she was nervous about it—this wasn’t just fast-tracking check-in at the reception desk—and she decided not to risk it.
So Talia went to the meeting and nailed it again.
In fact, this time she was even wittier, and their CEO, Jack Zimmer, and the rest of their executive team liked her even more than the previous yesterday.
“I’m very impressed with your business acumen,” Jack had said.
“It’s uncanny—some of the ideas you suggested matched mine before I could even voice them! ”
The rest of yesterday had been inconsequential enough that Talia felt it was okay to forward through it. It took a while, since she had learned not to turn the watch crown too fast.
But that also meant that Talia felt like she had spent a lot of time patiently rewinding twenty-four hours to buy BiomeLabs stock, then getting herself back where she belonged twenty-four hours later.
What a disconcerting sensation, to be exhausted by time passing personally for you, while no time at all had passed for anyone else.
This seemed like a physics problem for Sam: How do you keep track of the time you spend moving through time?
If time is known as the fourth dimension, would the time inside of time be a fifth dimension? Or something else even more inexplicable?
Regardless, here Talia was again, back on the purple couch in her office, worn out before her new day began.
She stumbled over to her computer; she was dizzy, an aftereffect of going backward and forward in such a short span, even though she’d done it slowly.
Talia logged into her investment account, and there it was—BiomeLabs stock, worth five times as much as she’d bought it for yesterday.
$25,000.
Her smile was so bright satellites probably picked up on it from outer space.