CHAPTER 18 #2
“One step at a time. And I’d tell her if anything came of it. It’s not like there are any guarantees. She might meet one of them, and they offer her a nice investment. One of them is more into acquisitions and tech specifically, not really the business, so I don’t know if I’ll reach out to him.”
“What do you mean, the tech?”
“He likes to buy the tech behind the software, not the business itself, and use the base code for another one of his businesses to give him a head start there. If he has something that could use a translation tool, for example, he’d buy the code and repurpose it.
Violet and her people would get paid for that, but they’d then be free to work on something else. ”
“You think she’d want that?”
“No.” Stella shook her head. “I’ll hold off on reaching out to him. Maybe if things get more dire, she’ll want to talk to him to at least recoup some of her investment. I’ll bring it up then if it comes to it, but hopefully not.”
“And you’re sure this won’t backfire?”
“Nope. But like I said, it’s just a couple of emails, and she can say no.
It’s her business. She’s got a lot of pride, and I understand where it comes from.
I used to dislike her because she had everything – the head start, the money, the automatic job after graduation, and the easy path to CEO of a giant corporation one day, while I had to work for everything and nothing came easy for me – but there are downsides to both, I suppose. ”
She took her full coffee cup from the machine and carried it over to where the sugar was on the counter.
“And what has you feeling this way all of a sudden?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re having sex with the woman.”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“But you’re trying to help her with her business.”
“Yes. What’s so wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It just sounds like she said that she didn’t want that help. And if you’re only having sex with her, why are you even offering to help her with this?”
“Because I’m not a dick. I’m a good person, I hope. If I can help her, why wouldn’t I try? Sex or no.”
“I don’t know. Seems like you’re getting pretty invested in this non-relationship. Did you even look at the link I sent you this morning?”
“Will you stop trying to hook me up with women on some app?”
“She’s not from some app. I met her in college,” Jen told her.
“She followed me on Instagram a few weeks ago, and we’ve been messaging back and forth.
We were friends back then, but she recently came out, noticed that I was out, too, and since she only lives about an hour from here, she wanted to know if I would like to hang out. ”
“Why are you sending me her info, then?”
“Because she’s not my type. I was never into her like that. She’s great, though. I thought if she were going to come here and the two of us were going to hang out, you could come, too, and maybe sparks would fly.”
“What are the odds of that happening, Jen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe check her profile and see if you are even remotely attracted to her physically. If not, we can all still hang.”
“Jen, I appreciate you trying to help, but I really don’t need it. I can find my own dates.”
“And I’m sure Violet can find her own VCs,” Jen suggested. “So, if you’re asking me to lay off, you might want to consider doing the same.”
Stella thought about Jen’s comment, and it had kept her from sending the emails for a few hours, but before she left the office and went home, she couldn’t stop herself.
Typing them up quickly but still trying to give enough details, she hit send on two of the emails and left off the other contact who would likely only want the tech anyway.
If they come back and say they weren’t interested, Violet wouldn’t even have to know about it, but if they were, maybe she’d actually get the help she needed to keep her business running for a while.
Stella knew being an entrepreneur wasn’t that easy.
Her own father had tried to start his own business on four separate occasions, getting the family into financial trouble every time one failed.
Eventually, the banks had stopped loaning him money, and their family and friends wouldn’t give him a dime, either, knowing they wouldn’t get anything back.
Her dad had meant well. He just hadn’t exactly been the most business-savvy kind of guy.
He worked for the post office now, and while it wasn’t a glamorous job, it was a steady income, and he’d been able to pay people back over the years.
That had also meant that any money Stella had hoped might be there for her to go to college disappeared long before she’d gotten accepted to three universities; one of them being a very expensive Ivy that she’d had to forget all about because she couldn’t get a scholarship big enough to cover everything, and the bank, believe it or not, had said that her parents had somehow made too much money for her to get any significant assistance by the time she’d been applying for loans.
Stella knew what it was like to ask for help, and while it wasn’t usually pleasant, it was sometimes necessary, and if she could do something to help Violet Russell now that she could, she wanted to.