Chapter Fifteen
LACEY
When Kate accuses me of bringing bad vibes to lunch, she’s one hundred percent correct. In my defense, I do not want to be here. I just made a giant mess back at the office, and I need to be back there, cleaning it up. Not having lunch with a stranger.
I overstepped with Jude. He wasn’t asking me what I thought his role should be at his company, he was telling me what the plan was.
In the way a CEO would tell a person on the product team.
Instead of reminding me of that, he redirected me.
And I followed up by acting out in front of the team when he didn’t like the release.
All in all, just a regular workday for me and most other people who work in tech.
True emotional intelligence is a journey, okay?
But the pattern lately has been that everything gets fixed when Jude and I engage over ideas.
We might start at a friction point, but ideas get better when we beat them up together.
Only today, he didn’t meet me halfway or anywhere at all.
He retreated, and I saw it. I felt it. And nothing got fixed.
Kate talking about this lunch like it was a setup could not have come at a worse time, considering the mood in that the room. Considering where Jude slept last night. Which is not something I’m going to think about during work hours.
All that aside, I take an instant and intense dislike to Kyle. He orders a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with three glasses, despite Kate and I telling him we weren’t interested in drinking at lunch today.
“Kate tells me you’ve got some AI experience,” he tells me.
I give him a rundown of the pragmatic AI strategy we’ve adopted at Lettercat. As an example, I tell him that we’re optimizing engagement by using AI to deliver each newsletter when the subscriber is most likely to read it, and seeing real results.
“But your real killer will be when the whole newsletter is written by an LMN. Your customers can just sit back and rake it in.”
Even though I want to, I don’t tell him that LMN is just three sequential letters of the alphabet, and what he’s looking for is LLM, which stands for Large Language Model.
Instead I explain that our customers are creators and creatives, so it’s important that our AI strategy focus on efficiency, analytics, and quality, and not attempt to poorly replace what they do so well.
Kyle doesn’t listen, just waits for me to stop talking so he can flash me a knowing, over-whitened smile.
“AI newsletters, though. Build that and you’ll absolutely kill it. You don’t even need to give me credit for the idea.”
So I give up. I let Kyle mansplain to Kate how a chatbot works and overpromise what his magical LMN is going to do.
I pick at my chicken Caesar salad while in my head I replay everything that happened in that conference room, trying to find the thing that was bad enough for Jude go cold on me like he did.
I don’t have to wait too long to find out: when I get back to the office, Ingrid is waiting anxiously at my cube and Dave and the QA team have each Slacked me a full summary of what happened when I left the room.
I try not to panic: it’s easily explainable!
So I explain the situation, easily, to Ingrid and then type it out to Dave and my pals in QA: it was an unsolicited call from a recruiter who found me on LinkedIn. It happens all the time.
Now I just need to tell Jude.
He’s standing at his desk, back in a Lettercat tee and jeans today, but he’s not alone.
His sister is sitting on his couch and waves me in, but when Jude looks up and sees me, he looks back to his monitors and gives his head a shake.
His headphones are on. Ella makes a face and gives me a shrug—typical Jude, right? —and I retreat.
His Slack is on DND, and he keeps his sister in there all afternoon.
I’m apparently not the only one who uses the buddy system.
I stay late, not because I’m a stalker, but because I have a superhuman amount of work to get through.
With just a few adjustments to go, we’ll have some functionality heading to beta.
That means I have final acceptance testing to do, messaging to craft for The Colony, support articles to assign, imaginary arguments to hold with Jude.
Because so what if I did want to get another job?
I’m not an indentured servant here. It’s incredibly fucked up for him to react like this.
Am I supposed to limit my professional development forever because of him?
Is anything he might feel about me conditional to my employment at his startup?
Or is this just his way of backtracking and making last night my mistake?
“Lacey,” Ella says, in the tone of a person who’s said it a few times while I was lost in thought. She’s knocking on my desk. I notice she’s got her coat on and her bag with her, so maybe she’s here to let me know I can pop in and have my real argument with Jude now.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Jude and I are going to go grab some dinner. You looked upset when he dismissed you before, and I guess I wanted to check in. It’s not you; he’s being odd today.”
I tell her that we had a bad meeting and about the recruiter call. That it’s no big deal and I’ll iron it out with him tomorrow.
“Probably a good idea to give him a minute,” she says. “I know he really values you. And not that it excuses anything, but he’s under an awful lot of pressure these days.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes, and instead I locate my only remaining shred of empathy.
“I get it. Being a founder seems bad enough, but then you factor in the Edmund stuff…”
She nods. “I really think that’s it. The acquisition threat just has him spiraling. It’s—”
“Ella? You ready?” Jude calls to her down the hallway. She tells me we’ll talk more tomorrow, and that I should have a good night.
Which is now extremely unlikely.
I log out and I go to a kickboxing class that I know will make me sore for three days.
I leave my laptop on my desk intentionally, so I won’t be tempted to work from home tomorrow.
Also to see if, like my sister and father have suggested, I use the noise from work to drown out anything that might be bothering me in my real life.
I pick up some Pad Kee Mao on my way home. I sit alone at a very small table in a very small apartment and eat my noodles. It’s quiet in a bad way.
I’m angry at Jude. I feel awful for Jude. I’m frustrated at the situation, at myself.
“Is it too late to call?” I ask.
“There’s no such thing as too late when you have three kids under the age of three. We’re running a 24-hour operation over here,” Glenn tells me.
I ask about the baby, about the twins. How Jen’s doing, how he’s holding up.
“Babies and startups are both exhausting; the one difference is that babies are boring in a way that’s almost soothing. Not true for startups. And since you’re calling me at ten o’clock at night, I suppose the better question is, how are you holding up, Lacey?”
I say that I’ve been working more hours than I ever have before, but there’s something nice about it all being for a vision I had a part in.
Sure, there are ups and downs— but maybe there were a lot of downs today.
I tell him about Edmund showing up, and how Jude’s now backing off the tactical in favor of the strategic.
“That’s probably the right move,” Glenn says.
I know my opinion on this has more to do with Jude than Lettercat, so I don’t complain.
I also leave out the tantrum I had this morning, the call from the recruiter, and everything that happened last night after dinner.
So, pretty much everything. But I do mention that I talked to Ella.
“Are we going to be acquired?” I ask.
He sighs. “Come on, Lacey. I know you’ve done this before. Part of the excitement of working at a startup is that you never know what’s going to happen. The thing that makes it terrible is also what makes it interesting.”
“I know,” I say. “I just had one of those days where I’m questioning what I’m doing this for. Like, how can Jude can ask so much of me when he knows it might all go away?”
Glenn’s quiet for a moment. “Maybe that’s why he’s asking so much of you. Because you’re a person who can help make sure it doesn’t.”
Goddammit, Glenn. Always making me see reason.
We have a Project Roar update scheduled right before lunch, but in the morning I DM each member of the team and tell them we don’t need to meet. Everyone’s so happy to have the time back that they don’t question why I didn’t just cancel the meeting. I didn’t do that because I’m up to something.
Jude, arriving late, puts the brakes on when he sees I’m the only person in the conference room.
“You’re in the right place,” I tell him. I gesture to the chair across from me. “Please have a seat.”
I’ve put a short deck together and I share it. The agenda items: Overstepping, Accountability, LinkedIn Settings / Jumping to Conclusions, Lettercat’s Core Values. I run through the first three items briefly and professionally. There are screenshots.
The final slide has the full list of values, but with Transparency and Honesty in bold.
“I know you can’t tell everyone everything,” I say, looking across the table for the first time. “But arguably, you should have told me we might be acquired.”
The Jude looking back at me isn’t the one who finds the problems with my ideas. It’s the one who called me when he was worried about Jen, or feels bad that I have to manage upward with him.
“It’s hard for me to talk about,” he says, “but I should have told you. I’m sorry I didn’t, you deserve to know.”
“Apology accepted,” I say.
I hesitate before I launch into the next part, the one there isn’t a slide for.
“The other night—”
“Was great,” he says quietly. “It was.”
I refuse to listen to the flutter in my stomach that agrees with him.
“But it made everything today worse.” I look at the door, to make sure no one’s within earshot. “Maybe it’s not a good time to make things more complicated than they already are.”
“Sure,” he says. He looks at the monitor instead of me.
“But I don’t want to be anywhere else. I love it here. And you and I work really well together.”
“We do,” he says, keeping his eyes on the Core Values. “Maybe we focus on that for now.”
“For now,” I repeat, but I don’t even know what that means.
Instead I open a report I’ve been dying to show him, one that I made with some newly acquired Excel skills to merge the net new sales report with the client onboarding survey.
There’s a chart, too, showing a new sales spike shortly after Tooity announced their Corday Ford partnership.
The intake form shows that a significant number of Tooity newsletters have begun migrating to Lettercat.
“Interesting,” Jude says, leaning in.
“Isn’t it? I don’t have qualitative data, but it looks like their customers hate the partnership strategy enough to jump ship. Maybe we dodged a bullet.”
He scratches his neck like he does when he’s thinking. “Have you sent this to marketing? I bet it’s worth doing some targeted ads or something. This could be an opening to go after their user base.”
“Maybe promote a webinar about how easy it is to make the switch,” I suggest.
By the time we walk out a half hour later, I feel relieved. Jude and I are back to normal, whatever that is. I peel off to go to my desk and he pauses.
“Hey. You didn’t do a slide on Kyle,” he says.
“Kyle is a tool,” I tell him. He continues on to his office, but I can tell that he’s smiling.