Chapter Twenty #2
After all of the years of working too much, of selling friends and family and then investors on my vision, after skipping Thanksgiving with my family, losing touch with my college friends, and eating takeout alone, this is what it was for.
All of that effort led to me standing in a conference room full of strangers on the other side of the country, at a whiteboard next to a guy in khakis, drawing him a high-level diagram of how our systems work so he and his team could understand how best to tear it apart.
I survived meetings and lunches and one very long dinner. I always found myself seated next to Edmund, even though he wasn’t calling the shots there. I fell into line, I took notes on my phone as I learned the already-mapped-out phases of Lettercat’s fate.
And then I came home.
I’m disappointed when Trevor and Lacey walk into the office together.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lacey waited outside until Trevor showed up, just to avoid me.
I was counting on catching one of them first. Trevor, to take the temperature of how bad it’s been around here while I was gone.
Lacey, because she didn’t answer or return my call this morning, and I very much wanted to connect with the person version of her before this meeting.
Before the product manager walks into the CEO’s office and says, “Is it?” when he says “Good morning.”
Trevor comes at me with a high five. “Real talk, tell me what kind of cheddar we’re looking at. You don’t need to give me a number. Just tell me, where’s my new house—Ibiza? Or more like Cabo?”
I sigh and leave him hanging.
“This is serious shit, Trev. I don’t feel like playing.”
Lacey sits down on the couch, crosses her legs, folds her arms. She doesn’t shy away from eye contact, but refuses to warm to me. She’s steely, unflinching.
Trevor sits down on the other end of the couch, and I pull the armchair from the corner so I can sit across from them.
“I saw you both signed the NDA, so thank you for that,” I begin.
“Was there an option not to?” Lacey asks. I pretend I didn’t hear her.
“So it’s probably pretty obvious to you both at this point, but it looks like Lettercat is going to be acquired by Corday Ford. I was in New York for the past two days meeting with their team and going over the details of what that’s going to look like.”
Trevor’s paying close attention, probably waiting for a number I’m not going to give him. Lacey’s trying to murder me with her eyes.
I continue, “Like it outlined in the NDA, Corday Ford is a public company and information about acquisitions can be market-moving, so I really do have to ask you guys to keep this confidential. Even internally.
“Starting today, we’re going to be engaging with their team to sketch out some of the major architecture and integration points so Lettercat can become Corday Ford’s internal and proprietary content management system.”
“What does that mean exactly?” Lacey asks.
“It means we’re not going to be writing any code until the deal goes through, but I need you guys to identify the core team members for this initial planning phase.
Give me a list and I’ll make sure they get an NDA today as well.
We’ll need to lock down the project files too, and track it under an anonymous name, Project Z or whatever. ”
“No,” Lacey says. “What does it mean that Lettercat’s going to become—what was that bullshit you said?”
“Their internal and proprietary content management system.”
“Yes. That. What does that mean?”
I exhale through my nose. I don’t know why I thought she might make this at all easy on me, or why I thought I deserved her to.
“They’re going to migrate all their publications and their content to our platform. Corday Ford is going to run on Lettercat. Video, podcasts, ads. All of it.”
I pause and watch Lacey process this.
“They’re going to take Roar?” she asks quietly. “All of it?”
“Yeah. We’ll need to refactor it, do all the performance work and have it ready to scale. We’ll have budget. We can do it right.”
Our shared vision, brought to life with Corday Ford’s money.
“Sweet,” Trevor says, not reading the room. “What’s the timeline like?”
“I’m not really sure yet. It depends, but Edmund says they’re motivated to get it done quickly. All our books are clean and the board’s enthusiastic, so who knows. Maybe a month or two?”
“What about the team?” Lacey asks. “How do they fit into this?”
“Everyone comes along. I heard consistently from the CF team that they want us all to keep building.”
“For now, sure. But what about once the integration’s done? When they’re all in New York and we’re out here.”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“Yes, you do. We all know how things work at Corday Ford.”
I tell her I’m doing my best here, but I don’t really have a lot of options. I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can do, but the board seems to have made up their minds.
“But Lacey,” I say. “You have to see that this is better than running out of funding. Sure, they might do layoffs down the road, I don’t know.
But at least Corday Ford will give people severance.
If this deal doesn’t go through, we’re out of money in a few months. And that’s it, we’re all unemployed.”
“Shit,” Trevor says.
I thought this might soften her, but it hasn’t. If anything, she looks more betrayed than before.
“There’s another option, Jude. You helped build the model, so don’t act like you don’t know what the data says. If these investors can’t see it, find some who can. Or you can just do what you’re told, since that’s easier.”
The better move would probably be to yell at her, or ask her to leave my office. But instead I stand up, give her a hard look and say, “Why do you even care? You’re the one who has a great new job lined up.”
“Woah,” says Trevor.
Those might be tears in her eyes, but I keep going. “Edmund told me how well your meeting went. How passionate you are about their product.”
“That’s out of bounds,” she says. “I’m not doing this right now.”
And she gets up, grabs her bag, and leaves. Not just the room. She leaves the office.
“I’m confused,” Trevor says, pointing to where Lacey was on the couch. “Are you hitting that?”
I don’t have time to chase after her. Trevor and I put a list of engineers together and I send it off to get their NDAs out and signed in time for the kickoff meeting. Then I have IT get the camera ready in the conference room, and tell them to please leave it up for the foreseeable future.
The new project team files into the conference room, but there’s no friendly chitchat before the meeting starts. I’ll have a half-hour to break the news and answer questions before the team in New York logs in.
Lacey walks in just as I’m about to begin and sees the only chair open is next to mine. She walks over, looks me in the eye, and drags the chair to the back of the room.
I see how this is going to go.