Chapter Twenty-Four
JUDE
“Are you sure you’re not using me to avoid reality?” Lacey asks, laughing, from beneath me. We’re in her bed and her alarm went off forty-five minutes ago, but I’m done letting work take over my life. I have new priorities, and one of them is soft, beautiful, and naked right now.
“I’ll show you some reality,” I tell her, blowing a raspberry into her neck. She squeals, and then sighs as I kiss my way up to her ear.
I don’t care what time it is in Greece. Or New York.
The bus is crowded. The first one that passed was so full it didn’t stop, so Lacey said we needed to jam ourselves onto this one.
“Or we could Uber,” she said.
“I want to do what you normally do,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Get ready to shove.”
And now we’re crushed together on a bus lurching downtown, Lacey’s head pressed against me largely to avoid the two backpacks encroaching on her personal space. But I like it there.
“Seeing a bit more humanity than you’re used to this morning?” she asks, looking up.
“A little,” I agree.
We stayed at her studio last night because one of the many things we agreed on after my soccer game is that my apartment is terrible, and going forward we’re choosing happiness and color over cold gray convenience.
I got dressed next to her kitchen sink this morning, and she spent ten minutes trying to find a place to put my bag where we wouldn’t keep tripping over it.
But I don’t mind how small her place is; it means she’s never very far away.
I put one of my AirPods in her ear, and we listen to the series of irate voicemails Edmund has left for me, laughing when we very much shouldn’t be.
He’s not sure what kind of bullshit I’m playing at, but Mike is no longer returning his calls, he says.
He’s awaiting word from Corday Ford’s lawyers while he’s there in Greece, trying to schedule an emergency board meeting.
He’s got to deal with the fallout from my infantile stunt while he’s supposed to be at the Acropolis with his wife.
It’s really not funny. Except it is.
“Play that one again,” she says. “I like the part where he’s sputtering like a cartoon villain.”
“Should we listen to your voice memo next?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
I know she’s worried that the release of the Roar code might get her offer pulled.
I’m going to take sole responsibility with Edmund, but it’s hard to know what he’ll do with all of this rage.
I also know that she doesn’t want to accept, that she’s hoping there’s a way forward for Lettercat without Corday Ford.
And without me. I’d honestly be okay with that; she loves it more than I do.
When we get to the office, we do a dumb thing where she takes the elevator and I take the stairs, just in case anyone’s paying attention to our arrival times in the midst of the shitstorm I’ve created at Lettercat.
For the first time in a week, people say good morning to me. Dave brought muffins. Jonnie likes my haircut.
I put the muffin down on my desk and I call Edmund, proving to myself that I’m not avoiding him. I’m just establishing boundaries; going forward, I work when I’m at work. I’m still relieved when it goes straight to voicemail.
I join the engineers in Gutenberg for the daily standup, and I linger afterward, trying to get a better handle on the performance issue that’s still making the platform less than optimal.
When Glenn walks into the conference room, I’m standing behind Lacey, looking over her shoulder at her laptop, my hand on the back of her chair.
All of it a shade too close, too familiar, and I see him notice.
He looked worried to start, and now I’ve only made it worse.
“My office?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says.
I explain to him on the way that I’m aware how selfish my decision yesterday seems. And is, in some ways. There was real money on the table that might not be there at the end of today. Lacey’s offer might disappear; Glenn’s reputation could be harmed.
But I tell him Corday Ford’s plan to eliminate all direct customers, and the teams who support them.
“You say they were going to rip the heart out, so you decided to shoot it in the head?” he asks.
Piracy sounds less cool when it’s phrased like that.
“It’s a calculated risk. And I’m fully aware that as soon as Edmund gets a quorum together, I’m out.”
We sit down on the couch in my office.
“And was Lacey a calculated risk too?” he asks.
“That’s not an abuse of power. I care about her. A lot.”
He studies me for a moment. “Then did you think about what it looks like for her? How people could take everything she’s achieved here and write it all off because the CEO’s in love with her?”
There’s nothing for me to do but blink, because I haven’t thought of that.
“I know you didn’t have bad intentions,” he says, but I know intentions don’t count. Lacey’s brilliant. The idea that someone could write off her success because of me feels ten times worse than disappointing Glenn.
“This is all leading in the same direction. I fucked up a million different ways. I’m good at building things, but I’m not built for running a company. I’m going to be done here today, and as bad as that feels, it’s also a relief.”
Glenn puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t count yourself out,” he says. “Learn as much as you can from this, and take it to the next company you start.”
I shake my head, but Glenn doesn’t see. He’s too busy wheeling the whiteboard over, discussing strategy for my conversation with Edmund and the board.
Do I step down voluntarily, do I let them force me out, let’s take one last, dying look at the cap table.
But it’s okay. I appreciate the soft landing Glenn is trying to give me.
We’ve decided the best course of action is me stepping down—in hopes that it will keep Corday Ford from suing Lettercat—when Lacey and Trevor come bounding into my office.
“Sorry to interrupt, but it’s urgent. I think,” Lacey says.
“It’s urgent,” Trevor confirms. “Play it.”
She holds out her phone and plays a long, meandering voice memo from the two co-founders who want to bring her on as Head of Product.
They talk about how great she is, about how excited they both are about the energy she’d bring to their company, how they want to do a retreat in San Diego or maybe Sedona, yes, Sedona!
They love it there, definitely Sedona, plus last time they were in San Diego…
And then something about Edmund, something about an airline, then something about her calling them after she’s had a chance to review.
Throughout it, I focused on how impressed they are with Lacey, which makes me happy.
I know she’s resisting—and they do seem flakey—but maybe she should give it a shot over there.
She’ll do amazing wherever she lands, but I hate that she needs a clean slate as a result of my poor decisions. It’s unfair.
She and Trevor are staring at me like they’re holding a smoking gun while I’m lost in thought; I don’t understand.
“Play that last bit again?” Glenn requests.
Lacey comes closer and plays it again, starting with the last time they were in San Diego.
“And I know Edmund’s likely stepping back,” one says.
“With his CF board seat,” the other says.
“But he’s setting up an intro with another airline—”
Lacey stops it.
“Edmund’s getting a Corday Ford board seat?” Glenn asks.
Lacey nods, her eyes wide. “When I heard it, I checked with Trevor. He’s a corporate governance savant,” she says.
Trevor raises his fist to me triumphantly.
“I know my shit. That’s self-dealing, bro.”
Glenn erases everything he’s written on the whiteboard.
Every officer and member of a board of directors has a legal obligation to act in the best interests of the business.
That means Wally couldn’t make us hire his granddaughter as our CTO, and Amber can’t select accounting software based on which vendor gives her the nicest gift.
It does also mean that a CEO shouldn’t torch a potential acquisition just because he doesn’t like the plans the acquiring company has for his startup.
My violation of that obligation is what Edmund’s pulling the board together over today, what my lawyer friend Ari warned me against doing.
As ironic as it seems, Edmund’s going to argue that when I released the Roar code and tanked the Corday Ford deal, I was acting against Lettercat’s best interests.
Even though nothing could be further from the truth.
But Edmund getting himself a Corday Ford board seat after secretly shopping us to their COO, after telling the rest of the board that Lettercat was a lost cause, unworthy of more funding, that we should be grateful for the lowball offer CF was making us?
That’s self-dealing. It’s worse than carelessness; self-dealing can be prosecuted.
The allegation alone has ended long and esteemed careers.
I call Edmund again, and this time he answers. I cut short the tirade he launches into by playing the message Lacey’s forwarded me, which I have all queued up.
“What is it that you want?” Edmund asks me. I have that all queued up too.
It turns out I am a killer; I’m just as surprised as Edmund is.
The emergency board meeting is held in the afternoon.
When it’s over, I walk out to the floor and I hit the gong.
“Jesus Christ, what now?” Kate says, speaking for every startup employee in history.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I tell them, “but I have some pretty important updates. First off, I hate to tell you all this but the Corday Ford deal is officially dead.”
I wait for the applause to die down before I continue. “The chairman of the board of directors has stepped down as of today; I’ve been appointed interim chair but I assure you, my tenure there will be as brief as humanly possible. Because I also stepped down as President and CEO today.
“I made a promise to a few of you that if we survived last month, I’d bring on a CTO who would provide strong technical leadership.
But there’s no one in the world who wants that job more than I do; it’s where my heart has always been, and I can’t wait to step into that role.
Enough about me: I’d like to introduce you to the new President and CEO of Lettercat. Glenn, come up and say hello.”
A few meetings later, I can tell Glenn’s spent a lot of time thinking about how this company ought to be run.
He’s already talking about a re-org, moving Trevor to lead a new channel sales and partnerships department, bringing Amber on full-time if she agrees to, telling me he knows it’s not traditional but that he’d rather not have the CTO’s input on the new Head of Product.
He assures me he has a promising internal candidate in mind.
I’m clearing my stuff out of his office to move back where the nerds and goobers hang out; returning to my people. Ella’s helping me pack, and she tries to recycle the water bottle Lacey left in here ages ago but I tell her not to.
“I just want to keep it,” I tell her.
“Suit yourself. You can keep all the garbage you want if I can convince you to take a small break before starting your new job,” she says.
“No need to convince me,” I tell her. “I’m taking next week off. I think my girlfriend and I might head to Hawaii.”