The Underwriting

by Michelle Miller

  TARA

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16; SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  “Get in the car,” Tara said sternly from the driver’s seat.

  Neha crossed her arms and didn’t budge.

  “Get in the fucking car or I’ll get you fired so fast they won’t buy your plane ticket home.”

  Neha relented, slamming the door behind her and keeping her arms folded as she stared out the window. Of all the things Tara had prepared for leading up to today’s meeting with the sales syndicate, waking up to discover that Neha had never reformatted the sales deck she’d sent her four weeks ago was not one of them. The slides weren’t in the order she’d asked for, the fonts were different between sections, and the margins were entirely inconsistent. The deck looked like a bad first draft by a bad summer intern.

  And of all the things that could hold Tara back right now, an arrogant analyst who’d never met a hairbrush wasn’t going to be it.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Neha muttered.

  “The fonts aren’t even the same, Neha. We just spent twenty-five hundred dollars printing decks we can’t use,” Tara said as calmly as she could.

  “Twenty-five hundred dollars is nothing for L.Cecil.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Tara drove down Mission Street from the St. Regis and turned onto the Embarcadero, without stopping at Hook’s building.

  “Where are we going?” Neha asked, sitting forward in the car seat.

  “I need a manicure,” Tara said, “and I’m assuming you do, too.”

  “But the syndicate meeting—”

  “Starts at three o’clock.”

  “But I’ve got to reformat—”

  “Juan’s taking care of it.”

  “Juan?” Neha’s face went white. “Does he know I messed up?”

  “I told him the file got corrupted and your changes were erased,” she said. Tara was furious, but there was no need to bad-mouth the girl to her only friend.

  She pulled the car into a parking spot, and Neha followed her reluctantly into the nail salon, where Tara asked in Vietnamese for two manicures.

  “You speak Chinese?” Neha asked, surprised.

  “Vietnamese,” she corrected. “They’re Vietnamese.”

  “Why do you speak Vietnamese?”

  “I spent two summers there teaching English when I was in college.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I wanted to help people.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Neha said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Neha,” Tara said, not caring how rude it sounded.

  They took their seats and Tara picked a dark gray polish, then remembered the meeting today and exchanged it for a dull, neutral pink. Neha looked at the polishes, flustered, and selected the same.

  “Why did you bring me here?” the analyst finally asked as the women put their hands in warm water. “You already fixed the problem.”

  “I wanted to ask why you never updated the presentation,” Tara said evenly, watching the woman in front of her cut her cuticles.

  “If you haven’t noticed, I’m the only analyst on this deal,” Neha said rudely. “I’ve got a lot going on, Tara, and frankly, I think making sure all the numbers are perfect is a lot more important than making sure the slides are perfectly formatted.”

  Tara turned to face the girl. Her skin was oily, her eyebrows were bushy, her glasses were outdated. She had the potential to be pretty; she just didn’t make any effort.

  “Unfortunately, that isn’t true,” Tara said. “No one will look at your numbers—no matter how perfect they are—if they aren’t presented in an appealing way.”

  “Then people should know better,” Neha said.

  Tara studied the girl, wondering whether she recognized the weight of what she’d just said. “What’s your goal, Neha?”

  “To be the best.” The girl didn’t hesitate.

  “The best what?”

  “The best whatever-I-am.”

  “And you want to be an associate, right?”

  “Yes.” Neha sat up. “And I’m sure I’m going to get the promotion, especially after this deal. Everyone knows I’m the best analyst in the group.”

  “They’re not promoting you,” Tara said, turning her gaze back to her nails. She’d seen the list last week: Neha wasn’t even up for consideration.

  “What?” Neha asked uneasily, then said with more assertion, “Did you tell them something?”

  “No,” Tara replied. “I just know what they’re looking for, and it isn’t you.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve been on more deals and—”

  “Gotten all the numbers right,” she said. “At the expense of presentation, which is what matters to this firm.”

  “But Larry said I’m the best analyst he’s ever seen.”

  “Exactly. Which is not the same thing as being good at anything else. Analysts sit in the back crunching numbers. Associates do some of that, but spend more time figuring out how to package it; by the time you get to VP your job is to work with people, and people care a lot more about what you’re like to be around than how precise your numbers are.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That you’re unpleasant to be around,” Tara said bluntly.

  “Are you saying I’m ugly?”

  “No,” Tara replied automatically, “I’m saying you’re unpleasant to be around.” But as she repeated the words, she got the feeling she was lying. Were the two synonymous? What was she trying to say? “I’m saying you need to pay more attention to presentation,” she finally said, “if you want to grow in the firm.”

  The two women sat in silence as the women across painted their nails. Tara’s brain felt heavy with the truth of what she’d just said. Was Wall Street really like that: more interested in appearances than fact? Were people really like that? Is that what Josh Hart had been saying?

  “Why did you decide to work on Wall Street, Neha?” Tara asked, finally breaking the silence.

  “To prove I could,” the girl said without looking up.

  “To who?”

  “Parker Hughes.”

  “Who’s Parker Hughes?”

  “He went to my high school. He got dropped off in a black car every morning, all the way from the Upper East Side, and acted like he was doing us a favor by going to Brooklyn Latin instead of some boarding school.” Neha’s voice was bitter.

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Astoria. I took the subway to school.”

  “And Parker’s parents worked on Wall Street?”

  “Both of them. And he acted like that made them special, like it made him better than me because my parents didn’t. But I was smarter than him, and better than him at everything, and,” she concluded, “I’m proving it.”

  “Where is Parker now?”

  “At Goldman.”

  “Do you ever see him?”

  “Not since we graduated from high school.”

  “Has it been worth it?”

  “It will be.”

  “When?”

  “When my kids are dropped off in black cars.”

  Tara thought about Lauren Wiley, puking in the bathroom at the Frick, her mother still at the office. She’d probably gotten dropped off at school in a black car.

  “Do you really think I won’t get promoted?” Neha’s voice softened.

  Tara didn’t want to tell her, not now. “I don’t know, Neha,” she lied.

  “So what should I do?” the girl asked.

  Tara looked at her again: Was it really just that she needed to fix her appearance? And could Tara really tell her that? “I don’t know,” she repeated, quietly, then looked at her watch. “We better go.”

  “Are they dry?” Neha looked at her n
ails skeptically.

  Tara lifted a brow. Was she serious? “It’s shellac,” she said. Didn’t everyone know about shellac?

  Tara paid and they drove back to Hook in silence.

  “Why did you decide to work on Wall Street?” Neha asked after several moments of silence.

  Tara was quiet for a long time, thinking about the question. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I guess it seemed like the best option at the time.”

  They got to the parking lot and Tara pulled the car into the space.

  “Hey, Tara,” Neha said as they got out of the car, “I’m sorry about the presentation.”

  “It’s okay,” Tara said, and she meant it. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure.”

  “Yeah, but,” she said, “well, you can still trust me, you know? To take on more work?”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Tara said. “Just promise to be honest with me about what your priorities are.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Neha said, adding, “And you could maybe put in a good word for me, too, with the promotion committee?”

  “Sure, Neha,” Tara said, wondering if she actually had the heart to do it.

  JUAN

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16; SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  “Is this seriously what you do all day and all night?” Juan asked as Neha took a seat next to him. “I actually think I want to kill myself.”

  Juan had been formatting a PowerPoint presentation for the past four hours, making sure the graphs were flush against gridlines and all the footnotes were in the same-sized font.

  “You okay?” Juan asked when Neha didn’t respond.

  “Yeah,” she said, shaking her head as if to get rid of whatever she was thinking about. “Sorry you have to do that.”

  “It’s cool,” he said. “It’s kind of fun to see what you do. It makes me appreciate what I do a lot more.” He smiled. “Hey! Nice nails!”

  She blushed and clenched her fists.

  “Don’t hide them,” he said. “They look really nice.” He meant it. He liked that Neha had thought about what she looked like: it made her seem like a real girl instead of a human workhorse.

  “Thanks,” Neha said uncomfortably, uncurling her fingers.

  “Okay,” he said, looking at the screen. “I think we’re all set.”

  “Did this put you totally behind?” Neha asked.

  “Nah,” he said jovially. “I was just working on my community center.”

  “What? What community center?”

  “It’s going to be called the Eduardo Ramirez Center, after my dad. It’ll be like a hangout place for kids in my old neighborhood, to give them something to do instead of join gangs or deal drugs,” he told her.

  Juan smiled at her. He hadn’t officially told anyone, but he’d spent the past week researching how to start a community center in East Palo Alto, which is what he was going to do with a third of his money as soon as the employee lockup expired six months after the IPO and he could sell his Hook shares. Focusing on what he could do with his wealth had made him realize how foolish he’d been to stress about Kelly Jacobson: he had no idea whether that database was even accurate, but he knew for sure that his money could help kids in EPA.

  “You’re building a community center?” Neha asked.

  “Yeah.” He loved the feeling of saying it. “It’ll be a lot like Hook, actually—with free food and a basketball court and video game rooms and foosball tables. And every day there will be a different class, open to everyone. I already talked to our chef and he’s going to come teach cooking classes, and Brad’s going to do surf lessons.”

  “But how do you pay for it?” She lifted an eyebrow.

  Juan shrugged. “Turns out I’ve got a lot of Hook shares.”

  “Are we ready?” Nick’s voice asked, irritated, from behind his shoulder.

  “Oh.” Juan turned, startled to see the CFO standing beside him.

  “Yep, just sent the presentations to the printer. They’re delivering them to the St. Regis at two o’clock.”

  “Great,” Nick said, jittery. “I don’t want you to talk to anyone in the meeting,” he instructed, “just sit in the back and I’ll give you a signal.” He paused, thinking. “I’ll go like this”—he pinched his earlobe—“if I need you to bring me any statistics.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Juan said. “I’ve got it all right here.” He indicated his laptop. Before the formatting fiasco, he had uploaded the Hook databases onto a laptop in order to calculate any user statistics if Nick got caught in a question he didn’t know.

  “Okay. Please be there forty-five minutes early,” Nick said, moving on.

  “Wow,” Juan said, turning back to Neha. “He’s even worse than normal.”

  “It is a pretty big presentation.” Neha shrugged.

  “Who is it with, again?” Juan asked. Nick hadn’t bothered to explain any of it.

  “It’s with the sales syndicate,” Neha said. “They’re the ones who sell to institutional investors at whatever price we set at the pricing call.”

  “Who are institutional investors?”

  “Big funds and certain individuals with enough money to buy a lot of shares.”

  “I thought anyone could buy stock.”

  “They can, but normal people buy from the institutional guys the day after the institutional guys buy from Hook. That’s when the stock is listed on the NASDAQ exchange.”

  “Why would the institutional guys sell, right after they’ve bought them?”

  “Because they expect the price to go up, in which case they make a profit,” she said. “Of course if too many of them do that, there will be a huge supply when it gets listed and people will think that means it’s not worth very much and then the price will drop, which is why we’re spending all this time trying to get a ‘good book’ of institutional investors who won’t flip it all immediately.”

  “So what you’re saying is big funds and really rich people get the stock at a cheaper price than normal people?” he asked, stuck on the point.

  “Yeah,” Neha said. “We’re trying to sell 1.8 billion dollars’ worth of shares—it would be totally inefficient to bother with anyone who isn’t in for at least a couple million.”

  Juan squinted at her. That didn’t seem fair, but she didn’t seem to mind, so he figured it was a dumb question. Instead he asked, “But Hook gets whatever the institutional guys buy—from the pricing call, right? So what does it matter if the price drops?”

  “You don’t get that price,” Neha said, “the company does, but unless you get an exception to sell before the lockup, you personally don’t care about the price until at least six months from now. All the same, though, it looks really bad for the company if the price drops.”

  “What do you think Hook’s price will be in six months?”

  Neha shrugged. “You know better than me.”

  “Why?”

  “You know what’s going on in the company. If it keeps doing well, the price should go up. If something happens and you don’t ever become profitable, then I guess you’re Zynga.”

  “What happened to Zynga?”

  “They went from like fifteen dollars a share to two,” she said. “But that’s not as bad as companies during the bubble that went completely bust. All these guys who thought they had a hundred million dollars and then had nothing.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Juan said. “But I think it’s different now, don’t you?” Juan hadn’t forgotten the dot-com bubble, he’d just gained some perspective. The guys who had lost millions and stopped paying his mom twelve years ago were betting on companies who didn’t have real users. Hook had five hundred million of them—it wasn’t the same.

  “L.Cecil analysts don’t think we’re in a bubble,” Neha said. “For Hook to collapse, something really bad would hav
e to come out—like something criminal.”

  “You two need a ride?” Tara interrupted them.

  “Sure,” Neha answered for them, adding in a friendly tone, “did you get everything you need?”

  “Yes,” Tara said, smiling at the girl. “Thank you.”

  Juan looked at them suspiciously: didn’t Neha hate Tara?

  —

  THE THREESOME got to the hotel and Juan sat in the back of the room and pushed the anxiety out of his mind—no one was going to find out what he knew about Kelly being on the app, and it wasn’t criminal anyway.

  When the meeting started, there were thirty-five people in the room, all men except for Tara and Neha and the girl checking people in. They were all wearing suits, had slick haircuts and sat in neatly arranged chairs in the stuffy banquet hall. The scene couldn’t have been less like Hook.

  He tried to pay attention, but Nick spoke in jargon that didn’t seem to mean anything, so instead he researched rental spaces in East Palo Alto on his laptop. Maybe he would just buy a building. And a new house for his mom.

  The Q&A finished without Nick ever pulling his earlobe, and Juan followed the crowd out into the bar area, which L.Cecil had rented for an after-meeting reception.

  “Juan,” a voice called.

  Juan turned and saw the venture capitalist Phil Dalton lumbering down the hall. “Juan, can I speak with you, please?” he said, catching up to him.

  “Sure,” he told the man, following him to an empty conference room.

  Phil shut the door, his face serious. “Is there a non-anonymous database?”

  “What?” Juan asked carefully.

  “Is there a database where individuals’ histories on the app can be identified?” Phil’s voice was hushed.

  “Well, we collect everything separ—”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yes,” Juan said quietly. He could feel his heart start to pound. Why did Phil look so upset? Had he found out about Kelly?

  “Show it to me.”

  Juan hesitated. Dalton Henley owned the majority of the company: he couldn’t say no.

  “Is everything okay?” Juan tried to keep his voice calm as he opened his laptop and pulled up the combined database he’d discovered.