The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “Did she? When did she tell you that?”

  “Recently.”

  “Just before you killed Mark?”

  Richie gives him a hard look that Gattner returns with his own don’t-fuck-with-me stare. They lock eyes for a moment, then Gattner says, “We might as well get specific here while you’re insulting me. I know where you were that day. I know you were with her. How did she convince you to do it? Tell you she still loved you?” He starts laughing. “Is that what she did, you dumbfuck?”

  Richie sees himself stand up and grab Gattner by the collar and violently yank him over the desk and slam him to the floor. But before he can actually do it, Bender says:

  “How much of the company do you have, Don?”

  Gattner looks over at him, a little surprised by Bender’s flat, unemotional tone.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. What’s your piece of the pie?”

  “Around five percent or so.”

  “So, what are we talking about, a thirty, thirty-five million dollar valuation. I think that’s what I heard.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you haven’t made a dime.”

  “Course not. But we’ve got plenty of strategic partnerships lined up. We’ve been signing up vendors for the last three months. We’ve got over a thousand on board so far. We’ll have over twice that at launch.”

  He then gives them a brief history of their financing. Gattner says McGregor put up the better part of a million in seed money and had then gone out and raised close to twelve million. They hadn’t expected to raise that much. They were looking for more like half that. But the mobile market was so hot and this Australian investor, Grant Cahill, came along and didn’t blink twice at the valuation they insisted on.

  “We talked to a few of the big VCs and the truth is we could have gotten them to invest based on Mark’s track record. But they were going to drive a much harder bargain and Mark didn’t want them up his ass all the time. You know how it is.”

  Richie knows that one of the big benefits to having a Sequoia, KPCB, or Andreessen Horowitz on board is that it’s easier to hire engineers and programmers. They figure that, with one of the heavies behind you, the odds are greater for an exit event, which is ultimately what all these guys are after. But the heavies also keep very careful watch over their investments. They dole out payments in smaller chunks and do rigorous due diligence every step of the way.

  “Truthfully, Mark’s strategy was to get a foreign investor all along. He dabbled with the Russians and Chinese, but was happy as hell this Aussie Cahill came along. The guy was like eight thousand miles away and he spoke fluent English. He’d made a fortune in minerals but wanted to broaden himself into high tech. Mark knew he’d be much easier to deal with.”

  Gattner says everything was going well until they discovered that another start-up was basically on their way to doing the exact same thing they were doing—except their way seemed better and they seemed about six months ahead.

  “Mark kind of panicked,” Gattner says. “These guys—it was only two of them—were in stealth mode and somehow Cahill got wind of it. Mark tried to convince him that it would be okay, but then we just ended up buying the company. It was the easiest thing to do.”

  “How much did you pay?”

  “We didn’t disclose that,” Gattner says.

  “Ballpark?”

  “Let’s just say it ate up a nice chunk of the initial investment.”

  “So how much do you have left?”

  “Enough. Mr. Cahill put up some additional money recently and he has no intention of letting this thing go down the drain, especially with us so close to launch. He called to tell me that yesterday in fact. If you want to speak with him, I’ll give you his number. He’s got deep pockets.”

  Bender isn’t impressed. He says they all say they have deep pockets until they have to reach inside them.

  “Shit, they could have pockets to their goddamn ankles, but what good is that when they suddenly develop stubby thalidomide arms.”

  “I sent you a code for our private beta,” Gattner says. “We’ve got twenty-five thousand people using the service. I don’t suppose you checked it out.”

  “It was on my plate and then it slipped off.”

  “Well, maybe you should check it out before you dismiss it.”

  “Frankly, I didn’t see the there there. It seemed derivative, another Groupon/Living Social clone.”

  “It’s far more sophisticated than that. These are real-time deals in real space. This is the grail.”

  “You say grail, I say fail.”

  “Well, if that’s your fucking attitude, I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”

  “Come on, don’t take it personally. What the fuck do I know? I’m only batting nine twenty and was the Tech Blogger of the Year five of the last seven years. But who’s counting?”

  Gattner shakes his head. “You know what your problem is? You’re so morally and emotionally bankrupt that your sole goal in life is to bring everybody down to your level.”

  “I can’t totally disagree with you, so I won’t. But here’s my question. The company McGregor picked up, who were the guys? Who were the coders? I assume that’s why he paid what he did for the company.”

  “For competitive reasons, I can’t disclose that.”

  “I’m going to find out.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Are they still at the company?”

  “I’m not going to disclose that. I’m honestly not sure what I should and shouldn’t be saying, so I really have to talk to someone before I overstep myself.”

  “Tell me this then: how hands-on was McGregor? You can answer that, right? He doesn’t do any coding himself anymore, does he?”

  “Nah. Not that it’s beneath him or anything. I mean, I’d see him talking to some of the guys about certain bugs—we had a couple of marathon bug-bash sessions recently. But at this point, we were mainly tweaking the interface and talking about features we wanted to add in the next version. He’d draw up wireframes and give it to the programmers and tell them what he wanted. The engine was done. We were just refining it. We were planning a one point five version for next year that was more robust.”

  Bender: “Who’s is in charge now?”

  Gattner flashes a smile. “For the moment, me. But it depends on what the will says, right? Mark had the controlling interest.”

  “Did he leave it to his wife?”

  “I’m not in a position to comment on that. I think we should know soon enough, though.” He pauses for a moment and when Bender doesn’t say anything right away, he says: “Is that it? Are we done here? Because I think I’ve been pretty damn accommodating if you ask me. We’ve got nothing to hide. As hard as it will be, the company can survive this.”

  Bender nods, then gets up and extends a hand, suddenly and remarkably kicking into affable Tom mode. “I owe you one,” he says, and promises to cover the app when it officially launches, please give him an early heads-up.

  Gattner sees them back to the reception area and begins to say his farewells when Bender mumbles something about his protein smoothie running through him and that he needs to take a leak. Is there a bathroom he can use?

  Gattner points him back toward the offices. “All the way down to the left,” he says. “There’s a little hallway. First door.”

  Richie realizes that this is the you’ll-know-when moment Bender was referring to back in the car.

  “I’ve seen it,” he says to Gattner.

  “Seen what?”

  “The app. Beth showed it to me.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “I actually thought it looked pretty good.”

  He then begins to critique it, making sure to keep Gattner looking in the direction of the exit rather than behind him toward the pen. The more kind words he has, the more Gattner is drawn in. He talks about the interface, points out what he likes about it and mentions
a couple of things he thinks could be improved. As he gives his two cents, he catches a glimpse of Bender walking back toward them. He then disappears, presumably checking into Gattner’s office, which is out of Richie’s line of view.

  Come on, asshole, he thinks, listening to Gattner rationalize one of the design choices they’ve made. Hurry up. He wonders how long he can hold his attention. Every time Gattner turns to look in the direction of his office, he quickly reels him back with a compliment.

  As Gattner starts to swivel around again (he’s obviously started to wonder where Bender is), Richie reaches into the barrel one more time, scraping bottom.

  “To me, it’s just a scalability issue,” he says. “Like all this stuff, it’s live or die on that. You need to ramp up the users at warp speed or it just isn’t going to work. I know you have a big social element, but I’m just not sure how viral this thing can be without better incentives. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to building organically through search engines, so I think you’re going to have to market the hell out of it in pretty traditional ways, and you know, then it comes down to money and good ideas.”

  Gattner seems to have forgotten whom he’s talking to. It’s not Richie, accused killer. It’s like the old days, the two of them talking shop—or shit—as the case often was.

  “You know, here’s the fucked-up thing,” he says. “I told Mark to bring you back. You know he was so fucking paranoid about you and what you were going to do to him, I said Mark, you know the old saying, ‘Keep your enemies close.’ Well, I said bring Richie back. We could use him. No one else is going to give him a shot with a decent title and all that. Ask him. I bet he goes for it. And he kind of looked at me like I was crazy at first but then I could see it hit home. He said, ‘You know, that’s not bad idea. I’m going to think about it.’ And I said call Richie, feel him out, because frankly I didn’t know if you’d be interested. I’d heard the Sinatra stuff was going pretty well. But at least he could get a sense of where things stood. I just said, fuck, confront this shit directly. I know he tried to contact you when you first got out and to offer to help you out with some cash and you blew him off. But who knows, maybe things had changed.”

  Richie looks down, absorbing Gattner’s little speech, no longer concerned about Bender.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have done it, Don. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Mark.”

  Just then, over Gattner’s shoulder, behind the receptionist, he sees Bender reappear, smilling as he flashes a quick V for victory signal with his fingers.

  “Maybe he would have made you an offer you couldn’t refuse,” Gattner says.

  “He wouldn’t have.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would’ve killed him to do it.”

  27/ ASS OR ARM

  CAROLYN IS PEERING INTO HER REFRIGERATOR, COMTEMPLATING cracking open a bottle of white wine, when she hears the familiar ding of a text message from her phone in the other room. Her text communications have been in the unpleasant camp, so the sound makes her apprehensive. But this time when she goes to look at her phone, she’s happy to discover the message is from Cogan, who’s simply written: “Shot up yet?”

  “Nope,” she responds. She’s just just come back from having dinner with Beth Hill and is still wearing her work clothes, a blue pants suit and white blouse. “Long day,” she adds. “Against doctor’s orders staring longingly at unopened sauvignon blanc.”

  She watches the phone’s screen, waiting. It has been a long day. In the morning, she and Beth met with McGregor’s estate attorney about the will and spent the better part of the day going over finances, which she’d used as an excuse to keep stiff-arming Madden. Meanwhile, Richie Forman had posted bail and Lowenstein was busy filing discovery motions. She’d been trying to keep abreast of all of that and more.

  Ding.

  “Want some help? With shot, not bottle. But can help there 2.”

  Shit yes, she thinks. Then, mustering every reserve of willpower, she writes:

  “I’m ok. Thx for offering.”

  His reply takes a little longer this time, but not much.

  “Saw you on TV today. Looked and sounded good.”

  She’s gotten similar messages from a dozen or so other people. She’s about to type another “Thx” when he tacks on another sentence:

  “Have some info for you.”

  “About what?”

  “Ok if I stop by?”

  “When?”

  The next text that comes through is actually a picture. It’s thumbnail sized and while she can see that it’s a picture of him, she taps on it to enlarge. The background looks familiar despite the poor lighting.

  She goes to the door and opens it, and there he is, standing there with his phone in his hand.

  “Oh, hello,” he says.

  Expressionless, she stares at him a moment, then looks down at her phone and types: “Not amused.”

  After the message arrives, he types back, “Don’t be a hardass. I know you’re happy I’m here. I saw you smiling through the window when you were reading my texts.”

  “Really not amused now,” she types. “Spying on me?”

  “Yes,” he writes back. “But not in a creepy way.”

  She struggles to suppress a smile. To stifle it, she looks up and says:

  “What’s the info?”

  “Let me shoot you up and I’ll talk to you about it.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Cogan,” she says, then turns and walks back inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Ass or arm?” he asks, following her into the living room.

  “What?”

  “Where do you want it?”

  She ignores the question, giving his appearance a more thorough inspection. On second glance, his clothes seem neater than usual. His hair is combed, too, which leads her to believe he’s on his way out rather than returning home.

  “You work today?” she asks.

  “Was off. But I went in. For you.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “You were curious about McGregor’s health so I poked around a bit. For the record, let’s just say I overheard a couple of nurses gossiping in the courtyard over coffee.”

  “Cheeky. What’d you hear?”

  “Like you said, the guy had some tightness in his chest, so he went to the emergency room. Told the attending that he had some pain in his arm, some light-headedness and shortness of breath. You know, classic heart-attack symptoms. So they do an EKG and some blood work and he seems okay. It’s most likely a GI issue because GI issues end up presenting a lot like cardio issues, which can cut both ways. You get people thinking they have heartburn when, in fact, it’s a much more serious issue. Anyway, you’ve got to run the blood test a few times over a twenty-four-hour period to get an accurate reading. There’s this enzyme called CKMB—it’s a form of creatine kinase—whose levels rise if you have any damage to your heart muscles. Usually if the levels aren’t elevated on the first test you haven’t had a heart attack, but that isn’t always the case. To be safe, the attending decided to keep him overnight for observation and to run the follow-up CKMB the next day, along with a stress test.”

  Usually, she likes hearing all the medical terms, which is why he went into the detail he did. But tonight she’s tired and impatient.

  “Okay,” she says. “That’s it?”

  She’s kind of hoping it is because that would mean he’d used this pathetic little report as an excuse to get to see her.

  “Come on,” he says. “You know I’m better than that.”

  “What’d you get?”

  “How ’bout we do the shot first?”

  “Don’t worry about the shot. I can do it. When you’re genetically involved, you can do the shot.”

  He looks at her, his eyes boring into her, their sudden intensity startling her.

  “Just let me do the goddamn shot for you, Carolyn,” he says testily and suddenly it dawns on her that somethin
g’s a little different. Something’s changed.

  “Okay, okay. Geez.”

  “Ass or arm?” he asks, his voice calm again.

  “I’ve been doing it in the stomach,” she says, leading him to the bathroom, her heart beating harder. “I’m supposed to pinch the skin, get a little hunk to jab into. But I’m such a baby.”

  The capped, preloaded syringes are in a box on a shelf in a small linen closet next to a syringe disposal container that has a biohazard warning symbol on its label. She fishes a syringe out of the box and hands it to him along with a couple of alcohol swabs.

  “Drop your pants, Counselor,” he says nonchalantly, tearing open one of the alcohol swabs.

  She knows full well she can just expose the top of her rump and that’ll be enough. But with a little glint in her eye, she decides to take him literally. She unbuttons her pants, pulls the zipper down, then tucks her thumbs under the elastic band of her panties and slowly slides both layers to her knees, leaving her blouse dangling there, providing a bit of coverage. Turning away and bending forward slightly, she rests her left hand on the counter and then lifts the back of her blouse from the bottom with her right hand.

  “Don’t miss,” she says, looking back over her shoulder.

  She watches his eyes drift downward and his Adam’s apple rise, then fall, as he goes to work with the alcohol swab on a spot just below her hip on the right side. He pulls the syringe’s cap off with his teeth, and jabs her with the needle, causing her to wince. It’s over in a second. He sets the syringe aside, applies some pressure to the pricked area with the second swab, then guides her blouse back down her ass, conveniently managing to brush the back of his hand against her skin.

  She turns to face him and they stand there for a moment staring at each other. But before he gets too many ideas she reaches down and slowly and deliberately wiggles her pants and underwear up her legs. When everything’s back in place, she goes to the closet and gets the container for the used syringes and hands it to him.

  “So what’d you hear? Or were you just bullshitting me so you could stick me?”