Page 64 of The Hard Launch

“Tell me what the downside is if you do this,” he asks.

“It’s not about pros and cons,” I tell him. “Especially if Lettercat’s going to be gone in a year, there’s literally no harm in trying. The data all says I should do it.”

“But?”

“I believe in facts. I think intuition is a myth, and my gut has never told me anything. But for some reason I just don’t want to do it.”

Glenn puts his glasses back on. “I see two reasons why that might be. You could be burned out, which is possible given the way you work. Still, I doubt that’s the case. You said your gut’s never told you anything. Have you considered that it’s trying to, but you’re not listening?”

The muffled sounds of a baby crying come from upstairs, and Glenn tells me he’ll go change Ryley and bring her down to meet me. She’s adorable and smells delicious, but after a half-hour of holding her while talking to Jen, whose boys are now crawling all over her, I find myself scooting back some personal milestones on my long-term life plan.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

JUDE

I’m aware that from the outside, it appears I’ve rolled over, that I’m Edmund’s little puppy. That I’m happy with the shit sandwich he’s feeding me.

Unfortunately, as the founder and CEO of a startup, the acts of resistance available to me don’t have much in the way of cinematic flair. I’m not assembling a team of fighters to wage a scrappy war, so much as sitting around with Trevor, staring at the cap table and reading the investor agreement over and over. I upload the documents and ask my AI assistant what my options are. The consensus is, I’m fucked.

Unless I can get a significant number of shareholders on my side to vote against the acquisition, it’s simply going to happen. Given that the board members won’t even sit down in a chair without a specific command from Edmund, prospects are beyond grim.

I try anyway.

I make calls to all the investors to check in, hoping to hear the slightest opening or crack from any of them. I remind them about the numbers we were projecting on the new platform, and every single one of them agrees that they sure are great, before asserting that those numbers are the reason for Corday Ford’s offer being as high as it is. It’s almost like someone else called them before I did.

Because Trevor isn’t an officer of the company and isn’t bound to the terms of the no-shop clause in the Corday Ford’s Letter of Intent, he quietly works his network to try to uncover additional investors, someone willing to step in and purchase Lettercat for more than what Corday Ford is offering. We research and we brainstorm and we hope for a miracle, but as the days go on it’s feeling more and more like a done deal. Literally.

The rest of my time is spent doing what feels like sitting in a conference room watching a team planning my own elaborate, diagrammed, estimated and risk-assessed funeral. Project Z grows into sharper focus each day. In fact, Trevor is currently presenting the near-final plan to the team sitting in Gutenberg as well as our friends online in New York. Edmund and Wally are logged in today as well to check in on our progress.

Trevor makes his way through the integration points on a high level, then deep-dives on what Lettercat will look like for each arm of the Corday Ford content creation machine. All the people in New York are in the corner of his shared screen, nodding and jotting down notes as he speaks. Here at Lettercat HQ, Ingrid is playing Stardew Valley on her phone while Dave is working on editing what appears to be his GitHub README. Lacey’s in the back, dead-eyed as usual. She doesn’t seem to care enough to be exasperated anymore.

Trevor comes to the slide that outlines how existing Lettercat customers will be handled. We’ll need to migrate their login credentials to use Corday Ford’s system, but other than that they’ll continue to be billed as they are for the time being. Net new customers will also bill through the existing mechanism just to keep things tidy.

“Hang on, Trevor,” Mike interrupts when the billing part comes up. “We have an update on this. You can just take this out of the deck, and go ahead and pull it from the project plan.”

“The billing?” Trevor asks. “For existing or net new?”

“No,” Mike says. “Not just the billing. All of it.”

My attention, which for the last five minutes has been on the quest Ingrid has embarked upon, snaps back to the meeting at hand. There’s a tone the Corday Ford people use when they’re breaking bad news to you but are trying to make it sound like a small thing. Like when they told me, oh hey, we decided it makes more sense for any new hires you make to be based in New York once the deal goes through.

Mike’s using that tone now.

“It would be great if you could clarify that,” Trevor says.

“Yeah, gang. A pretty big development I guess, but the FP&A guys came back and their projections show the direct-to-customer business is going to run at a loss. We’ll either try to sell that off or shut it down. TBD on the details, but you can just cut the slide for now.”

All of the eyes in the room are on me, and I can feel them on me from New York and wherever Edmund’s projected head is. I might have made a noise.

Because Lettercat is a direct-to-customer business. Corday Ford’s going to cut all of our customers— and our customer-facing teams —loose.

“You good, Jude?” Edmund is asking me.

“Absolutely,” I say.

I refuse to look at anyone. I get up and leave the meeting five minutes later.

When I toured this office space, when our team finally outgrew the co-working space and was solid and funded enough to have a home of its own, it was pretty much move-in ready. It had exposed beams and ducts for that industrial startup feel. It had conference rooms with tables and chairs and pods of cubes.