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When perfect peace in thy fair eyes I found;
But far within, where all is holy ground,
My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies.
A poem from Michelangelo Di Lodovico. I read it and could think of nothing else but you.
-Furio
I felt myself grinning so hard that my cheeks hurt. I missed Furio every bit as much as I had missed Jude and Owen when I was in Italy, a fact which didn’t make my situation any simpler but was impossible to deny.
“What the actualfuck,” Michelle suddenly shouted from the kitchen.
I ran back in there. “What is it, Shelly?”
“Furio Rossi is abillionaire,” she said, staring at her phone.
I grimaced. “Did I forget to mention that?”
“And he looks likethis!”She turned her phone around, showing one of the few public photographs of the man, perfectly dressed in a suit and smiling his dashing smile.
“He’s like an Italian James Bond!” Michelle said. “You should have led with that!”
“I didn’t think it was important,” I said.
“I’m going to shove one of these vases up your ass,” she said, grabbing one and walking toward me. “Then I’m going to shoveanotherone up there!”
I laughed while running away from my sister, who kept insisting thatthreebillionaires is way too many for any one girl.
The next few weeks were a blur of love and activity and work. Melinda was a hiring maniac, because we seemed to have at least one new employee in the office every day. People whose names I couldn’t remember said good morning to me when I got my morning energy drink out of the fridge in the kitchen. There was never any time alone; I was always in a meeting, or talking to someone about their job, or reviewing someone’s code and giving them notes.
When I started working at ACS, I knew the company would grow quickly, but I never expected it to be this rapid. It was overwhelming, but it was exciting, too. The company was moving forward like a freight train, and one that was continuously accelerating. I wondered if I would be able to keep up with it, but I was excited to try.
Jude and I sat down and created a whole new expansion roadmap, because the old one was nearly complete. There were hundreds of new programs and functions to plan. We spent a full week with our heads together on it, and it felt like the work was being completed by the teams underneath us almost as quickly as we could come up with tasks.
When I went to bed at night—whether with Owen, or with Jude—I thought about how exciting it was to be part of all of this.
Soon there were discussions about what would happen when we went public. It was now awhen, not anif. Articles were written about us in MSNBC and Forbes.Silicon Valley’s Crypto Unicorn. Apparently a unicorn was a company worth over a billion dollars. When I mentioned this with skepticism to Owen one day, he laughed and said, “Are you kidding? Right now, Amber, we’re probably worth closer tothreebillion.”
One day, I sat down and did the math on my stock options. I hadn’t paid much attention to them since they weren’t tied to any specific value yet, but now I started running some calculations. It was tough to guess exactly how much they might be worth, but even the most conservative estimates meant they were worth tens of millions of dollars. It was like holding onto a bunch of winning lottery tickets.
I can retire in my twenties. Oh my God.
As the idea marinated in my head, I began to realize that it wasn’t what I wanted. Not the money—Idefinitelywanted that. But retirement wasn’t for me. At least, not yet. When my father died, I flailed around. I didn’t know what I wanted. I pined over my lost ArgoCoin fortune and played videogames. I did a little bit of freelance coding, but nothing piqued my interest. It was tough to muster motivation after watching ArgoCoin, my former baby, thrive and flourish without me.
But working here at ACS was scratching that itch. I wasn’t one of the principal founders, but I had been here longer than anyone except Melinda. Itfeltlike this place was mine, or at least a part of it. I woke up every morning excited to come in and continue pushing it as far as it would go.
Moreover, I was respected here. I was building a career. On the company organization chart, I now had eight team leads who reported directly to me. Each of them had several of their own direct reports as well. I knew that it was my pride talking, but I liked seeing my name above all of them on the chart. It was every bit as satisfying as the work I was doing, and the salary I was earning, and the stock options which would set me up for the rest of my life.
Being a manager hadn’t come naturally to me at first, but I had settled into the role over time. I wasn’t the born leader that Owen was. I would never be able to give an emotional speech that rallied the troops to pull an all-nighter during a critical outage. But the day-to-day work, reviewing code and guiding other coders, was something I was good at.
On top of that, I loved working for Owen and Jude. Yeah, sure, I was sleeping with them. I know. But my satisfaction with my job was more than that. They would have been incredible bosses even without all thefringe benefits. Jude was a brilliant coder, obviously, and I found myself learning something new from him every single week. Owen, meanwhile, had a keen long-term vision for the company. He made strategic adjustments to our roadmap that didn’t always make sense to me at the time, but usually ended up being the right decision down the road. He saw things ahead of time that neither Jude or I could have imagined.
Whenever Advanced Crypto Solutions went public, I wouldn’t cash out and retire. I would keep working here. Maybe not forever, but for as long as I felt fulfilled.
Because that’s what I felt, deep in my chest for the first time since ArgoCoin:fulfilled. And I was beginning to picture myself feeling that way at ACS for years to come.
In general, everything was perfect. My love life was better than I ever could have hoped, and both founders of the company shared me without any fights or complications. I was working at my dream job, one which left me smiling at the end of each day—even when it was a particularly tough day. And my finances were growing, and would soon be exploding in size when the company went public.
