Kill Process (37 page)

My addled brain tries to make sense of it.

“What about approaching other investors?” I croak. “Or getting a bank loan?”

“No, on both accounts. You’d need the existing investors to sign, and they’re not going to do it, not if they want to force you into accepting their terms. You could secure a personal loan, not a business loan, and put your own money in.”

The idea is absurd. A startup is a money-consuming monster. Our burn rate is four hundred thousand a month. My personal equity wouldn’t cover a single payroll.

“Thanks, David. I’ll figure something out.”

“Sorry I don’t have better news,” David says. “Get some rest.”

Of course I’m going to ignore his advice. I can sleep when I’m dead. For now I need to figure out some way to save this company.

As soon as Amber and Igloo are in the office, I grab them along with Harry, our finance guy, and convene a meeting in the one conference room without windows. I close the door and gesture for them to take seats.

“Harry, how much cash do we have?”

“Cash or liquid assets?”

“Anything. How much money we can access to pay the bills with, right this second.”

“About ten k cash, and twenty-five in our line of credit,” Harry says. “The transfer from our investors should show up the day the funding closes. When is that going to happen?”

“None of the funds from our investors are coming because I won’t sign because I refuse to accept the Tomo offer.”

“I told you CompEx was a bad idea,” Igloo says.

Amber punches the table. “Corporate assholes.”

“Shit,” Harry says. He opens his laptop, stares furiously at the screen. “We’re not going to clear payroll.”

“I know. We need to come up with a plan. The four of us. We need some way to cover the next couple of weeks, maybe months, to keep us operating. A source of money that doesn’t involve banks or investors.”

The room is dead silent. Igloo and Amber exchange glances. Harry stares at me, his mouth hanging open. Nobody looks confident.

I sink into a chair along with the rest of them. “We have to figure out something. Harry, what happens if we don’t pay our rent?”

“We’re evicted.” The expression on Harry’s face is one of utter dread. I suspect no part of what he signed up for including running finances for a company without money.

“Yeah, but that can’t happen immediately, can it? It’s not like we’re going to show up tomorrow and the doors will be locked.”

“Eventually they’ll kick us out.”

“Okay, your task after the meeting is to stop our next payment from happening. Find out how long before they lock the doors. What about payroll?”

“We can go without pay,” Igloo says. “If we tell people, they’ll understand.”

I feel a pit in my stomach at the thought. These are my people. Before we took on Owen as an angel, Igloo was living on ramen. I’ve failed my people if I can’t pay them. I take a couple of deep breaths to keep myself stable.

I turn to Amber. “You know everybody’s past employment the best. You think everyone can manage if we don’t pay them?”

Amber shakes her head. “A few are coming from a successful exit. Most are limping along from one early-stage startup to the next and it’ll be hard on them if we don’t pay. We’ll lose their attention pretty quickly once they’re worrying about rent; and worse, if we miss payroll once, they’ll assume it’ll happen again and spend their time job hunting.”

Fudge.

“How much do we need to make the next paycheck?” I ask Harry.

“Excluding us,” Igloo adds.

Harry looks at me, and I nod.

“Excluding you three,” Harry says, “we need about a hundred thousand.”

Double fudge.

I glance at Amber. “I hate to do this to you, but can you talk to each person, one on one, and see if they’re able to forego a paycheck? If they need to be paid, what’s the minimum they can survive with?”

Amber rubs her face and lets out a sigh. “You really want to delegate that? You’re the CEO. You’re the one people expect to hold that conversation with.”

“I have other
things—”

“We all have a thousand other things,” Amber says. “That’s not the point. It’s your job to conduct those hard conversations. If you’re not woman enough to do it, then sure, I will. But it says a whole lot about how much you care about the employees.”

My blood boils at her accusation. “Fuck you! I care. I have critical stuff I
have
to do.”

“What stuff?” Amber says. “You keep disappearing for entire days for no reason. What is this stuff you’re working on?”

“Can you two
please
not fight?” Igloo says in a tiny voice.

“I’m sorry.” I settle back in my chair.

“It’s like listening to my parents,” Igloo says. “How are we going to handle this if you’re fighting? Let’s work together.”

I stare at Amber for a few moments, and nod in apology. “I will talk to everyone about payroll.”

“I can take half.” Amber says, and now she looks a little like she regrets her outburst.

“That would be a huge help. Thank you.”

Nobody says anything for a minute as we let the emotions settle down for a bit. Harry looks shell-shocked.

“Too much estrogen for you, Harry?” I say, hoping the atmosphere can handle a little joke.

He mumbles something, then stares off into the distance. “I’ve never worked with people who were so open about how they feel.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say.

Harry points at his computer screen. “We’re forgetting something important. Our cloud bill. It’s about fifteen thousand, and gets charged to our credit card.”

“We can make the minimum payment, right?” I say.

Harry shakes his head. “That’s what we’ve done the last three months. We’ll go over the limit if we don’t pay the credit card bill before the cloud computing charge hits. I expected the investment money would be here by now.”

“Switch the account to my personal credit card.” I turn to Amber. “You need to keep the spend under my credit limit.”

I stand to stretch my legs. “If that’s it for the immediate expenses, then we’re covered for the next couple of weeks. However, we need a long-term plan to bring in money. If we can’t go to investors or banks that leaves one option. We launch.”

“That’s not for three and a half more months!” Amber says.

“No, we launch now. The beta users are happy, right?”

Igloo nods. “We have almost a thousand users. Engagement is high.”

Amber looks at me and Igloo, slaps her forehead dramatically. “Please tell me you’re kidding?”

“No,” I say. “If we launch, we bring in revenue.”

“Nobody is ready! Marketing and biz dev and tech all aligned on a plan to launch in January, a plan we just pulled up from March.”

“Then we accelerate it some more.”

“You’re asking for the impossible,” Amber says. “We can’t solve this problem by launching! Even if we could somehow, miraculously launch today, we’re not going to receive revenue for months, and not meaningful quantities for even longer, six months or a year.”

“I know. We don’t need to be totally profitable. We just need to change the game enough. Look, Owen says the investors all want to take the Tomo offer. But the moment we launch, everything changes. If there’s dissent among the investors, maybe launching will change the dynamic and win one to our side.”

“The number one killer of startups is insufficient funding,” Amber says. “Launching will accelerate our spend. Without money in the bank, we can’t run ads, can’t scale servers, can’t run a PR campaign.”

“The sooner we’re ready, the more options we have. If I miraculously drum up a few hundred thousand and we’re ready to launch, we do it and spend the money to get the word out. If we’re not ready, the money comes in, goes to pay the bills, and then we’re back to square one. Find a way to be technically ready for a full public launch in a month. I’ll convince marketing to develop a guerrilla marketing plan that doesn’t require any spend.”

Amber shakes her head in reluctant acceptance. “This is going to be a disaster.”

*     *     *

After our meeting, I go back to my office. I stare at my purse with loathing, then open it and apply more makeup. I’m putting on my jacket to go when Amber walks by and looks at me.

“I don’t mean to be such an ass about it,” Amber says, “but what is it that’s so important that you have to do?”

I stare at her for a moment. “Swallow my pride and go beg every person I know for money.”

“Oh.”

The silence is overwhelming and awkward.

“I better get to it, then,” I say, and edge past her.

As I walk outside my heart aches. Yes, I really am about to beg for money, and putting on makeup to do it is somehow doubly demeaning, an acknowledgement that at the end of the day, every woman has to decide how much to leverage her looks rather than only her brains. I’m so desperate right now that if I were a younger woman, and a whole one, I would consider sleeping with every post-IPO CEO in this town if it would keep Tapestry afloat. I’m filled with self-loathing at the thought.

That’s not why my heart aches. It’s because even though I’m really going to beg for money now, my answer was a deception, a distraction to keep Amber from asking more questions about where I’ve been in the past days when I’ve been at the storage facility.

I want to stop lying to the people I care about.

An old black Lincoln pulls up outside the building. I get in the passenger door.

“Hi, Danger.”

“I didn’t expect I’d be seeing you anymore. I gave you the last bitcoin payment months ago.” He pulls away from the curb. “Got something new in the works?”

“Sort of.” The car’s cracked red leather interior tugs at my memory. “Isn’t this the car from
The Matrix
?”

Danger smiles. “I never had much money until the Bitcoin run. Seemed like a worthwhile investment.”

“You have any of that money left?”

“Are you going to do it again? I thought you’d gone legit. I keep seeing your photo next to articles about the secret startup in Portland.”

“No, I can’t do it again. I was wondering if you’d like to become an investor in my company?”

Half an hour later, Danger drops me off at Thomas’s law office. I go in, talk to Thomas, wait a half hour, and then come out and go to another company in town. Finally, late that afternoon, I Uber back to our offices. I walk in and set my bag down with a thump on Harry’s desk.

He stares at it suspiciously.

“For the employees who need to be paid, this is what you’re going to pay them with.”

“Please tell me that’s not a bag full of cash.”

“It was all legally acquired. I didn’t rob any banks.”

“This is not the normal way money comes into a business.”

“Harry, please. Pay the employees. I borrowed from friends.”

He reluctantly pulls the bag toward him.

“Oh, and Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s not going to be any more, so find a way to make that last.”

Again, partial truths. Sure, the money from my boyfriend is a loan, one which he promised me doesn’t need to be repaid. For all the rest though, I promised them stock. Handshake deals, cash now for some of my personal stock in Tapestry later. I’m sure I’m breaking some securities law, and I’m trading away the stock way below valuation, but now we’ve got cash, enough for critical expenses for the next few weeks or maybe a month or two if we eke it out.

It’s not like I really needed the stock. I have no goal of getting rich out of this. Just keep this company alive, find a way to defeat Tomo, and in the process make the world a better, safer place. That’s not so much to ask.

*     *     *

It’s midafternoon, and I’ve talked to all but a handful of employees. What I really want to do now is finally look at the data I got from Lewis’s accounts at Tomo. I don’t need to download anything or connect to any sites. It’s all contained there on the encrypted hardware on the second laptop in my bag.

To appease Amber’s concerns about my continual disappearances, I settle on examining the data right here in my office. However, before I turn the laptop on, I’m going to make damn sure it’s isolated from the net. I flip it over on my desk and use a screwdriver to undo the back. After I take off the access panel, I remove the battery and hard drive, and remove the screws from the motherboard.

Halfway through my work, Keith comes in, our biz dev guy. He returned from a trip today, and I texted him to come straight into the office from the airport. Apparently he’s already heard through the rumor mill I want to accelerate the launch.

“It’s not possible to pull up the launch.” He pauses, watches me take the computer apart. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing this laptop,” I say. “We can’t afford to buy a new one.”

“The money situation is that bad?”

“Yeah. Did Amber talk to you about pay yet?” I lift the motherboard out, and find the connector that leads up through the hinge into the display.

“No . . .”

I stop for a second and look him in the eye. “You believe in what we’re doing, right? We’re not building another website here. We’re trying to make a difference in the world.”

“I know,” Keith says. “To stop Tomo.”

“Well, we’ve scared Tomo, so they’re doing what they usually do: buy anyone who might threaten them down the road. I said
no
, but our investors, who aren’t as principled, want to accept. Long story short, we have no funding. I really need help from employees that are financially able to do without their full pay. I’m not going to force anyone to go without pay, because I don’t believe that’s fair. If you’re able to manage without a paycheck, or with a partial one, that would be a huge help.”

In the end, he agrees to forgo his paycheck, and promises to figure out how to support a product launch in six weeks.

He leaves, and I unplug the tiny combined wi-fi and bluetooth module, ensuring the computer is totally isolated. It’s the only way I can trust no one will see the information on the laptop, my final download of all the data on Lewis.

Before I reassemble the computer, I check the innards against photos of this particular model for surplus parts like government keystroke loggers that happened to fall inside and plug themselves into the keyboard connector. Fortunately, everything appears pristine.