The Underwriting Read online

  Tara waited for the flight attendant to finish, then pulled out a printed copy of the deck Neha had sent around yesterday with a summary of Hook’s public financials, turning her attention to the company’s revenue streams. He watched her, surprised she didn’t want to chat more, then pulled out his copy of the Wall Street Journal: two could play at that game.

  TARA

  FRIDAY, MARCH 7; SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  “Holy shit.” Beau Buckley broke the silence as the car pulled up to a massive glass building on the Embarcadero.

  “They used to be in Palo Alto, but San Francisco gave them a tax break to entice the company to move here,” Neha explained. “And it helps them, too, because all the good engineers want to live in San Francisco, not the South Bay. Plus Hook has the best food of any of the tech companies, so they pretty much get whoever they want.”

  Tara stared at the girl. She was like a walking encyclopedia, one of the hard-charging, chip-on-her-shoulder analysts whom the firm would work to the bone building models but never give any actual power because they were socially inept.

  Of course Todd would get an analyst like that, she thought to herself. It was true that she’d allowed herself to think the deal might be the start of a serendipitous romance. She’d let her mind wander to the narrative wherein Todd wasn’t actually a douchebag—he was a really good guy who just hadn’t found the right girl, just like she hadn’t found the right guy—and the deal would be the start of what they hadn’t finished in college and . . .

  She’d been wrong. He was a douchebag. She’d stopped by his desk yesterday to ask a question about the schedule, and he’d been across the room flirting with a receptionist. During a fifteen-minute meeting to hammer out the target syndicate list, he’d checked his text messages four times, and she’d caught him looking at his own stats on his Hook profile. Then this morning he’d been flirting with a flight attendant . . . at eight forty-five in the morning. Now Neha? He wasn’t just not what she’d hoped, he was worse than she’d feared.

  But that was better, Tara told herself as she got out of the car. Her big break was just starting to happen—it was the worst possible time to finally fall in love. In fact, if Todd had been the one, it would have been the cruelest kind of trick by fate, to force her to choose between love and career opportunities when she’d been waiting for either/or for so long. With Todd out of the way and the romance option quashed, though, she could focus on the deal and see what opportunities—professional and personal—a 1.8-billion-dollar deal under her belt would net her.

  She’d woken up this morning at four a.m. with that resolve. The gym wasn’t open yet, so she’d done her six-mile run on the West Side Highway—it was dark and cold, but invigorating, and gave her time to prepare her mind for today. She’d followed it up with a green juice, a coffee and an extra tablet of Celexa. She’d called her doctor and he’d agreed she should double the dose as a precautionary measure, and given her a Xanax prescription for emergencies. For the next three months she needed to stay focused—she couldn’t risk her anxiety causing an emotional spell like had happened when she was fourteen. Then, she’d been paralyzed with sadness for weeks, unable to rationalize herself out of the funk. She couldn’t afford that now—not now that things were happening.

  The foursome walked into Hook’s headquarters, where they were meeting Josh Hart, Nick Winthrop, Phil Dalton and a PR girl named Rachel Liu.

  “You must be the bankers!” a young blonde in a tank top and cut-off shorts greeted them as they walked through the front door into the atrium lobby.

  “Are we that obvious?” Todd gave the girl his politician smile. Neha had worn a terrible boxy suit, but the rest of them had dressed down: still, their haircuts, postures and lower body fat percentages screamed New York in the office’s sea of hoodies, flip-flops and muffin tops that showed the consequences of the office’s endless free food supply.

  “You can take the man out of New York but it’s hard to take the New York out of the man.” The girl grinned.

  “I’m Todd.” He reached out his hand.

  “I’m Julie!” she said, smiling at the group. “I’ll get Josh’s assistant for you.”

  “That’s okay, Julie,” Nick Winthrop said as he emerged through the side door.

  He was pudgier than in college, and his reddish hair was thinning. His eyes were big and round behind his plastic-framed glasses and matched the round tip of his nose. If it was true every person looked like an animal, Nick definitely fell into the bug phylum.

  “Todd.” Nick stuck his hand out to the investment banker, but Tara could sense his awareness of her. “Nice to see you.”

  “Nick.” Todd took his hand. “Been a long time, man. How are you?”

  “I’m great,” Nick said proudly. “Things have really just kept getting better for me since college.”

  “It sounds like it.” Todd smiled jovially. Tara wondered if he knew Nick was set to make eighty-five million dollars on the deal. It had to hurt Todd, the cool kid in college, to know that Nick, the social wannabe who’d been dismissed from SAE rush, was going to make more in a year than Todd would make in twenty, and that it was Todd’s responsibility to ensure it happened.

  “Nick, it’s great to see you.” Tara stuck out her hand, smiling warmly.

  Nick tilted his head. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  Was he joking? “Tara,” she reminded him. “Tara Taylor. I was a few years behind you at Stanford?”

  “Oh, Tara . . .” Did he seriously think she’d forget the drunken serenade? “I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten . . . older.”

  Tara forced a smile. “Haven’t we all?”

  “Tara’s in Equity Capital Markets.” Todd stepped in.

  “Huh,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t have pinned you for such a job.”

  Tara’s chest burned. How dare he suggest she wasn’t smart enough to work on Wall Street. Did he think she was just some dumb sorority girl whose usefulness expired after she rejected him?

  “Shall we go to the meeting?” Nick continued, turning on his heel.

  He held his badge to a door at the side of the room and a woman’s voice came through a speaker: “What is the square root of 1,764?”

  “Forty-two,” Nick said back to the speaker, and the door opened.

  “Is that the secret code or something?” Todd asked.

  “Gamefication,” Nick explained. “It’s big in Silicon Valley right now. Basically, turning regular tasks, like taking taxis or grocery shopping or walking through your office, into games where you collect points.” He checked his phone. “I just got two points for that one.” He lifted the device to show Todd his score. “People love it!”

  “What happens if you’re bad at math?” Tara asked.

  Nick smirked. “We don’t really have that problem here.”

  Tara gave Todd a did-he-seriously-just-say-that look as they followed Nick to the conference room, and Todd lifted his eyebrows in agreement, holding the door open for her to proceed. She could smell Todd’s aftershave as she passed and felt her skin prickle. What was it about aftershave? She turned to look at him, but he was winking at Julie. Tara rolled her eyes.

  Todd’s version of Nick’s gamefication was, evidently, flirting; both of them seemed like grown-up children.

  The hallway was a round glass tube that stretched down a pier, like the inside of an aquarium, flanked by the Bay Bridge to the right and Alcatraz to the left as it funneled into a glass bubble that constituted the conference room.

  “Are these by George E?” Beau piped up from the back of the group, pointing to graffiti-style mermen that looked like painted photographs on the glass. Beau was twenty-six, but he seemed older because he was old-school, the preppy product of the Upper East Side. He wore pink chinos and a white polo shirt with his monogram on the collar. His skin was tan from winter weekends in Pal
m Beach and his brow was eerily smooth, like it had never had a cause to furrow.

  “How’d you know?” Nick asked suspiciously.

  “I have one of his early pieces,” Beau explained casually, as if it weren’t odd that someone his age would collect million-dollar art. “I’m on the Young Fellow board of the Frick and people started talking about him a couple years ago so I figured I’d get in the mix, even though the stuff is totally pervy.”

  “I’m sorry?” Nick seemed offended by the remark.

  “Dude: Mermen? There’s some Freudian shit going on in that, don’t you think?” Beau was cool, unintimidated. He was confident, but without the inflated ego, and Tara got the feeling he might end up being her favorite person on the team.

  “He’s one of Phil Dalton’s favorites,” Nick said, his voice infused with condescension. “Actually, Phil invested in him as a human capital deal. That’s the new trend in art, you know. Successful venture capitalists like Phil give guys like George E seed funding in exchange for equity in their future work, and then help promote them by securing commissions like these mermen. Phil’s like a modern Medici, and Hook’s like the new Sistine Chapel.”

  Yikes, Tara mouthed to Beau, who grinned in agreement. Computer nerds determining the future of art didn’t feel good for anyone.

  They entered the conference room, where a glass table sat in the center of the glass-encaged room.

  “This is the fishbowl,” Nick explained. “Josh designed it.” He glanced behind them, and Tara turned back to look in the direction from which they’d come. The main Hook building stood tall at the shore, and six stories of employees were gathered at the windows looking down on them.

  “We have a very open culture here,” Nick went on. “We built this conference room so that everyone in the company could see what meetings are going on, but they’d be blocked from public view.”

  “That must make visitors nervous,” Todd said.

  “It does.”

  Josh Hart walked through the door, followed by an attractive Asian woman in a tight pencil skirt and patent pumps. Josh looked at the foursome and his face twitched before he walked to the far side of the conference room table and said, “You brought a crew.”

  “Promise this is the full team,” Todd said. Josh ignored his extended hand, so he shifted it to the woman instead. “I’m Todd,” he said with a dazzling smile. Did he ever stop?

  “Rachel Liu,” the woman’s precisely lined red lips spoke. Her hair was done in a thick bun and she looked decidedly not San Francisco. “I handle PR for Josh and Phil.”

  “Phil likes to keep Rachel in the loop on most things,” Nick explained.

  “I think I’d feel the same way,” Todd said, grinning. She offered a thin smile in return.

  With the sexual tension established, they all sat down, the New Yorkers across from the Californians, all of them under the age of thirty-five, to discuss the fourteen-billion-dollar valuation of the dating app company.

  “So I printed an agenda,” Nick said, passing around a sheet of paper. The first item was “Presentation of L.Cecil’s capabilities.”

  Tara looked at Todd: Hadn’t they already won the deal? Why did they need to present a pitch?

  Todd looked at the sheet, equally confused, then looked back up at Nick. “We didn’t bring a pitch,” he said carefully. “I thought it was decided that we were working togeth—”

  “It has been,” Josh interrupted. “I signed the contract this morning.”

  Now Todd was confused. “Who gave you a contract? I’ve got the papers right here for us to review.” He indicated the stack in front of him.

  “Harvey Tate and I worked it out yesterday. I faxed over the agreement this morning,” Josh said without interest in where the confusion had occurred.

  “What?” Todd said. “What did you agree to?”

  “Firm commitment. One percent fee. Target date May eighth.”

  “One percent?” Todd voiced Tara’s own reaction. These deals usually went for six to seven percent, a point or two higher when there was a firm commitment, which meant the bank was responsible for buying any shares that didn’t sell in the initial float. How had Harvey agreed to those terms, and how had Todd not known?

  May 8 was also just two months away—she’d never heard of a deal ever happening that fast.

  “I—” Todd started, but he was interrupted by Phil Dalton, who entered the room jovially. He was six-foot-three and looked like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Chris Noth.

  “What’d I miss?” Phil asked the room, taking a seat next to Rachel and leaning in enthusiastically. In addition to making over two billion dollars on his investments in Silicon Valley’s most preeminent social media companies, Phil Dalton had established himself as a “mentor capitalist” in Silicon Valley, the self-appointed advisor to entrepreneur-wannabes, whom he was happy to advise in exchange for a significant cut of anything they ever produced. Tara found the whole construct bizarre and hard to take seriously.

  “We were just going through the deal terms,” Nick said, straightening in his chair. Tara looked between them. Nick was, evidently, one of Dalton’s aspiring protégés.

  “Did we discuss how much we’re going to sell in?” Phil asked. Founders and early investors like Phil used IPOs to sell their shares into the deal in exchange for cash. They had to disclose how many shares they sold, however, and selling too many made it look like they didn’t have confidence in the company’s continued growth.

  “How much do you want to take out?” Tara asked.

  Phil seemed to notice her for the first time. “Sorry, who are you?”

  “I’m Tara Taylor, I’ll be your point from the Equity Capital Markets side of things.”

  “Ah, yes. I was told to keep an eye on you,” Phil said. Tara blushed, not sure who would have given such an instruction. “I’d like to do a third of our holdings. Will that raise any eyebrows?”

  “That should be fine,” Tara said.

  “Can I talk to Tara alone, please?” Josh cut the conversation short.

  Tara’s head snapped to the CEO. Josh was nondescriptly white: a distinctly American blend of European heritage that resulted in medium-toned skin, an average-sized body, and facial features that were neither too prominent nor too proportionate. Light brown curls gripped his head, which was a little too narrow, as if someone had put metal plates on his ears and squeezed them together. What kind of animal was Josh?

  “What do you need to talk to Tara abo—” Todd started.

  “You are not interesting to me,” Josh interrupted bluntly. “She is.”

  Tara looked at Todd, who looked at Rachel, who was consumed in a side conversation with Phil and didn’t notice.

  “Probably better for us to talk through everything off-line anyway,” Nick said, standing. “Since I’m the one who’s going to be running the show on this.”

  “I—” Todd struggled, but finally stood. “Yeah, sure.”

  Tara felt her palms start to sweat as her colleagues left the room, her skin hot as her brain raced for what about her was “interesting” to Josh Hart. She sat forward in her chair.

  “Get the shade, please,” Josh commanded Nick, who hit a button on the wall that caused a screen to drop, blocking the view of the room from the employees in the building back on the mainland, before leaving Josh and Tara alone in the room.

  Josh sat back in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, and studied Tara with the apathetic diligence of a dermatologist scanning a patient for signs of disease. For the first time in her life, Tara wished she were less attractive.

  His tongue shot out from the corner of his mouth and moistened his lips. A lizard, she thought: he looked like a lizard.

  “Why are you here?” he finally asked.

  She glanced around. “You asked me to—”

  “I mean,
why are you here,” he said. “What is your purpose?” His words were pointed, with a tinge of spite.

  “I work in Equity Capital Markets,” she said, “which means I coordinate—”

  “Wrong,” he interrupted, like a game show buzzer.

  She looked at him for an indication of what he was looking for, but found nothing. “The price you can get is only as good as the price you can sell,” she said carefully, “and I’m here to provide data on the markets so that—”

  “Still wrong,” he said, tapping his thumbs in his lap.

  “I’ve worked at L.Cecil for seven years, so I have a solid understanding of how the bank and these deals are supposed to run, and will use that to be sure—”

  “Wrong.” He slammed his open palm on the table, his irritation breaking. “Are you actually this stupid?”

  Tara’s breath caught in her throat. “I—” she started. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what you’re looking for.”

  “You’re here to distract, Tara,” he said.

  She looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  “You are an attractive woman, and you are here to use that attractiveness to blur objective thinking so that investors will be more likely to do what you want them to do.”

  “I take great pride in ensuring my reports present the—”

  “Which you know,” he ignored her protest, “because you’re wearing tight jeans and heels and makeup.”

  She stopped, sitting straight in her chair.

  “I like to look nice,” she said, “for myself.”

  “No,” he said, “you thrive on external validation. ‘For yourself’ simply means men turning their heads makes you feel better about yourself. How small are women’s brains that you actually convince yourself of these things?”

  “Excuse me, but I went to Stanford,” she said, feeling her voice get stronger. “I was one of the top analysts at L.Cecil, and am one of the youngest vice presidents. My brain is—”