The Underwriting Read online

  “Trying to validate your intelligence by success within a stupid system only makes it worse,” he said.

  “Wh—” she exhaled, but didn’t know what to say.

  “Let me spell it out for you,” Josh said. “You’re here on the assumption that I’ll want to sleep with you, and will, therefore, be more likely to do what you say. What you say, in turn, will be dictated to you by one of your bosses. And you will listen to that boss because he tells you that you’re smart, even though he’s only using you because you’re pretty.”

  “You can believe what you want,” Tara said firmly, “but I know that I am objectively good at my job.”

  “You see, that’s why people are so drawn to Hook,” he said. “We cut out all the bullshit and give people the freedom to embrace their core instincts. There’s no ‘packaging,’ no ‘selling,’ no obstruction of the truth: just a photo and rating, and a simple yes/no decision about whether or not a user wants to engage. We cut out all these stupid manipulations people engineer to convince themselves their motives are more profound than they actually are.”

  “I’m going to strongly suggest we don’t say that to investors.”

  “But you do understand that is why Hook is the most intelligent social media platform, right? Because we actually get to the core of how human beings work?”

  “I disagree with your evaluation of humanity,” she said.

  “Which is why you work for a bank pushing paper and I have built a platform used by five hundred million people.”

  “I think people want something deeper,” she said, feeling an old part of herself awaken—that part that used to sit around the dinner table in college debating the meaning of life. “They want meaningful relationships, but apps like yours are easy and fun and instantly gratifying in a way that distracts them.”

  “Is that why you don’t use it?”

  “How do you know I don’t use it?”

  Josh sighed and ignored the question. “What you just said will not get me a good price, so let’s just agree to use your looks instead of your brain.”

  Tara searched for the right thing to say. “My job is to evaluate the market value,” she finally said, “and be truthful about that. Not to get into the complexities of human interaction.”

  “Good girl,” Josh said. “Smile a little more when you say it and you should be ready.”

  “I don’t have to take this,” she said, snapping out of the hypnosis she didn’t realize she’d been under, and moving to stand.

  “You’re going to be great with Callum,” Josh said, unbothered by her movement. “He loves girls with control issues.”

  “I do not have control—”

  “He’s going to try to fix you, though, which you can use as leverage.”

  “I’m not playing my sexuality with anyone, Josh,” she said, standing. “Callum,” she knew, was Callum Rees—one of Hook’s earliest investors. “I’m going to do my job objectively and fairly.”

  “Just don’t sleep with him,” Josh said. “That’s the one way you know you’ve lost all your power.”

  “You know I could sue you for sexual harassment?” she said, looking down at him across the table.

  Josh’s nostrils flared and he smiled. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Is that a challenge?” she asked, lifting a brow. “Do you have any idea how much money I could make on a suit against you?”

  “But then you’d be that girl who made her money filing a sexual harassment suit,” he said. “You don’t want that.”

  She paused, knowing he was right.

  She watched him from across the table, part of her wanting to get out of the room as quickly as possible, the other part feeling like she couldn’t leave on this note. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” she said, turning to leave. When she reached the door, she turned back. “Why did you put down the shades?”

  “So people won’t know what we talked about,” Josh said. “Or did.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” she said carefully.

  “They don’t know that.”

  “What the—”

  “Careful how you manage power, Tara.” He finally looked up and smiled a lizard smile.

  She felt her chest tighten. Who was this guy?

  “I’ll be in touch,” she finally said, pushing the door out into the glass tube hallway. When she looked up she saw dozens of Hook employees in the main office, peering down at her like hyenas. She looked straight ahead and willed herself to ignore them. She felt like she’d just been assaulted.

  “Hey!” Todd called after her as she pushed through the atrium, past the receptionist desk and toward the main door. She could hear Todd end the call he was on and start to follow her. “Hey, Tara, wait.”

  She got out onto the sidewalk and stopped, closing her eyes and letting the warm air resettle her emotions in the few seconds she had before she felt Todd grab her arm to turn her toward him.

  “How’d it go?” Todd asked, his voice concerned. “What’d he want to talk about?”

  Tara felt her face form into a calm, polite smile. “Fine,” she said normally. “He just wanted me to explain some market basics. I guess he was embarrassed to ask in front of you.”

  “Huh.” Todd looked back at the room, satisfied that Josh wanted to impress him. “That’s good to know.” He turned back to her, pleased with that nugget.

  “I’ve got a killer headache,” Tara said. “If it’s all right with you I’m going to go to the hotel and work from there.”

  “Sure,” Todd said. “I e-mailed you the break-out for who’s on what for the filing, so let me know if you have any questions about your pieces.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, grateful when he turned to wave and she could let her shoulders drop.

  JUAN

  FRIDAY, MARCH 7; SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  “What’s going on?” Juan Ramirez asked as Brad returned from the window where a dozen or so programmers were gathered.

  “Dude, we’re totally going public.” Brad’s big blue eyes were wide, like a little kid’s in front of a stocked Christmas tree.

  “What?” Juan swiveled his roller chair from his computer to face Brad. “Going public? How do you know?” Juan didn’t pay much attention to the business side of Hook. He preferred to concentrate on the programming, and on organizing the company social calendar.

  “Check it, bro.” Brad nodded his wide chin to the window. “There are these four cats here—real New Yorky types, all done up and serious. Down in the fishbowl meeting with Josh and Nick and that hot PR chick. Or at least they were all meeting, but now it’s just Josh and the hot girl New Yorker in there with the shade down. You know what that means: Josh is getting a blow job!” He sang the last bit, pumping his chest in celebration of his CEO’s manly conquests. “Celebratory BJ for the newly minted billionaire. Rock on.”

  Ever since someone had suggested that Brad was Hook’s resident “brogrammer,” the Santa Cruz–bred beach volleyball player turned computer scientist had taken the title up like a mantle, exaggerating his surfer stereotype to the point where Juan sometimes didn’t know whether the words he was speaking had any actual meaning.

  “What does that mean?” Juan asked.

  “A blow job? It’s when a girl—”

  “No, the bankers being here.” Juan put his hand out to stop Brad’s pantomime.

  “Dude. Means we’re gonna be friggin’ loaded. Siiiicck.”

  Juan laughed at his friend and turned back to his computer screen, where he was coding an update for Hook’s Android app. Juan had stopped looking at his share statement three years ago, when Josh said his ownership was worth four hundred thousand. He knew an IPO was the only reason Josh would be talking to New Yorkers in suits, and he knew th
at an IPO would mean that the $400K—or whatever it was worth now—would become cash, but he didn’t want to think about it any more than that. Because he also knew, having grown up in Silicon Valley, that as much as money from an IPO could be real, it could be gone. The 2002 crash was still fresh in Juan’s mind, along with all the multimillionaires in Atherton who went broke and told his mother they couldn’t pay her for the time she’d spent cleaning the houses they could no longer afford. Of all the things Juan knew, the thing he knew most of all was that he was never, ever going to be like them.

  And so Juan didn’t pay attention to the money, just the app and his colleagues and making the most of the opportunities he’d been given.

  “Juan, can I borrow you?” Nick Winthrop’s voice interrupted his drifting.

  “Sure.” Juan stood up and followed Nick to his office.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Brogrammer Brad whispered mockingly as he clipped away at his keyboard. Brad was an idiot, but he made work not feel like work.

  Nick, however, was the epitome of work that felt like work. He’d joined Hook two years ago, and he acted like he owned the place, talking about his Harvard MBA as though it made him the expert on everything. As far as Juan could tell, the only thing Nick had done since his arrival was put hand sanitizer on every desk and replace the M&M’s in the bulk candy stations with the generic kind. He’d threatened to scale back the hours Joey, the company bartender, served cocktails in the tiki bar on the second floor, but Juan and Brad had led an office-wide sit-in, drinking frozen margaritas on a Tuesday in solidarity for Joey and his right to health benefits that would be lost if his hours were cut to part-time. By noon everyone in the office was drunk, and at seven p.m., Nick finally relented, letting Joey keep his schedule without ever mentioning it again.

  “What’s up?” Juan asked as he entered Nick’s office, acknowledging a girl and guy who Juan assumed were from the investment bank.

  “Shut the door, please, Juan,” Nick directed, his brow serious. Juan did as told, and introduced himself to the bankers.

  “Juan,” he said, shaking each of their hands.

  “Beau.” The guy’s teeth were unnaturally bright.

  “Neha.” The girl’s palms were alarmingly clammy.

  “Beau and Neha are from L.Cecil,” Nick said, “an investment bank in New York that Josh and I have selected to take Hook public.”

  Nick paused, waiting for Juan to be impressed. Juan remained silent, waiting for the secret information.

  Juan didn’t not like anyone, but he didn’t actively like Nick Winthrop. He knew the M&M’s were just the start: Nick wanted to change the company, and Juan was worried Josh was going to let him do it, not because Josh agreed, but because Nick was just so annoying that Josh might not have the stamina to protest.

  And so that was something else Nick had done: he’d driven distance between Josh and Juan, and Juan resented that even more than the M&M’s.

  Juan had started working with Josh Hart when he was in college and joined full-time after he graduated from UC Berkeley in 2009. Juan had gone to school on scholarship from the Lipmann Foundation, which provided college tuition to children of immigrants and helped them become naturalized citizens. Phil Dalton was a board member of the foundation and the one who introduced Juan to Josh as a good programming mentor.

  And that he was. Josh Hart was the best programmer Juan had ever encountered. He was one of those coders whose whole brain thought in code: everything was a binary, a node, a decision point that did what you told it to. The thinking was so much a part of him that he could see coding problems before others did. He knew that by making X decision at node 1, you’d have to make Y decision at node 50. His foresight allowed him to fix things at node 1 and avoid inefficiencies, creating programs that functioned more smoothly and identified more closely with human intuition than other apps.

  So when Josh asked Juan to come help him build an app he thought would crush all other dating apps, Juan didn’t hesitate. For eighteen months it was just the two of them, staying up all night most nights in a dingy basement office in Mountain View eating cheap Chinese takeout and programming what would, eventually, become Hook. It was before funding and users and a fancy office in San Francisco that gave some stability to the notion that their effort would lead to something. There was nothing glamorous about it—it was just really hard, uncertain work—but it was raw and real and Josh became a much-needed companion when Juan’s college friends were working their normal day jobs and his high school friends back in East Palo Alto were working minimum wage. Josh could be rude and demanding, but he understood and didn’t apologize for the isolation of being different. And, as someone who had always struggled to fit into a system where he felt like a perpetual outsider, Juan admired that.

  Nick didn’t get it. He’d always been part of the system, and he’d always followed the crowd to do what was comfortable and secure. Now that Hook was getting huge he was trying to take credit for things, but all he’d really done was hitch on to a rising tide.

  “By going public, I mean we’ll be offering a portion of our shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange, where the general public will be allowed to buy them, like they can shares of GE and Google and Facebook. This will allow us to raise money to grow the company,” Nick explained, his voice dripping with condescension. “It’s very important that you not talk to anyone else about this—not even Brad.”

  “Oh, everyone already—” Juan started to tell him they all knew, then changed his mind. “Sure,” he said. “Lips sealed.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of work to do, getting the documents ready to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and I need you to help Beau and Neha get the information they need for their analysis. Can you do that?”

  Juan glanced around the room. He needed to program, not entertain bankers, and Nick’s patronizing tone made his skin bristle. “Sure,” he said, “if you tell me what you need.”

  “I’ll be upping your security clearances,” Nick said, “so you have access to all the information in the database in order to help the bankers calculate user statistics.” He pulled out a piece of paper from his perfectly pristine file cabinet. “I’ll just need you to sign this NDA verifying that you won’t share any of the information.”

  Juan stepped forward to sign the sheet. As if Juan couldn’t access the databases if he wanted to: he’d built the entire program. How dumb did Nick think he was? “What kind of information will you need?”

  “Just basic demographic information about our users—all anonymous, of course. Just things to help prove our market penetration and user engagement.”

  “Sure,” Juan said, handing the signed sheet back to Nick.

  Nick checked his watch. “Okay, then. I’ll let you all get to it.”

  Juan glanced at the other two, hoping they knew what they were supposed to get to, and the three left Nick’s office.

  “I say we check out the bar,” Beau suggested. “I heard it’s hip.”

  “I think we should get to work,” Neha corrected.

  Juan glanced between them, trying to decipher the relationship. “How about I find you both desks, and then I’ll give you the tour.”

  There were two open computer stations on the long desk where Juan and Brad sat, formerly occupied by a financial analyst who had quit six months in and the general counsel, Glen Fanning, whom Josh had unceremoniously fired three months ago. Glen, who was a fat fifty-year-old with two kids, had been the only thing close to adult supervision at Hook, and no one had been sorry to see him go.

  Juan moved a stack of costumes he and Brad had been deciding between for the upcoming company broomball tournament out of one of the chairs. “Will these work?”

  The bankers nodded, and Neha took a seat, opening her laptop and burying her nose in some Excel model. Beau lifted an eyebrow, then turned back to Juan. “How about that bar
?”

  Juan led him across the hall, past the basketball court, and down the stairs to the cafeteria, where the former executive chef for the White House prepared three meals a day for Hook’s staff, all free to employees and guests. They proceeded through the game room, full of beanbag chairs, every variety of video game console on the market hooked to large flat-screens, and a custom-designed foosball table. The tiki bar was a long open room that extended to a deck that looked out over the Bay and had, as its centerpiece, a fully stocked, surfboard-shaped bar.

  “My man Joey.” Juan fist-pumped the bartender.

  “What’s happenin’?” Joey returned the friendliness, reaching his tattoo-sleeved arm out to Beau. “I’m Joey.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Beau said. “Think I could get a bourbon?”

  “Coming up.” Joey turned to his craft.

  “So what information is in the database?” Beau asked.

  “Oh, we track everything,” Juan said. “Comments, when and where people log in, who they meet up with. All apps do. You can’t make your program better if you don’t know how people are using it.”

  “Is that all in your privacy policy?” Beau asked.

  “I guess?” Juan didn’t get into that stuff. “We keep information users provide—like names and e-mail addresses—separate from the information we collect about behavior so that none of it’s identifiable,” Juan said, then shrugged. “So it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Bourbon straight up.” Joey returned with Beau’s drink.

  “God, you all live the life,” he said, looking around the bar and taking it in. “Maybe I should come out here.”

  “Do you not like working on Wall Street?” Juan asked.

  “I’d have preferred to do what you do.” Beau shrugged. His blue eyes were friendly. “But I didn’t exactly have a lot of options, given my family.”

  Juan didn’t follow. Beau looked really rich, like he came from the kind of family that had nothing but options. “Have you ever coded?” he asked.

  “I was a CS minor in undergrad,” he said. “I was decent.”