Michael Ridpath: Final Venture

Frank would normally have backed me up on something like this. And if he had disagreed with my conclusions, he would have gently guided me to what he believed was the right answer before the meeting, not waited for the moment of maximum humiliation.

It had to be me and Diane. That was the only logical explanation. Frank loved his daughter, and was very protective of her. In this case overprotective.

My phone rang. It was Gil.

'Simon, can I have a word tomorrow morning? Say nine o'clock?' His voice was friendly.

'Gil, I'd like to talk to you now-'

Gil interrupted. 'There's no need for that. Let's talk tomorrow, when you've had time to think about this morning. OK? Nine o'clock tomorrow then.'

His voice brooked no argument, and anyway what he said made sense. 'OK, I'll

be there.'

Daniel glanced across the room at me. 'Gil's going to give you a chance to dig yourself out of this hole. Take it.'

'We'll see.' I picked up the Net Cop papers on my desk and tried to focus on them.

'Do anything over the weekend, Daniel?' John asked.

'Yeah,' said Daniel. 'Went to Foxwoods. Played blackjack all Saturday night, and came out with a thousand bucks more than I went in with. What more could you ask? What about you?'

'Nothing so exciting. I caught the Monet exhibition at the MFA. Pretty good. You should go.'

'Sign me up!' said Daniel.

'Daniel, have you ever been to an art gallery?' I asked.

'Sure. My parents took me to some museum in Paris when I was a kid. I threw up over a sculpture of a man and a woman making out. My mother was convinced my innocent sensibilities were upset by such an obscene composition. I suspect it had more to do with the Pernod I sneaked at lunch. Anyway, it was a real mess. Museums don't agree with me.'

John snorted. 'I'm sure they don't.'

My phone rang again. This time it was an external call. 'Can you take that John?'

He punched a button and picked up the phone. He listened, and glanced up at me, mouthing the word 'Craig'. I shook my head.

'I'm sorry Craig, he's in a meeting… It may last all day… I'm not sure what exactly it's about… I'm sure he'll be back to you when he has some news… OK, goodbye.'

'Thanks,' I said, as he put down the receiver. 'Craig's going to be calling all day. Would you two mind picking up my phone today?'

'Us pick up your phone?' said Daniel. 'We can't do that! We need a babe to pick up your phone. I'll call a temp agency and get one for you. Now what do you need? Redhead? Blonde? Let's get a blonde.'

'You'll do fine, Daniel,' I said.

I glanced down at the Net Cop papers in front of me. I had told Gil I couldn't carry out his decision, but that decision had been taken, and I had to face up to the fact. I couldn't leave it to someone else at Revere, or even worse, some hard-nosed lawyers to tell Craig. I had to do it myself, face-to-face; I owed him at least that much.

Net Cop was located in a modern industrial park in the romantically named Hemlock Gorge, a small wooded valley just off Route 128 in Wellesley. The whole company was basically a room of engineers in cubicles on the first floor of a low, brown, all-purpose building. I received a wave from Gina, the company's only secretary, and looked for Craig. At this stage of the company's life, all the work was being done on computers. On one side of the room sat the hardware engineers, and the software engineers sat on the other. They were different breeds of people who spoke totally different computer languages: the hardware guys used Verilog, and the software guys C++. Craig needed to get these two groups working together. This was achieved by a small team of bilingual engineers who sat in the middle of the room with a handsome golden retriever called Java.

Many of the staff were surprisingly old, some of them even had grey hair. Craig liked to hire experienced people, the enthusiastic nerds of the eighties who now had wives, children and a little common sense.

It was a good team. A great team, Craig said. And from a standing start they had already achieved more in six months than much bigger firms' R &D departments had achieved in two years.

I spotted the man himself drawing at breakneck speed over a double whiteboard in the corner. Boxes and arrows spread across the large white surface in bewildering confusion, and Craig finished off his point with a resounding question mark, scribbled with such emphasis he almost broke the pen. Two engineers were listening to him: an Indian with a greying beard, and a large man with a bulging yellow T-shirt and hair that was receding at the front, and advancing rapidly down his back.

I crossed the room and coughed gently.

Craig turned round. 'Hey, Simon! Howya doin'?' Despite his MIT education, he sported one of the dozen or so local Boston accents, which he clung on to tenaciously. He was grinning broadly, as though he were genuinely pleased to see me. Perhaps he was.

'I'm fine, Craig. How are you?' I replied, nervously.

'So, when do we get the dough?'

'That's what I wanted to talk to you about. There's a problem.'

'A problem? What kind of problem?'

The two men Craig had been lecturing were watching us with interest. In fact, I could feel eyes from all around the room resting on us.

'Can we talk about it in your office?'

Craig paused, looking around him. 'OK, come on,' he growled, and led me over to his small glass corner office.

He closed the door behind me.

'What's the problem?'

I took a deep breath. 'Revere has decided to make no further investment in Net Cop,' I said. 'Sorry, Craig.'

'What do you mean, you're not going to give us the money?' Craig's face reddened, and his thick neck bulged even further, the veins clearly visible. His muscles tensed large under his T-shirt. He struck the small conference table in his office so forcefully I thought it would break.

'You gotta give us the fuckin' money! You gotta!'

'Craig, I'm sorry, I've discussed it with the partnership. We can't.'

'Why the hell not?'

He took a couple of steps forwards and stared up at me. He was only five feet six inches tall, but he worked out regularly. He looked more like a squaddie than a brilliant coder. He was strong and tough, and very, very angry.

I groped for words. 'We feel that the market has changed. It's become more competitive. Too many companies are out there and it's hard to tell who the winner will be.'

'Jesus, we've been through this a million times. You wanna know who's gonna be the winner? We are!'

Spittle darted from his lips as he pounded his chest with a meaty thumb. I was aware that outside the glassed-in office all the engineers had stopped their work. Some of them were drifting over to watch.

I wanted to tell him that I thought he was right, that Revere should have given him the money. But that would have been unprofessional and a betrayal of the partnership. Besides, it would have made a messy situation even messier. Gil was right: while I worked for the firm I had a duty to carry out their decisions. Whether I agreed with those decisions or not was between them and me.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'But there it is.'

'You can't do this, Simon. You're committed in the investment agreement.'

'Not quite.'

'It says if we meet the milestones, Revere will put in another three million bucks. We've met the milestones. Where's the money?'

'We don't feel that the ASIC has been tested sufficiently'

'That's crap! I'm satisfied, what more do you need?'

'We need it to be tested in real working conditions for a period of three months. To see whether it works in a real system.'

'That's impossible, and you know it! Anyway, I say it works fine, and that should be enough!'

Reluctantly I tossed across a copy of the investment agreement, with the words 'will be determined at the sole discretion of Revere Partners' highlighted in yellow.