Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil

bluff = display confidence when your holdings are valueless to leverage the ignorance of the other party

card shark = a card player who bluffs and succeeds

The day of my meeting with Mr. Schrub I let Kapitoil run on autopilot. The scrolling white numbers on the black monitor blurred like a snowstorm the entire morning.

In the afternoon I walked all the way uptown through the snow to Mr. Schrub’s apartment. My external concentration was so low that a garbage truck almost crashed into me on Broadway. It was almost amusing to me how you can be so focused on macro concerns, but it requires only a micro event like that to impact everything.

When I arrived at Mr. Schrub’s apartment, I had to check in as before. The receptionist called upstairs and then told me that Mr. Schrub was coming downstairs. I waited 20 minutes, however, and each minute I grew more panicked. But I reminded myself that this was possibly part of his negotiation strategy.

Finally Mr. Schrub arrived with his briefcase. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “I’ve been cooped up all day.”

We crossed the street to Central Park without talking. As we passed a white horse with black markings attached to a carriage, Mr. Schrub asked, “Feel like a carriage ride? I’m always up for one, but Helena says it’s cruel to the animals.”

I consented, and he arranged a ride with the driver, an Indian man with glasses that were highly concave.

We covered ourselves with blankets and the horse pulled us into the park, away from all the dirty snow where people had walked and onto a clean interior path. Our breath made small clouds in front of our faces like exhaust from a car.

Mr. Schrub put his briefcase on his lap over the blanket and opened it. “I’ve got the contract ready. You can sign now, but we’ll wait until you have a lawyer cosign it so you can be sure you understand all its terms. I think you’ll find it very generous.”

He handed me the stack of papers. In bolded font was the price for the program. It was even higher than what he said at the fund-raiser. Something happens when you see a number attached to a currency symbol, instead of just thinking about it. It becomes more real. Sometimes I enjoy examining my bank account for that reason: Unless I observe evidence, I still don’t believe someone is paying me for what I would also do for free.

There was a division in the path, and Mr. Schrub asked the driver to turn left, but because it was windy and we were behind him and the horse made so much noise, Mr. Schrub had to yell at him three times before he finally heard, and the horse angled northwest. Its body was perspiring even though the temperature was below freezing.

Mr. Schrub added, “And we’ll give you a team of programmers to direct. Any resource you want, you’ll get. We’re going to groom you for a leadership position.”

I considered my options:

1. This was of course what I wanted most of all when I arrived here in October;

A.and in some ways it was what I still wanted;

B.and as a leader at Schrub I could make some enhancements in business practices;

2. but Kapitoil would still operate and exploit problems elsewhere;

A.and as Mr. Schrub said about himself, I would change slightly daily in ways I wouldn’t notice;

B.and one day I would be a different person and no longer Karim-esque;

i. and possibly being Karim-esque, although it is not confident or experienced or a strong negotiator or many other factors that make a skilled businessman, is still a positive class of being;

ii.and is in fact superior to being Schrub-esque;

1. and I knew that if I signed the contract and told my father what I had done, he would be disappointed.

I folded the contract in half.

“I cannot sign this,” I said.

“Is it a money issue?” he asked. “We can get more.”

I shook my head. “I will be publishing my paper.”

“What if we confidentially provided the code to a few select partners in the sectors you’re interested in, and continued running Kapitoil?”

I had already evaluated this idea. “The code must be on the open market for the best people to utilize it. And there may be applications we have not thought of. The only way to know is if it is available to everyone,” I said. “I have made my decision.”

He exhaled with force through his nostrils. His muteness made me nervous, as it always did.

Then he said, “Kapitoil was fully funded by the company and written on company time. We could take you to court and easily block you from disclosing it to others, and my programmers could get access to the code or write a version of it on their own. You wouldn’t come away with a cent. We’re offering you a lot of money to avoid that.”

Although the horse accelerated on an empty path and the wind sliced my cheeks, my body heated up under the blanket. I couldn’t believe I was so foolish that I hadn’t asked Cynthia about this. I hadn’t 100 % created the program on company time as he stated, but they had funded me. He had the best lawyers in the country, and the solitary one I knew was Cynthia.

Mr. Schrub was correct: Possibly I wasn’t man enough to be in business.

And I could make my family secure for years, not months, if I merely signed the contract.

He was the more skilled player. He knew how to leverage the rules of the game.

The horse slowed down and stopped as a large cluster of Asian tourists crossed the path in front of us. I looked down the side of the carriage as we waited. A small piece of bread sat on top of the snow like a topping on a cake with icing, and dozens of ants were aggregating around it. It again wasn’t the correct subject to be thinking about at the time, but it made me happy that such a small piece of food was sufficient for so many ants.

The other incorrect subject to be thinking about was Mr. Schrub’s comment that his programmers could innovate their own version of Kapitoil. It was a complex and beautiful program, and although Schrub has the cream of the cream programmers, I don’t believe anyone else could write a parallel program, even launching from the proposal I presented to Mr. Ray, and it angered me that he thought other people could.

But maybe he didn’t truly think his employees could rewrite Kapitoil. Schrub had continued to offer me more and more money to have access to the code. They had probably attempted to create their own version and failed, and they knew that their only opportunity was to buy the program from me.

Then I thought of Rebecca’s advice from our poker game and had an idea. And it was as if I were observing the entire galaxy of stars while I was simultaneously struck by lightning.

I retrieved my voice recorder and accessed the saved recordings folder and selected a short file and pressed play.

Mr. Schrub’s voice came on: “Well, in better news, I have a proposal for you. My business people emailed it over this morning…I don’t fully understand it, but apparently they want you to de-encrypt Kapitoil and allow our programmers access to the code, so they can make modifications to the algorithms, too. You’ll still be the point man on all this, and you’ll get a corresponding bump in salary…As far as I can tell, it’s a win-win for everyone.”

I pressed the stop button. The skin around Mr. Schrub’s eyes trisected.

I said, “That is proof you tried to mislead me about the original contract.” Then I bluffed. “I can sue you for that. My lawyer has a copy of this recording, and because I did not in fact create Kapitoil on company time but on my own time, and it is copyrighted in my name, she says that the rights are mine. You will have a few more months to use the program until the paper is published and before the algorithmic signal loses its power.” I added something that I didn’t believe, but maybe Mr. Schrub would: “And if you take us to court, the concept of the program will be revealed to the public immediately and someone else will gain enough information to create a similar program and Kapitoil will be valueless for the futures market, and you will not come away with a cent.”