23 min read
MARCUS
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 – 7:45 AM – Axiom Headquarters, Fort Lauderdale
Fifteen months to the bell.
The phrase had become Marcus Webb’s mantra. Every decision, every meeting, every strategic choice filtered through that single constraint. Fifteen months until Axiom went public. Fifteen months until he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Fifteen months until the four years of sacrifice finally paid off.
Marcus had grown up on a cattle ranch outside Tulsa. His father was still the foreman there, sixty-four years old, up at 4 AM, working cattle in weather that would kill most men. Marcus had learned to ride before he could read. Learned that delayed work meant dead cattle. Learned that you solved problems with your hands and your back and your stubborn refusal to quit.
He’d been a cowboy. A real one. Not the hat-and-boots kind you saw at country bars in Fort Lauderdale, but the kind who’d castrated bulls and pulled calves and mended fences in the August heat until his skin cracked and bled.
Wrestling had been his ticket out. State champion at 171 pounds, good enough to catch the eye of a Coast Guard Academy recruiter. His father had driven him to New London in a truck held together by rust and prayer, shook his hand at the gate, and said three words: Make it count.
Marcus had made it count.
He’d met Sarah at The Rusty Anchor, a dive bar near the Academy where cadets went to escape. She was at Connecticut College with her cousin Jennifer. Two sorority sisters who’d wandered in on a Thursday night looking for cheap beer and bad decisions. Marcus made her laugh so hard she snorted her drink. By the time he graduated, they were inseparable. Jennifer was dating his roommate Edward, which meant the four of them spent every weekend together. Family before they were family.
They’d gotten married two weeks after graduation—June 14, 2003, a small ceremony at the ranch. His father had worn a suit for the first time in thirty years. Sarah’s parents had flown in from Connecticut, clearly wondering what their Ivy-bound daughter saw in an Oklahoma cowboy. But they’d seen it by the end of the weekend. The same thing Sarah saw. The same thing everyone eventually saw: Marcus Webb didn’t quit.
The Coast Guard sent them to Kodiak, Alaska. Two years on a remote island in the Gulf of Alaska, population 6,000, where the nearest Target was a two-hour flight away. Sarah had deferred Stanford for a year to come with him—she wasn’t starting a marriage with a two-year separation. They lived in base housing, watched the northern lights from their back porch, and learned to be married in a place where there was nothing to do but be together.
Marcus worked search and rescue coordination, but the real education happened after hours. He’d brought a laptop and taught himself to code in the long Alaskan winters—dark by 4 PM, nothing but time. He built tools for the base: a better scheduling system, a parts inventory tracker, small utilities that solved real problems. By the time they left Kodiak, he had a portfolio of working software and a certainty that he wanted to build things for a living.
His last three years of service were in San Francisco, port security and maritime law enforcement. Sarah was at Stanford by then, close enough for weekends. She dragged him to startup mixers in Palo Alto, introduced him to founders who saw his side projects and didn’t care about his uniform. The Valley was hungry for engineers who could actually build things.
When his five-year commitment ended in 2008, Marcus had options. Four startups made offers based on his side projects. He took the one that felt most like building something real.
It wasn’t.
The next twelve years were a blur of startup chaos. Dev #1 at a company that flamed out in eighteen months. First engineering manager at another that made it to Series B before the founders imploded. Director of Platform at a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. MJ was born in 2010. Isaiah in 2013. Each time Marcus told Sarah this was the one. Each time he was wrong.
By 2018, he’d spent ten years betting on other people’s visions. Six startups. Six failures. Each time he’d taken less money for more equity, believed he could build something that mattered, and watched it fall apart.
Soren recruited him with the pitch that always works on tired startup veterans: stability. Senior Software Development Engineer, then Senior Manager within a year. The money was real. The stock vested on schedule. The health insurance was excellent. His shoulders dropped two inches the day the first direct deposit hit.
He hated it.
Two years in the Valley, watching his RSUs vest while the commute ate his soul. Sitting in meetings, staring at screens, making more money in a month than the ranch made in a year. But he wasn’t building anything. He was maintaining. Optimizing. Playing defense. The cowboy who’d grown up solving problems with his hands had become a cog in a machine.
Then Sarah got the call from the Garlands.
An old Florida family wanted her to run their charitable trust. $120,000 a year, two days a week—enough to stay in the game while being home for the boys. It was the kind of opportunity you didn’t turn down. In summer 2020, they sold the Bay Area house at the peak of the market, rolled the equity into a four-bedroom in Coral Ridge—one of those old Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods where the houses had yards and the streets had sidewalks—and started over.
Marcus figured he’d find a remote job, maybe another big tech company. Instead, he went to a local startup meetup in Fort Lauderdale—just to see what was out there. That’s where he met Kyle Mercer and Darren Choi, two guys with a PHP app and a dream.
Marcus was done playing it safe. He was ready to bet on himself again.
And he’d bet everything.
When Marcus walked into Axiom in early 2021, the company had two customers and $30,000 in annual recurring revenue. The entire tech stack was a PHP app running on the free tier of a cloud hosting platform. Kyle was still working his day job. Darren was coding in his spare bedroom between consulting gigs.
Sarah thought he was crazy. But Marcus saw something Kyle and Darren couldn’t execute alone: the best product in a $40 billion market, built by founders who couldn’t scale. Two customers and a PHP app, but those two customers loved it. The product worked. It just needed someone who could actually build a team. Marcus could do that. He knew he could do that.
They offered him twelve percent of the company. Twelve percent of nothing. But Marcus saw what it could become.
The problem was money. They needed to hire their first real development team. Kyle and Darren were tapped out. VCs wouldn’t fund a company with no revenue and no senior management.
So Marcus did something he’d never done before. He walked into the bank and took out an equity loan.
The Bay Area house had been their foundation. $800,000 when they sold it in 2020, after a decade of appreciation and mortgage payments—that was $300,000 in equity. They’d rolled $200,000 into the Fort Lauderdale house and paid off the last $120,000 of Sarah’s college loans. Finally free of that debt, thirteen years after graduation. It had felt like they were building something permanent.
Then Kyle and Darren called.
The cash reserves went first. Then the $50,000 equity loan against the new house. Sarah signed the papers with shaking hands. Then the retirement accounts—his 401(k) from Soren, cashed out with the early withdrawal penalty; Sarah’s modest IRA. All of it poured into Axiom during the two years he took no salary, surviving on her trust income and rotating 0% balance transfers between credit cards.
Everything they’d built. Gone. Converted into shares of a company that barely existed.
That money hired the first five engineers. Derek Huang and Prakash Venkataraman were the ones who stayed. Derek was the ambitious one, hungry, always looking for the next level. Prakash was the steady hand, a veteran architect who’d seen three companies fail and wanted to build one that wouldn’t. They were Marcus’s people.
Those engineers built the features that landed the first enterprise customer. That customer’s logo went on the pitch deck that raised the Series A.
And Marcus had been right. That was the thing. He’d been right.
Four years later, Axiom had 400 engineers, $240 million in annual recurring revenue, and a billion-dollar valuation. The PHP app had become an enterprise platform. The two-person startup had become a company preparing to go public.
But Marcus’s 12% hadn’t stayed 12%.
The Series A diluted him to 9%. Series B brought him to 6.5%. Series C to 4%. The Series D down round, when Blackwood Capital came in with rescue terms and pushed out the founders, crushed him to 2%. Employee pool expansions took another bite. They’d issued him additional shares over the years—performance bonuses, retention grants—but none of it made up for the brutal math of dilution.
Now he held 1.4% of a company valued at $950 million. Thirteen million dollars on paper.
Sometimes, late at night, Marcus did the math he tried not to do. If he’d kept that original 12%? At $950 million? That was $114 million. Enough to never work again. Enough for his grandchildren to never work again.
Instead: $13 million. Still life-changing, if it held. But a fraction of what might have been. Big money had become small money, one funding round at a time, each dilution dressed up as “growth” and “opportunity” while his stake shrank and shrank.
He still drove the twelve-year-old minivan they’d bought when Isaiah was born. MJ’s college was four years away, and Marcus had no idea how they’d pay for it if the IPO didn’t work. The 529 accounts they’d started when the boys were babies sat empty, raided in year two when the credit card juggling ran out. They still owed $50,000 on the equity loan.
He’d mortgaged his family’s future on this bet. The house. The retirement. The college funds. Four years of hundred-hour weeks and missed basketball games and dinners cut short. All of it riding on July 6, 2026.
If the IPO failed, if the stock cratered, if $13 million became $3 million, he’d have risked everything, built a billion-dollar company, and ended up no better than if he’d just stayed at Soren. Four years of sacrifice for nothing.
That was why he couldn’t afford to take risks now. Not with the IPO fifteen months away.
He’d seen what happened to founders who rocked the boat. Kyle and Darren had built Axiom from nothing, and Blackwood had pushed them out the moment they became inconvenient. Advisory role. That’s what you got for creating something. Marcus wasn’t even a founder, which meant he was even more expendable. One wrong move, one “unnecessary risk,” one experiment that spooked the board, and he’d be out too. Watching his equity vest from the sidelines while someone else rang the bell.
After the IPO, he told himself. After the IPO, we can experiment. After the IPO, we can take risks. After the IPO, this all becomes worth it.
The phrase had become a mantra. A prayer. A way to defer every hard question until the finish line was behind him.
What if I’m wrong?
The thought surfaced sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and he was staring at projections that all pointed up and to the right. He’d push it down. Not now. Not when he was this close.
First, he had to get there. Then he had to survive the lockup. Then, maybe, he could finally exhale.
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 – 8:00 AM – Executive Conference Room
The leadership sync started at eight.
Catherine Bell sat at the head of the long conference table, Marcus to her right. The CEO ran these meetings with the efficiency of a metronome. Fifteen minutes per agenda item, no tangents, no philosophical discussions. She’d been brought in three months ago during the Series D to fix what the founders couldn’t: a company growing faster than its leadership could manage.
Catherine was good at what she did. Two successful exits. A reputation for execution. The board trusted her implicitly. She spoke their language. ARR growth, gross margins, CAC payback periods. Technology was a black box that produced metrics. As long as the metrics were clean, she didn’t care what happened inside the box.
That was Marcus’s domain. He ran the technical organization. She ran everything else. Three months in, they’d found their rhythm.
The agenda was the same as it had been for months: Q4 close-out, Q1 projections, IPO timeline review. Clean quarters, predictable growth, no surprises.
Derek Huang, VP of Engineering, cleared his throat. Twenty-nine, ambitious, one of the first five engineers Marcus hired after Axiom stopped being just the founders and a prototype. Derek had the hunger of someone who’d built himself from nothing and wasn’t done climbing. His options would fully vest in April 2026.
But lately, Derek had been increasingly agitated.
“Before we get into the quarterly review,” Derek said, “I wanted to raise something that keeps coming up with the team.”
Marcus nodded. “Go ahead.”
“AI development tools. GitHub Copilot, Claude, GPT-4 for code generation. The team keeps asking about them. Our competitors are starting to announce AI initiatives. Developers are asking questions.” He paused. “What’s our position?”
Across the table, Prakash Venkataraman leaned forward. Principal Architect, the technical conscience of the company. Another one of the original five. Prakash was older than most of the team, a veteran of three enterprise software companies who’d taken a chance on Marcus’s vision when it was just a PHP app and a dream. He had the calm demeanor of someone who’d seen technology cycles come and go, which made his support for Derek’s question all the more notable.
“Marcus,” Prakash said, “the developers are going to use these tools whether we sanction them or not. I’d rather we get ahead of it. Define guidelines, evaluate options, build an AI strategy. Shouldn’t take more than a few months to have a real plan.”
Marcus set down his coffee cup. He’d been expecting this conversation. He’d been dreading it, too.
Catherine cut in before Marcus could respond.
“Is not having AI coding tools going to directly cause us to lose customers in the next fifteen months?” Her voice was flat, analytical. “Can you prove that?”
Derek hesitated. “I can’t prove…”
“Then this conversation is over.” Catherine looked up from her laptop, her eyes cold. “Let me be very clear. No unauthorized AI development tools. None. I am not updating our S-1 risk factors because some engineer wanted to use ChatGPT to write code.” She looked around the table slowly. “Anyone caught using unauthorized AI tools in their development workflow will be terminated. Immediately. And they’ll forfeit their unvested equity.”
The room went still.
“We’re fifteen months from the bell,” Catherine continued. “Fifteen months from the liquidity event that makes everyone in this room wealthy. I will not let experimental technology introduce variance into our metrics. I will not explain to the SEC why our development process changed mid-registration. And I will not watch this IPO fail because someone couldn’t follow instructions.”
She turned to Marcus. “Anything to add?”
What Catherine didn’t say — what she’d never say in front of the board — was that she’d watched this exact pattern destroy a company before. Helix Health, her second exit. Their CTO had approved a last-minute platform migration nine months before closing. “Just modernizing the stack.” Three months later, two major bugs in production. Revenue restatement. The acquirer walked. She’d spent six weeks on the phone with lawyers while 400 people lost their jobs.
She wasn’t stupid about technology. She was strategic about timing. There was a difference, and she was tired of people not understanding it.
The hard truth was simpler: she didn’t trust Marcus to manage the risk. He was a builder, not a governor. Give him permission to experiment and the experiment would consume everything. She’d seen his type before — brilliant engineers who confused motion with progress and speed with control. Fifteen months was not long. The margin for error was not wide. And the consequences of getting it wrong fell on her, not on Derek Huang with his unvested options and his impatience.
So yes, she’d been harsh. She’d rather be harsh and employed than kind and explaining to the SEC why Axiom’s development metrics showed unexplained variance during the quiet period.
Marcus leaned forward. “Look, I get it. The tools are exciting. I’ve played with them.” He spread his hands. “But we’re not some legacy company trying to catch up. We ARE the transformation. Meridian’s still running green screens. TransGlobal can’t spell ‘cloud.’” A few chuckles around the table.
He stood and walked to the window, warming to his point. “Here’s what everyone forgets. The Agile transformation movement is in its twentieth year. DORA metrics, DevOps, both over a decade old. And most enterprises still can’t do basic CI/CD.” He turned back to face the room. “Things don’t evolve quickly in the enterprise. That’s why startups like us get so valuable. We’re already where they’re trying to go. We don’t need to chase the next shiny thing. We ARE the shiny thing.”
“So we just… wait?” Derek asked.
“We execute. We ship. We go public.” Marcus sat back down. “What message does it send if we announce some big AI initiative right before our IPO? ‘Hey investors, we’re not sure our platform is good enough, so we’re scrambling to adopt whatever’s trending on Hacker News.’“
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Derek cut in.
“I know. But that’s how it reads.”
Derek started to respond, but Catherine cut him off.
“IPO or bust. That’s the priority. Everything else waits.”
The Blackwood partners around the table nodded in agreement. They’d invested $150 million at a valuation that only made sense if the IPO succeeded. They weren’t paying for experimentation.
Prakash caught Derek’s eye across the table. Neither said anything. What was there to say? The decision had been made. The threat had been issued. Fifteen months of their equity was on the line.
The meeting lasted another ninety minutes. Clean quarters. Predictable growth. IPO timeline on track.
Marcus walked back to his office feeling like he’d handled it well. The team had concerns. That was natural. But he’d addressed them. Catherine had been clear. The board was aligned. Everyone understood the stakes.
Forfeit their unvested equity. That would keep the engineers in line. Nobody was going to risk years of stock options to play with ChatGPT.
He was winning. He’d already won.
Everything else was noise.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 – 2:00 PM – Axiom Boardroom
The board meeting at the end of April was supposed to be routine.
Axiom’s board was dominated by Blackwood Capital, who’d led the Series D down round. Lower valuation, rescue terms, more control. The original founders had been pushed out as part of that deal. Kyle to an “advisory” role that meant nothing. Darren with a secondary buyout that let him cash out $8M.
The partners around the table weren’t aggressive anymore. They were defensive. Every decision ran through one filter: Does this protect the IPO timeline?
Victoria Hartwell, the lead independent director, was the exception. She’d been a COO at two enterprise software companies and had a reputation for asking the questions nobody wanted to answer.
“Marcus,” she said, during the strategic update section, “I’ve been reading some market analysis.” She pulled up a report on her iPad. “More enterprises are using AI to build their software. Not just adding AI features. Using AI in the development process itself. McKinsey says it’s accelerating. Gartner says it’s inevitable. Our competitors are all in the conversation.” She paused. “We’re not. What’s our response?”
Marcus had prepared for this. He’d spent an hour rehearsing his answer with his communications director.
“Victoria, we already have AI. ML team, data science, predictive features. Route optimization, demand forecasting. Some good people.” He leaned back. “What you’re reading about is using AI to build software. Different thing. And honestly? Why would I introduce experimental tools into our dev process right before an IPO? That’s how you ship bugs, miss deadlines, spook the underwriters.”
He clicked to the next slide. “Our competitors are still figuring out cloud. We’re already there.”
The board nodded. They liked this answer. It was confident without being reckless. It acknowledged the trend without committing to expensive experimentation.
“And the timeline?” Victoria pressed.
“After the IPO. Capital, profile, room to breathe. We can do a proper evaluation then. Right now?” He shrugged. “Execute the plan.”
Victoria leaned back in her chair. “I’ve seen companies lose market position because they were watching the finish line instead of the road.”
“I hear you. But fifteen months, we’re at the NYSE. Then we can have this conversation properly.”
Kwame Okonkwo shifted in his chair. He was the newest board member, former CTO with digital transformation experience at two Fortune 500s.
“For what it’s worth, I think that deserves more than ‘post-IPO.’” He glanced at Marcus. “Competitors experimenting now will have fifteen months of learning by the time you start.”
Marcus kept his voice even. “Kwame, with respect, you’ve been on this board three months.”
“Long enough to recognize the pattern.”
Catherine cut in before it escalated. “We’re aligned. Let’s move to financials.”
The Blackwood partners nodded. Three votes. That was what mattered.
Later, Kwame caught Marcus in the hallway.
“I wasn’t trying to…”
“I know.”
“It’s just, I’ve watched companies do this. ‘After the acquisition.’ ‘After the integration.’ Always ‘after’ something.”
“We’re not those companies.”
Kwame looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.” He walked away.
Marcus went back to his office. Kwame would learn. They all learned eventually.
Thursday, May 1, 2025 – 11:00 PM – Marcus’s Home Office, Fort Lauderdale
Marcus sat in his home office with his laptop open.
He told himself he was reviewing the quarterly projections. But he kept finding himself on competitive intelligence sites, searching for news about Meridian Freight.
The results were sparse. Their last product announcement had been eight months ago. A minor feature update to their legacy platform. Their conference presence had evaporated. Their job postings were minimal.
He pulled up their stock chart. A flat line stretching back a decade. $9.12 today. $9.08 a year ago. $8.95 five years ago. The four percent dividend was the only reason anyone held the stock. Steady income for investors who’d given up on growth.
Marcus scrolled through their website. The design looked dated, the messaging stale. “Enterprise Freight Solutions” was the tagline. No mention of AI, no mention of cloud, no mention of anything modern.
That’s what a dying company looks like, he thought. Paying dividends because they’ve got nothing else to offer.
He pulled up their company page online. Their engineering team seemed smaller than it had been a year ago. The VP of Engineering had left. Two senior architects had departed. The profile photos that remained were mostly older, less likely to be the kind of talent that built cutting-edge systems.
Classic death spiral. Talent leaves, product stagnates, customers start looking elsewhere. I’ve seen it a dozen times.
He checked their latest quarterly earnings. Revenue flat. Margins steady but not growing. The analyst commentary was brutal: “Meridian continues to serve its existing customer base but shows no signs of innovation or growth. We maintain our HOLD rating. The dividend remains the primary value proposition.”
Marcus closed the laptop and went to bed, satisfied.
Meridian was exactly what he thought they were: a legacy company coasting on existing contracts, paying shareholders to stay patient while the business slowly wound down. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to watch.
He’d check again after the IPO. By then, they’d probably be even further behind.
Saturday, May 3, 2025 – 9:00 AM – Webb Family Home, Kitchen
Sarah found Marcus at the kitchen table, reviewing board materials.
“You missed MJ’s game last night.”
“I know. The board prep…”
“He scored twelve points. His coach said it was his best game of the season.” Sarah sat down across from him. “He stopped asking if you’d be there.”
Marcus set down his coffee. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m not trying to be fair. I’m telling you what’s happening.” She looked at him. “You came home from spring break talking about nothing but the IPO. Edward was asking questions, getting curious about something. You were checking your phone.”
“Fourteen months, Sarah. Fourteen months and all of this becomes worth it.”
“You said fifteen months at the spring dinner. You said a year before that.” She took a sip of her own coffee. “The boys are growing up. That’s not waiting for the IPO.”
“This is different.”
“You always say that.”
He didn’t have an answer. Or maybe he did, but it would’ve started an argument neither of them had time for.
Sarah stood. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about the business. I don’t understand half of what you do. But I understand that MJ’s stopped expecting you to show up. Isaiah barely talks to you anymore.” She paused at the doorway. “That’s what worries me.”
She left. Marcus stared at the board materials until the words blurred.
Sunday, May 4, 2025 – 1:47 AM – Marcus’s Home Office
Marcus couldn’t sleep.
Sarah’s words kept circling. MJ’s stopped expecting you to show up. He’d dismissed her concern the way he dismissed most concerns lately, filed it under “deal with after the IPO” and moved on. But something about the conversation had lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable.
He sat at his desk in the dark, laptop casting blue light across his face. The house was silent. Sarah and the boys had been asleep for hours.
He opened a blank document. Typed a heading: Where does work get stuck?
It was the kind of question Edward would ask. The kind of question Sophia had been describing at the spring dinner. The teams that struggled were the ones who didn’t know what they were building. What was Axiom building? What was stopping them from building it faster?
He started typing.
Feature request to deployment. What’s the actual timeline?
He pulled up Jira. Looked at the last three major features they’d shipped. Traced them backward through the system.
The average was fourteen weeks.
Fourteen weeks from “we should build this” to “customers can use it.” He’d known the number was long, but he’d never actually mapped it. Never asked where the time went.
He started breaking it down.
Requirements gathering: two weeks. Waiting for product committee approval: one week, sometimes two. Design review: another week. Sprint planning: if you missed the window, you waited two more weeks. Development: three weeks on average. Code review: a week in the queue, sometimes longer. QA: two weeks. Security review: one week. Deployment approvals: another week.
Fourteen weeks. Maybe four of them were actual work. The rest was waiting. Queues. Approvals. Committees that met on fixed schedules regardless of urgency.
Marcus stared at the screen.
This was exactly what Edward had been talking about. What Sophia had described. The process was optimized for control, not speed. Every handoff was a checkpoint. Every checkpoint was a delay.
He could fix this. He could map the value stream properly, identify the bottlenecks, streamline the approvals that didn’t add value. It would take effort. It would require changing how teams worked. Catherine wouldn’t like it. The board would ask questions.
But if he didn’t fix it, what happened when someone else did? When a competitor figured out how to ship in seven weeks instead of fourteen? When the market moved faster than Axiom could follow?
His cursor blinked at the end of the document.
He thought about the IPO. Fourteen months away. Clean quarters. No surprises. The board wanted predictability. Catherine wanted metrics that told a simple story. Any significant process change would introduce variance. Variance spooked investors. Spooked investors meant a lower valuation. A lower valuation meant his equity was worth less. His family’s security was worth less.
The math was simple. Fix the process now and risk the IPO. Fix it after and risk nothing.
After the IPO, he told himself. After the IPO, we can do this properly. After the IPO, there’s time.
He highlighted the document. All of it. The analysis, the breakdown, the questions he’d finally started asking.
He pressed delete.
The screen went blank. Marcus closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a long time.
He knew what he’d just done. He’d seen the problem. He’d understood it. And he’d chosen to look away.
It’s not looking away, he told himself. It’s prioritizing. There’s a difference.
He went back to bed.
Friday, May 16, 2025 – 7:15 PM – Marcus’s Home Office
The text exchange with Edward happened on a Friday evening.
Marcus: Hey brother. How’s Miami treating you?
Edward: Good. Been experimenting with some new stuff at work. You?
Marcus: IPO prep is brutal but exciting. Board meeting went well last week.
Edward: Glad to hear it.
Edward: Hey, we should talk sometime about what I’ve been working on. Some interesting results around the AI stuff we discussed at spring break.
Marcus: Definitely. After the IPO, let’s grab dinner. Lots to catch up on.
Edward: Sure. After the IPO.
Marcus pocketed his phone. He’d respond properly later. After the board meeting, after the quarterly close, after the IPO. There was always time for Edward.
He turned back to his laptop and the projections that would carry him to the NYSE.