Young Adeline had turned her head to the mean girls as she proudly said, “My mom made it.”
The memory made Adeline laugh, how large that event had seemed back then. Charlie was a football star, a high school heartthrob, and about the hottest thing on the block at the time. They hadn’t been as close as siblings, more like cousins, and Adeline had never been more thankful than that moment.
The memory also brought a stab of remorse for what was going to happen to him.
*
Back in Santa Barbara, Adeline began the next phase of building the future. That began with San Andreas Capital.
She registered the domain name sanandreas.cc (she figured using the cc domain extension emphasized the firm’s tagline: compassionate capital).
She put the word out that she was looking to make investments in early-stage private companies, but she didn’t wait for pitches to arrive over the transom. She went after the companies she knew San Andreas had invested in. She also avoided start-ups that were too high profile, even though she knew they would succeed. She still needed to stay under the radar.
Her first meeting was with a Korean biotech company called Syntran. The CEO was perhaps ten years older than Adeline. Her name was Hana Kim, and she had been born in Korea, educated in the US, and returned to her native land to earn an MD, PhD, and start a company with a lot of promise—and a huge need for capital.
The woman sat in the conference room of the small office in Santa Barbara, a slide with statistics displayed on the projection screen behind her.
“This year, in 2014, the number of people waiting for an organ transplant reached an all-time high at 124,000. But the number of people waiting isn’t why Syntran is in business. We’re in business because of the number of people who die in the US every day while waiting for a transplant. That number is seventeen. We’re in business because we want it to be zero: here in the United States and around the world. We’re going to make that a reality by providing synthetic, transplantable organs.”
Adeline liked the CEO. She didn’t much like the company’s valuation or the terms attached to the preferred stock being offered, but she accepted it. As Warren Buffett had once said, it was better to get a piece of a great company at a good price than a good company at a great price. She sensed that Syntran was a great company.
The price she could live with.
Increasingly, what she couldn’t live with was the loneliness of her existence. In a way, she felt like her father must have in the Triassic: alone, stranded in time.
That Christmas, as she stared at the fake tree in the bay window of her small home, she decided that she would remedy that in 2015. She couldn’t stand being alone anymore. She knew Absolom would be founded in three years, but she didn’t have three more years of solitude in her.
It was time to get out. Even if it broke the future.
FIFTY-ONE
In January of 2015, Adeline flew to San Francisco to attend a start-up pitch competition. A small contribution to the event had bought a sponsorship for San Andreas Capital and an invite to the finals and the happy hour networking session after.
The event took place on a Saturday night, in a hotel ballroom, with a large stage and a screen almost as large. The energy was electric, a mix of nerves and hopes and a feeling like futures could turn on the success or failure of these moments.
The audience included start-up founders and investors and students, and a smattering of bloggers. The geek factor was high in the crowd. Most in attendance would rather talk about the future and extremely obscure details of their work than themselves. Adeline felt strangely at home.
One presentation midway through the night impressed her more than the others. For its founder’s style more than the company’s substance—which she knew little about.
The company was called speedio, and the founder and CEO was standing on the stage, hands held out, his voice monotone.
“Hi, everyone. We’re speedio.”
On the projector screen, a picture appeared of a thin, toned man walking on a beach wearing nothing but a Speedo.
The presenter faked a pained expression. “No, not that kind of Speedo. Speed-i-o. As in speed.io—your website’s only hope of survival.”
The image changed to a picture of Keanu Reeves on a bus, leaning over Sandra Bullock, who was driving.
“Since I know you pack of animals have the attention span of a rabid squirrel on meth, I’m going to lead with this: if your website drops below a certain speed, your whole business blows up—like Sandra Bullock’s bus in an amazing movie that we’re going to pretend has no sequel.”
On the screen, the image changed to a bar graph.
The presenter shrugged. “I hook you with memes. I close you with graphs. Here’s what this one means: it’s the bounce rate on the average home page on the web. For pages that take two seconds to load, on average, 9.6 percent of visitors bounce—or leave. If your page takes four seconds to load, you’ve lost 17.1 percent. Six seconds.”
He inhaled sharply.
“I don’t like to even think about this fact, but I will use it to get your money. At six seconds, 27.4 percent of visitors roll out. Gone. Poof. Probably for good. There’s very likely an Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, Gone in Sixty Seconds joke in there somewhere but I’m too lazy to dig for it, and I’m already seeing some glassy eyes, which means that, sadly—and ironically—the presentation for a company that speeds up information delivery isn’t going fast enough.”
That brought a bout of laughter from the crowd and sent the guy clicking forward a few slides. “If you’ve got technical questions, hit me up in the Q and A. I’m here for you. For now, let’s just keep it simple: we speed up websites. Fast websites keep their audience and make money. Slow ones—well, no one knows what happens to slow web sites because no one knows about them. We have a free tier for small websites, and we charge for large sites. We’re generating revenue, and we need money to scale ’cause it turns out making your website really fast takes a ton of servers and almost as many coders wearing very huge headphones and drinking very skinny Red Bulls.”
The next slide showed headshots of the company’s founders.
“Here’s the requisite ‘our team is awesome’ slide with credentials that prove we’re legit enough to date your rescue dog.”
The image changed to bar graphs and years written under them. “And finally, our total addressable market is huge. As in, the whole internet needs to go faster, and we get paid to do that.”
The final slide was a picture of a black man sitting at a very old computer terminal. Adeline didn’t understand it. Apparently, some others didn’t either.
“For those of you meme ignoramuses out there, this is Richard Pryor in the movie Superman III, which taught us everything we need to know about high finance: if you take fractions of a penny a bunch of times, you get a whole bunch of pennies and eventually dimes, dollars, and gold-pressed latinum, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what we do—we make a very, very small amount of money every time we make a web page load faster. Thus, the Superman III business model. And with that, I cordially, unabashedly, while making eye contact, invite you to deposit your cash money into my Speedo.”
The last line brought a wave of laughter and applause. As the questions began, Adeline decided that the CEO of speedio was smart and funny and probably a little overconfident and all the things she had been missing in her life. His name was Nathan Hill, and Adeline didn’t know if he was part of Daniele’s past, but she decided that he was going to be part of her future, even if it broke causality, because she couldn’t take being alone anymore.
For that reason, she sat through the Q and A, unsure what some of the questions meant.
“So,” a venture capitalist in the front row said, “I get how you speed up static assets—images, flash video, Java applets—but how are you handling dynamically generated pages? Say, an ASP.NET web form, for example. The ViewState is going to be different for potentially every visitor.”