Even with some improvements, it took several hours for Scott to decode what Melinda had been talking about. He had a feeling he was missing something important to make decoding easier.
After reading through what she had said he realized that poor sweet woman was actually a ruthless shark. He should have known better given her plans to perform nonconsensual brain surgery on her neighbor!
First of all, she said she would not accept the CEO position until he came up with a way to split her conversation into intelligible streams in “near real time”. Sure, that would be great but he had spent hours on this already and didn’t have a clue how to deliver this impossible request.
Then she proceeded to spell out how she would receive 10,000 shares as compensation for her first year's efforts. She then listed a proposed compensation in shares for other levels of employees going down to Junior level talents at a whopping 10 shares per year. That greedy hag! Furthermore she demanded an allowance for housing, clothing and food at $3000 per month, to be paid starting next month even if they had not yet secured any investors.
There were some other demands she made, primarily related to transporting her around to meetings. All of this was the focus of one of her dialog streams.
He had started labeling her parallel personalities. There was one he thought of as a mad doctor - this was the one who was still planning to sneak up on Carl in the parking lot and do a quick brain surgery before the cops arrived.
This other personality he called the Shark. Maybe she had business sense, but she was definitely not a sweet old lady.
Another stream decoded from her babbling described ideas for putting together their initial business plan proposal. She said having a big idea with a lot of upside potential was a key component of landing an early investor. With a little snark, she mentioned that pie in the sky ideas had convinced some promising young talents with world beating technology to take a risk hiring a crazy old lady. Why that little…
She explained that big ideas might be enough to convince young talent to take a risk, but you needed something more substantial to land someone who actually had money to lose.
It boiled down to a few requirements. Primarily, you had to have a believable short and mid term plan of action. Believable meant you needed details like how much things would cost and how much time each step would take. Everyone understood things didn’t always go to plan, but demonstrating a solid, detailed plan could convince someone the expected overruns were a manageable risk. Contingency plans in case of overruns were also appreciated. In short, you make the case that you were only missing the money needed to execute the plan.
Second, you need to understand your market. How much would you expect to sell if you plan executed on time or a little late. What were comparable goods or services worth? Would you impact the supply stack or were there other factors likely to change the demand? Who are your competitors and how might they react to your entry into the market?
Finally, what kind of equity would the investor receive in return for supplying capital. Your initial analysis of supply and demand could establish a value for the company. You can also assign a value related to expected growth. A typical investor would want slightly less than 50% of a company that did not have any provable revenue if they wanted to just sign a check and not spend effort guiding the company... Investors who expect more than 50% ownership expect to more actively manage the company.
Both had their advantages - if an investor wanted controlling interest, they typically had time and experience to contribute in addition to their money. There was a risk that they had money but an overinflated opinion of their contributions. In either case, they could waste significant time and energy if they were hands on. It was important to find someone who could either help build the business or would leave them alone.
Melinda went on to say that initial equity would likely be based on how much capital needed, profit and growth expected. She then explained that she felt a pool of 1 million shares should be split between the 3 original partners and the initial investor, while the dollar amount could be determined once had the other details better defined.
Oh… so maybe she wasn’t totally greedy. Scott, Matt and Barry would split ownership with the investor so they would presumably have a lot more than Melinda’s 10,000 shares per year. What a sweet old lady! He thought this personality was like a kindly professor who had a little sass.
Then the next stream of thought started. This one just started listing tasks the boys needed to get started on. She allowed she didn’t know how productive they were so expected an update after a week to get a better idea of time scheduling.
Scott was supposed to focus on training and refining his crazy lady translator (OK, his term for it, not hers!). Matt was supposed to research strip mining and shaft mining and see if he had any ideas for robotics that could assist with this in undersea conditions. Sort of a research and general brainstorm without going into any technical design. Barry was supposed to research cost effective materials for building corrosion and pressure resistant equipment. She expected a list of materials for different purposes, costs to acquire or produce and how readily available they were.
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This personality was a bossy manager. She seemed to imply she was taking it easy on them despite the fact that they were all full-time students and had little to no experience doing any of this! Would he call this one the Tyrant? Dictator?
“The Doctor” personality did not seem too engaged in their business planning. She commented that she had seen him giving Carl the water and sandwich and found it amusing what he did with it. She mentioned that it would be really great if you boys would build her an underwater laboratory where she could study medicinal benefits of deep-sea animals and plankton. She also expressed delight in the idea that international waters would not be subject to various medical laws or the Geneva convention. She had a whole bunch of ideas she wanted to try with genetic engineering and medical implants that would be frowned on in industrialized countries. She considered this short-sighted political pandering.
Yeah, “The Doctor” was a little scary. He resolved that if they ever helped built her underwater lab, he would make sure to never be in there alone with her!
Finally, a final stream of conversation seemed to involve a lady who was insisting that Scott drive her around shopping so she could look like a proper CEO. She went into great detail on what cosmetics, hair styles, clothes she thought would look good on her. She also debated what look to go with for Scott - were they going for a young, eccentric genius partner or unobtrusive assistant? Scott wondered why he should look like an eccentric genius. If anyone was eccentric it was Miss Five Brains. Also, what world was she living in where she thought it was a good idea for her to meet a rich potential investor in person?
Exhausted from reading this strange mix of insanity and possibly genius, Scott sighed and opened up Glitch_HR. He added Melinda White as the CEO. Even though her “Shark” personality hadn’t agreed to the position, he really couldn’t picture anyone else running this clown show.
He opened the training section and skimmed through the first few pages looking for anything that would catch his interest. On page 3 of the results there was a paper on tracking faces in digital video. That sounded interesting. He knew they used this in facial recognition to handle people looking in different directions. Also, there were some apps that would put cat ears, mustaches or silly hats on people. Yeah, he would never waste any time playing with that feature!
Reading through it gave some similar examples and explained how to train code to compensate for different orientations of a human face. Interesting stuff, but he didn’t see how this would help build an undersea mining operation. Working through a few other training recommendations, Scott ignored his regular class homework and went to bed.
In the middle of the night, he woke up with a start. Melinda kept suddenly looking in different directions while she talked. Was there any correlation between this and which personality was talking? He couldn’t sleep and spent four hours implementing the code that tracked human face orientation from video. It would then spit it out as a timestamped data stream. Now he just needed to record video as well as audio when talking to his mean, crazy boss.
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The next day Scott tried to go to some classes. They seemed even more boring than usual, but he was pleased to see he had gotten a solid A on his history class. He only lost a few points on his essay. His teacher’s comment was that he got the facts and dates right, but he didn’t seem to understand how important it all was. Well, that seemed like a fair criticism - he honestly had no idea why anyone would think that stuff was important!
In Dr. Chu’s class, everyone got their tests back and there was a lot of grumbling. A few people looked like they were about to start crying. He heard a couple guys behind him wondering what the curve would be. Apparently, Dr. “Puddles” Chu had been forced to grade on a curve – legend said his first year he failed every single student. The Dean had to make him adjust the grades so half the kids would pass.
Scott still hadn’t received his test when Chu waved it around in front of the class. “Scott Henderson scored a 100 on this test. He is the reason there will not be a curve on this test.” Chu handed Scott his test with an evil little cackle. Seriously! This was obviously revenge for the Puddles incident. Blaming him for failing most of the class seemed like it was straight out of the prison warden intimidation handbook.
Scott’s first thought was to panic - surely the other inmates would teach him a lesson for being so uppity. Then he remembered this was a Sophomore level Computer Sciences - these guys would probably just take the battery out of his wireless mouse when he wasn’t around and consider the score settled.
Fortunately, his friend Matt had gotten an 85 on the test. He always seemed smarter than Scott. The guy hardly ever did any studying and usually got the best grades in class. They had taken the test before Matt had the chance to improve his skills with Glitch_HR skill training, so he would probably resume beating Scott at everything soon enough.
“Ouch Scott, Chu is really trying to get everyone to hate you!” Matt commiserated. A little quieter “Did you do that well because of Glitch?”
“Yeah, I learned so much more than I got from the actual class. Also, there were some brain training exercises from some Russian chick Nadia Kucharska. If you see any of her articles in the recommended list, you should give them a try.”
“Nice, she sounds hot. Did you google her?”
“Um, yeah. No pictures online. Apparently, she used to work for something called the Institute of Strategic Planning in Poland. About 20 years ago, then nothing. If I had to guess, she's probably older than 40.”
“Eww! Nevermind.”
“Anyway, all the articles she published were on dark web sites. I bet she is totally sharing government secrets or something. I guess we now have to worry about the Polish government coming after us in addition to the US government and the Russians.”
“Not to mention Dr. Chu’s class. I bet half the people in there hate you too.”