Sigh... Jesus, this company needs an overhaul.... and an old priest, and a young priest. SolCo, for one, wasn't the best name, to the point sure, but it didn't exactly roll off the tongue well, and there were a ton of other more pressing problems. They were based in California, and since we were heading that way anyway, it was natural to go ahead and stop in. Like most tech startups, they'd gone to Silicon Valley... and made a right mess of the whole thing from day one.

Let's focus on the good parts first. The product is good, and it does have potential. Essentially, they worked out a new way to layer the crystals that would allow for far higher power gains and a new more efficient power battery to match it. All of their designs had been properly patented. As well, the staff was enthusiastic, and deeply believed in what they were doing.... and that's it for the good parts.

The facilities weren't even close to ideal. There wasn't any room to expand the facility, jammed in amongst multiple other businesses, so even if it took off, they would essentially be locked to a certain level of business, with no ability to step up. They'd been deeply screwed on the lease as well, and gotten chained into a longer lease to where they couldn't really just upgrade facilities. The company's valuation had been way too high, and while that is good in some ways, it was way too much, with VC investors expecting frankly insane degrees of return on investment, and that was the main part that preceded the stock shorting on such a massive scale, as they saw what way the wind was blowing, and decided to get what profit they could on the way to cutting their losses. The exaggerated valuation had also gotten them screwed at practically every level of spending, facilities included, as the people selling to them saw them as a much larger entity, and got as much money as possible out of them. The management of the company was idealistic, but it held everything up, unwilling to compromise, and there was about one administrative position for every non-administrative position at this point. Not only was that inefficient, but the salaries attached to that were absurd, so to make a profit, they couldn't compete against larger companies at all, being pricier and slower.

You couldn't run a McDonald's like this, let alone a whole multi-million or billion-dollar enterprise. I mean, sweet mother of Christ, Portland Public Schools was a fundamentally more efficiently laid out bureaucracy than this, and they were screwed in their own way. If your private company is less efficiently laid out than a governmental department, you have fucked up in a special way. Their org chart looked like the meme conspiracy board from that one show. Despite my 1%, I couldn't understand what half of these positions even did... well, aside from getting in each other's way.

Then the stock itself. They'd put out too many shares, and while that could get you quick capital, unless you delivered, all you did was dilute your stock price and leave yourself deeply vulnerable. The people running the show had fully panicked, and made the situation worse at basically every turn.

Raj, who was 'CEO' of this, was a nice guy. Once he'd learned who I was, he hadn't talked down to me, just explaining things as he would any other investor, and addressed me directly rather than my father. He took me through the facilities as they were, and introduced me to people. But nice, and good leader weren't necessarily the same thing. It was good to listen to your subordinates, but for many of them, it was clear they didn't have respect for him as the leader, like him as they might.

Okay, let's handle the problems in order. The VCs were a problem, and I didn't want to have to deal with them. Fortunately, they were desperately trying to finish out their deal with the stocks, and the deadline for return was fast approaching. They had to cut a deal, so I cut them one: I would sell them back the stock at the original price they got it at, and in exchange, they would sever their ties with SolCo, and relinquish the stock shares back to me at the same point. The entire deal was rigged to make no money for anyone, but leave me with the stock. Really, they were only too happy to get out from under this whole thing and wanted to wash their hands of it, and I couldn't blame them on that count. Much as shorting stocks is a horrible practice, they had their own investors to answer to, and for some, they couldn't afford the raised price on any level. They were against the wall, and I was the only one offering them an out.

Okay, VCs down, let's work on the debt problem. They didn't have an insane level of debt, but that actually would have been better for them in the given situation. Much as it's nice to think that VCs are the superior option to loans, it just depends on the situation, who your VCs are, and a whole roster of things. I rounded up all the smaller debts, consolidating them into a single loan payment to a single bank, the same one I had my money in. They were only too happy to work with me, albeit through my dad, but the important point was that it was handled for the time being. It was like my 1% but in reverse. With multiple loans, the multiple payments and interests had stacked up far too quickly, required extra management, and generally just dragged down the entire enterprise for all involved.

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Now the shitty part... I had to lay off people. I talked with Dad about it for a long time, but the truth was there was no saving most of these jobs. They were completely superfluous, and there wasn't enough room for everyone. The secondary issue with this is that Raj would never let them go. They were like family to him, and his own nature worked against him. Brilliant guy, but he should've been the guy heading up the tech line, not running the company. It was a bit like Reaver in a way, in that Raj had been doing what he thought was the right thing to do, but ultimately, operating from an incredibly flawed mindset and the limitations of bad/incorrect information.

Being smart doesn't protect you from doing stupid things. From what I was seeing thus far, if you really wanted to see something get completely fucked, you needed a smart person. An idiot would run into a brick wall, go "Well that didn't fuckin' work!" and move on, but the smart person tries to envision how to further get past the brick wall. Depending on the degree of self-awareness and ego, the smart one could bring the whole wall down before they take a moment to realize that there was a door just around the corner, completely consumed in battering their way through the problem in front of them. The idiot, meanwhile, walked around the corner and took the door. Raj was really smart.

I voted him out as CEO. It wasn't difficult to do, but I hated it all the same. He'd founded this company and had dreams of what it could be, but reality was harsh here. He'd fundamentally screwed himself, and there was no other way out. Dad advised me to keep it as short as possible, both with the vote and with laying people off. It might sound more merciful to try and be kind, but the truth was, no one wanted to hear it when they were being let go, and even less so hear a bunch of what amounted to empty platitudes from their perspective. I set up severance packages, made sure benefits got extended for a bit, and made sure to have letters of recommendation for them.

As to the vote, the reality was that I was the quorum. I held 80% control of the stocks, and Raj held another 10%. The final 10% were small investors, including some employees who had bought stock in the beginning. Even if every single person there voted to keep Raj, my vote outweighed them all, by a wide berth. I felt like an asshole, but Dad was there building me back up. This would lead to a better future for all involved. If I didn't pull the trigger, I was condemning them to a slow and inexorable destruction. To quote Moneyball, "Would you rather take a bullet to the head, or two to the chest and bleed out?"

I had to take a break at one point and threw up in the bathroom. Dad offered to handle it, but I refused outright. I had to learn, I had to get used to it, and my 1% would see that I got there. I just didn't have the privilege of time to be a kid about this, not if I wanted my own ambitions to succeed. No matter how I looked at it, I would have to get a lot better at swimming with the sharks if I was going to navigate these waters. All well and good to want to be a good person, but at a certain point, you're just massaging your own ego at the cost of others.

With a more realistic outlay to admin, the final part: Moving the operation. Local prices were incredibly high, just on the reputation of Silicon Valley alone, to say nothing of the company getting taken for a ride on the lease. Coordinating with Fred and Susan back home, several properties in Portland filled our needs, and the one I ended up picking was a bit out of the way. There were two distinct advantages, the first of which was price, but that was less of a material concern than the second point: Space. It was a bit bigger than we actually needed, but it was out in an area behind PDX airport, with other industrial buildings. There was space, which would give us the space to grow the operation once it was moving, with the price being far more manageable.

I installed Raj as the CTO, Chief Technology Officer, and started getting the move readied. Dad became CFO for now, in charge of the financials. It was more tiring than difficult. Employees for the most part were willing to go with it, and I did make sure to cover moving expenses. We lost some there, but that was just unavoidable. Like the rest, they were given severance and letters of recommendation. I didn't fight to keep anyone, but I made sure those leaving weren't going to be completely fucked by it. It was the best I could do at the moment, but I did make sure to give them my contact info in case things didn't work out, and they rethought the move.

Aimee tried texting me, but I just... I couldn't right then. I sat in a drained-out pool at our hotel, idly bouncing a rubber ball, sitting in a fetal position. I'd known it would be hard, but there's a difference between knowing and understanding. Dad tried, I had enough pizza to convince him I'd be okay, then promptly stopped eating. It felt like lead in my gut. I'd just stepped in and ripped away Raj's dream, sacked people he cared about, and pretty much spent the last several days recounting his every misstep to him. It didn't matter how polite I'd been about it, you could still see the pain it caused him, caused everyone. This is all so fucked.

"HEY! You Marcus?!"

I looked up, to see a man in his early to mid-twenties, wearing a three-piece suit, and holding a briefcase, "Can I help you with something?"

He met me as I walked up out of the pool, taking a moment to steady myself. He had a lot more energy than me, catching me in an aggressive handshake, "I'm Miguel Suarez, and I'm your new finance guy!"