Chapter 223: The Third Founder III
He thought about Makima’s building and forty years of invisible pressure. He thought about Patricia Moyer’s grandmother keeping documents in a storage unit for sixty years. He thought about twelve names in two colors of ink and a girl who had written I have decided to do something tomorrow and then gotten up and done it.
"Because people keep building real things," he said. "And other people keep finding ways to take them apart from the outside while calling it something else." He paused. "I have resources that let me stop that sometimes. Stopping it seems like the right use of them."
Thomas was quiet for a moment.
"You’re eighteen years old," he said. Not the way other people said it. More like he was just observing the specific strangeness of the fact.
"Yes," said Sean.
"Alright," said Thomas. "Put together the document. Send it to Clara and me both." A pause. "And Sean. The third thing you mentioned to Clara this morning. The two things before Thomas Park. The analysis and the institutional confirmation. What was the third thing actually."
Sean looked at the campus.
"You," said Sean. "Specifically you. The analysis was the first thing. The institutional confirmation was the second thing. Getting you into this conversation before you made a decision you couldn’t walk back from was the third thing."
A long silence.
"Clara was right about you," said Thomas.
"What did she say," said Sean.
"She said you were the most unusual shareholder call she’d taken in two years of investor relations and that she thought you were going to be very annoying to deal with and also probably exactly what the situation needed." He paused. "I’m inclined to agree with both parts."
Sean almost smiled.
"I’ll have the document to you tonight," he said.
"I’ll be reading it," said Thomas.
The call ended.
Sean stood in the afternoon for a moment.
Then he texted Max.
I need a document. Not the financial analysis. The human version of what Meridian does. Twelve acquisitions, what the founders experienced, what happened to the products and the teams and the clients. Specific and factual. Tonight.
Give me four hours, Max replied.
Sean texted Clara.
Thomas is in. I’ll have the document to both of you tonight. Start thinking about the sequencing for the seventeen shareholder conversations. We should move on those within the next forty-eight hours before Meridian’s communications team gets to them first.
Clara replied in three minutes.
Already thinking about it. One question.
Yes, said Sean.
The document you’re building for the seventeen shareholders. I want to add something to it. From me specifically. About what Vertex actually is from the inside. Not financial. Just what we built and why it works. A pause in the message thread. Is that okay.
Sean looked at that message.
She’d been waiting for someone to ask about the fight and now she was asking to be part of building the case for it. That wasn’t a CFO protecting a financial position. That was someone who cared about the thing she’d spent three years helping build.
Yes, he typed back. Send it to me when you have it. I’ll build it into the document.
He put his phone in his pocket and walked back toward the economics building for his two o’clock class.
The professor was going to talk about market efficiency theory again.
Sean was going to sit in the third row and think about seventeen people who had believed in something before it existed and whether they still believed in it now that someone was offering them a number to stop.
He thought they did.
He thought most people who had believed in something real kept believing in it longer than anyone expected them to.
That was the thing the Meridians of the world kept getting wrong.
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Max sent his portion at eight forty-seven that evening.
It was twenty-three pages.
Sean read it at his desk with dinner he’d ordered and largely ignored, a plate of something from the Thai place two blocks away that had gone lukewarm while he was reading.
Max had built it the way he built everything, from the outside in, starting with the corporate surface and then going layer by layer until the human story underneath was visible. Each of the twelve acquisitions had its own section. The company name, what it had built, how long it had taken to build it, what the product had actually done for the people using it. Then what happened after Meridian closed. The timeline of product degradation, team departure, client migration. The specific gap between what Meridian had said publicly at acquisition and what had actually occurred.
It was not emotional. It was methodical and complete and considerably more devastating for being both those things simultaneously.
At the end Max had added a section Sean hadn’t asked for.
The clients, it said at the top.
Max had found three former Vertex-adjacent companies’ clients, businesses that had been using products Meridian acquired and then wound down, and had pulled their public reviews and statements from the period after the product changes. Not cherry-picked. Just what was there. Small business owners talking about losing tools they’d built their operations around. The specific frustration of people who had trusted a product and had that trust treated as a captive audience rather than a relationship.
Sean read that section twice.
He texted Max. The client section. That was yours.
Seemed relevant, Max replied.
It’s the right call, said Sean. How’s Amara.
Currently reorganizing the way she organizes my files, said Max. She has developed strong opinions about my folder structure. I’ve been told my system is anxiety with a hard drive.
She said that to you in the hospital, said Sean.
She apparently stands by it, said Max. She’s not wrong. Send me the final document when it’s done. I want to see what Clara added.
Sean put his phone down and opened his email.
Clara’s section had arrived at eight fifteen, before Max’s, which meant she’d been working on it since their conversation that afternoon.