We’ve been holed up in Hazel’s office all day, monitoring the IPO while the rest of our team makes a valiant effort to pretend that today is just your average, ordinary workday, when it’s all the holidays and a freaking pot of gold at the end of the Silicon Valley rainbow rolled into one. You see, Hazel and I did something different when we founded this particular VC fund. We insisted that everyone who worked here—from the guy who pushes a vacuum through our late-night sessions, to our Gal Friday receptionist, to the six analysts on our team—should have skin in the game. And to make that happen, we bumped their salaries up 20 percent and invested that extra in the fund.
As a result, Hazel and I have the richest janitor in Silicon Valley.
We also have the most loyal one.
Here in California, we’ve still got three hours of blazing hot sunshine until the close of the business day. Outside, BMWs and expensive luxury cars shoot up and down Sand Hill Road, a short stretch of asphalt that fronts the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley. What used to be six sleepy miles cutting through western Silicon Valley is now the center of the VC universe. Hollywood has Rodeo Drive and corporate big shots have Wall Street, but my tribe rules California. The biggest players have offices here and my heart still kicks into higher gear when I spot the green exit sign Sand Hill Rd above the sun-seared brown hills. That sign is the ultimate X-marks-the-spot and here-be-treasure. Sand Hill Road is where dreams come true or go bust, the epicenter of billions of dollars and power plays.
The closing bell rings, echoed by an audible happy sigh from the outer offices, like a sirocco ripping through the desert or a giant, man-eating raptor sighting prey. The stock popped and closed four times above ask.
You know that now-famous Oprah episode where she announces “You get a car. And you get a car. And you—yes, everyone gets a free car!” That’s the prevailing mood in the offices of Coleman and Reed today. Our long-shot company just made its initial public offering and now we’re all rolling in cash. You know what’s even better than free money? Money that you earned because you were fucking right.
“Told you.” I grab the champagne flutes from the shelf above her desk.
“Show-off,” she grunts. Now that the market’s closed, she pops out of her seat. Frankly, I’m surprised she’s managed to sit still for so long. While our team celebrates, she grabs the edge of her desk, performing some kind of bendy, plié-squat thing. She claims it’s important to get up and move every hour—otherwise your chances of stroking out escalate faster than a poorly capitalized start-up plummets during its debut.
I prefer to get my exercise on the beach. Surfing works, as does running. Standing in place and bending my knees? Where’s the challenge?
“You know you can buy a new heart and a couple of kidneys with the twenty million dollars you just earned, right?”
Brown eyes narrow at me with laser focus. “Jealous, Reed?”
“Please. As if.” I blow her a raspberry because that’s what longtime friends do—they give each other shit.
“Mature.” And then she sticks her tongue out at me, finishing her reps before grabbing her coffee mug and slurping down an obscene amount of room-temperature tap water.
Hazel’s not a glass-half-full kind of person. She knows exactly how many ounces of liquid are in her oversize, llama-shaped coffee cup. Not part of the killer VC image, you say? Just wait until she looks at you. Brown eyes, long lashes, perfectly applied makeup (she did mine once on a drunken college night and I looked equally good) but you can tell right away that she’s taking you in, performing a lightning-quick analysis that would make a NASA supercomputer jealous. Hazel lives for numbers. She’s blunt and fact-oriented, and the shit that comes out of her mouth would be unbelievable except that it’s also invariably true. She’s smart and funny, and early on she nominated me to be the pretty face of the office.
Her reason? People like me.
She, on the other hand, never won Prom Queen, was never picked first for kickball and never received a dozen secret valentines. Hazel can rub people the wrong way, particularly when she’s explaining why she’s right and you’re wrong. In the Hazel-verse, Hazel’s always right and she’s perfectly willing to explain at excruciating length why that’s so. Still, Hazel’s good people. If you’d told me ten years ago that she’d be my best friend and business partner, I’d have told you to lay off the pot brownies. She stormed a talk I was giving at UC Santa Cruz on statistical modeling and IPO valuation prediction, we argued about my methods (I still maintain I was right and Hazel was sadly deluded) and then we discovered unexpected common ground in a small tech company we’d both invested in. It had IPO’d while we’d been arguing, and we were both officially millionaires. She’d promptly offered to buy me a drink or a piece of cake because we were either the two smartest people in the world...or the craziest. And either way, we deserved cake.
The jury’s still out on the crazy, by the way.
Ever since that celebratory slice of red velvet goodness, however, Hazel and I have been friends and business partners. We’ve conquered mountains together and my life doesn’t work without her in it. She’s always been one of the guys, a good sport, smart, driven. She’s all the adjectives—and her amazing business abilities are the cherry on the sundae of awesomeness that is Hazel. Tact, however, is not one of her assets.
She sets down her llama mug on the coaster on her desk. “Are you taking Molly out to celebrate? Or are you just staying in and having wild monkey sex?”
They say married couples have sex ninety-eight times a year, while single people score only
