Charlie walked up, carrying her wrapped present. Within the hour, she would discover that it was a small speaker and microphone that could be tuned to different voice effects. Shortly after unwrapping it, she would overhear her father in the kitchen, opening a beer and handing it to Elliott as he said, “Seriously, dude, what did I ever do to you?” Adeline had loved that little singing machine. Her parents had likely popped champagne the night it broke （as she cried in her room）。
But there was to be no crying at the party—or on the way home from school after that—because the teasing about her “homemade hobo clothes” came to an end when Charlie handed her the gift and looked her up and down.
“Adeline, love the dress. Where’d you get it?”
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.