Prescott kept his gaze locked on Ryan’s. “And you know it.”
For thirty seconds they sat in silence, staring straight at each other from across the table.
Ryan no longer felt at a disadvantage in the conversation. Prescott clearly wanted something from him, and floating out the idea of escaping to Panama seemed to have rattled him. A pressure had arisen in Prescott’s speech. An urgency.
“Why didn’t you let me defend my title in the spelling bee?” Ryan asked, breaking the silence and dialing back the tension that had been building between them. He did legitimately want to know the answer, but they both knew it wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask.
“You’d already proven you could beat kids four and five years older than you,” Prescott said, relaxing back in his chair a little, reminding himself that if Ryan made this too easy, he was probably the wrong person. “What good would it have done to send you back there one year older? It’d be like arm wrestling the strongest girl in your class. Lose and your reputation is shot. Win and you’ve gained nothing.”
“I wouldn’t have lost,” Ryan said confidently.
“I know,” Prescott countered, glowing with a fatherly pride. “And the fact that
you
know it too was precisely why you didn’t need to go back.”
Ryan made sure his mildly dejected expression didn’t change, but he got it. It did make sense from a big-picture perspective.
“Why did you bring me here?” Ryan asked.
“That’s a direct question. So I’m going to give you a direct answer. I brought you here to offer you a job.”
“I’m not interested,” Ryan said without asking to hear the offer. He now clearly held the cards. “You said you'd answer any question I had. I want to know about my birth parents."
"I'll do my best," Prescott said, having figured the question would come up at some point.
"Dillon looked all through your early records. The date of the opening was planned three months, almost to the day, after they died. He said you had no plan B.”
“Did he say we had a plan A?” Prescott asked, unoffended. “Did we ever make mention of you specifically in any of our voluminous internal records? Sure, we were waiting for the best possible orphan to come along, but in my wildest dreams did I think it would be you? No.”
“You knew I’d aced the initial aptitude test. You had the list.”
“We secured a list of all the kids who scored in the top fifth percentile. There were thousands of names on it.”
“My parents were murdered. I know that for a fact,” Ryan finally said, studying Prescott’s reaction. “Did you have any role in killing my parents? That’s a direct question. I’d like a direct answer.”
“No,” Prescott said convincingly. “But let’s say I had,” he challenged him. “Would that change the fact that I’m offering you an immensely impactful job?”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Prescott. I just can't see myself ever working for you,” Ryan said.
“Call me James. And that’s a knee-jerk reaction – a starting point. Don’t worry. I’m not going to hold it against you,” Prescott said with the smooth tenor of an FM deejay, as he reached into the inside pocket of his coat. “For thirty years I have been Avillage. You were the first orphan we legally adopted. In the eleven years AVEX has been open, you’re the only orphan whose board I’ve chaired.” He pulled out an envelope and slid it across the table to Ryan. “You may not see it this way, but to me, you're like a son.”
Ryan opened up the envelope and scanned the papers inside. He comprehended what he was he reading, but he couldn’t believe it. “What is this?” he asked.
“As I was trying to tell you before, the entire board is present and accounted for,” Prescott said.
“How can you do this? You don’t own these shares.”
“All of the previous members signed off on my takeover bid at a 60% premium to your already inflated closing price today. And I would’ve gone higher.”
“You took me private?” Ryan gasped.
“That’s one way of putting it,” Prescott said, his warm smile back in full force. “But those shares are all yours – if you accept my offer.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I don’t know. I’d probably gift them to you anyway,” he said, standing up and walking over to the plate glass window. “Ryan, I believe in you. And I believe there’s a reason you were the first IPO. It had to be you. From the day you became an orphan – I’ll never forget the day, March 16th eleven years ago – I’ve known this day would come. I never thought it would be this soon, but...” his voice trailed off, and he peered deeply into Ryan’s eyes. “Ryan, I’m not offering you a job at Avillage. I’m offering you
my
job.”
Ryan’s eyes widened, as he pulled back from the table.
“I’m dying, Ryan. Soon. I’ve got a few more months at best. Avillage is my legacy, and you’re the only one I trust leaving it to.”
“But I’m eighteen years old!” Ryan said.
“So what! I was twenty-two when I started out with nothing but a vision,” Prescott shot back defiantly. “And Silicon Valley was built by kids not much older than you.
“Ryan, I hire good people here. But I’ve never had an employee that was worth half of what I was at twenty-two. I have something they don’t. Something they’ll never have. You have it too. It’s undefinable, but unmistakable.”
“But there’s no way I could just step right into your job. I’m not prepared for this,” Ryan protested.
Prescott’s smile widened. “I’m not cleaning out my office tonight, Ryan. You’d learn under me for however long I can continue to work. It may be a few months; it may only be a few weeks. But you’re closer than you think. I raised you to be prepared.
“Did you know that an only child has a 57% chance...”
“... of choosing a profession in the field as their same sex parent,” Ryan interrupted. “Yes, I’ve heard that stat before – from you.”
Prescott nodded proudly and walked over to take the seat immediately next to Ryan. “I’ve been prepping you for this job your whole life. There was a reason I chose the parents I did for you. Your father, the intuitive hedge fund manager – he wasn’t selected to make sure you were taken care of financially growing up. He was chosen to impart his knowledge to you. I didn’t choose your mother, the educator of gifted children with a background in child psychology, so she could use her skills to ease your transition from the orphanage to home or to teach someone like you more effectively. It was so you could learn her specific skill set.”
Ryan hadn’t blinked in over a minute. He did know how to analyze an investment opportunity, almost intuitively. And he did have a knack for identifying kids who were truly gifted from those who simply tested in the gifted range.
“You say you’re passionate about orphans? If you run an orphanage in Panama, you’ll affect the lives of what? Fifty kids at a time?”
“Thirty-two,” Ryan said, with a twinge of embarrassment.
Prescott winced at his answer. “There are 500 kids on our exchange today, each one selected for extraordinary potential, and that number's only going up. You have a chance to develop tomorrow’s leaders. What could be more impactful than that?”
Prescott stood up again and laid his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He led Ryan down a short hallway, through an anteroom, pausing briefly to introduce Ryan to his secretary, and into his vacuous corner office with views of the Manhattan skyline to the north and the Brooklyn bridge to the east. Prescott’s L-shaped desk faced out toward both vistas from the back corner of the room. In the windowed corner across from it was a small round table with two leather chairs, also facing out toward the multi-million dollar views. Prescott invited Ryan to sit with him and picked up the Wall Street Journal lying on the table between them.
“Pick a symbol,” Prescott said, handing Ryan the back page of the Markets section.
“JY,” Ryan said, playing along
“He’s a thirteen-year-old somewhat speculative prospect, who’s been on The Exchange for four years now. He’s average in every way – except for mathematics. That was clear from an early age. Currently, he’s leaving his eighth grade class for a couple of hours everyday to take math classes at UCLA. We’re in the process of trying to steer him into mathematically modeling financial and currency markets.
“If it works, his shareholders will be richly rewarded. If not, he’ll probably end up a math professor at a top university. Either way, that’s a win in my book. Of course I wouldn’t tell that to his shareholders.
“Pick another one.”
Ryan thought about it this time. “Any symbol?”
“Any one you want.”
“SUZ,” Ryan finally said, watching for Prescott’s reaction.
Prescott sighed, keeping his gaze out over the city. “You’ve been following this a long time, haven’t you?” He didn’t turn to see Ryan’s response. “Susanna Ko had one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard from a little girl. And she was cute as a button. We’d set her up with the perfect parents – a voice coach and a really top-notch songwriter.
“At twelve she was on the verge of a major breakthrough. She’d sailed through the audition-phase of a nationally televised singing competition with a song her dad had written. America was going to love her.
“And then she was diagnosed with leukemia. Killed her in just a few months.”
There was genuine sorrow in Prescott’s tone, but Ryan couldn’t be sure if it was for the death of a child or the loss of a can’t-miss ticker symbol.
“How long have you known you were on the exchange?” Prescott asked.
“From day one. I watched you introduce me. I heard you describe my parents. And I saw you ring the opening bell that first day.”
Prescott nodded, more convinced than ever that Ryan was the only one who could succeed him. Keeping secrets – from everyone – was a vital part of his job.
“There’s one more thing I have to show you,” he said, walking over to his desk. He keyed a lengthy password into his computer and swiped his left index finger over a reader next to his keyboard. “Come on around,” he said to Ryan.
Ryan scanned the financial statement on the monitor. His bulging eyes stuck on the bold-type ten-digit balance at the bottom.
“As I was building this company,” Prescott said, making no specific reference to the numbers on the screen, “I knew the one thing I needed that I couldn’t come up with myself was capital. And not from banks. I never would have been able to manipulate the numbers to justify the risk to any bank. And I didn’t want to have to waste my time giving status updates to lenders.
“I had to sell my idea more to
donors
than investors. I pitched it as an idea to save an exceptional but declining America. And it was genuine. That has always been my vision.
“Never forget, the investors are important – we couldn’t survive without them – but the
mission
of this exchange is not to make the investors rich. It’s getting this country’s exceptional individuals back to realizing their full potential.”
Prescott paused from his soliloquy and turned to Ryan. “Do you know anyone more successful than Dillon was? Or Annamaria is? Or you are?”
Ryan kept conspicuously silent.
“About five years after I started building this company, the day arrived that I knew I would no longer have to worry about money. You’ve probably heard of Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s ‘billionaire giving pledge?’”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “They convinced a bunch of billionaires to agree to give away most of their fortunes to a cause of their choice when they died.”
“Well, I met with dozens of billionaires before I finally stumbled upon a reclusive, probably somewhat jingoistic Texas oil tycoon in his late eighties, who thought my idea was worth throwing his money behind. He eventually vowed to leave 95% of his fortune – a little over ten billion dollars – to Avillage. And the money was given 100% at the discretion of the CEO. I wouldn’t accept it under any other condition.
“Whoever the next CEO is assumes full control of all those assets – roughly six billion dollars and, for the first time, rising. There won’t be any legal fight for it from my wife or my children. The money wasn’t given to James Prescott; it was given to the CEO of Avillage.
“I’ve been perpetuating a rumor, essentially by not denying it, that I’ll be leaving the company in the hands of one of my children. And in my opinion I am. If you’ll accept the offer.”
~~~
In the end it wasn’t the corporate mission or the money that led Ryan to accept Prescott’s offer. It wasn’t that he was all of a sudden convinced that Prescott was a genuinely good guy or that he wanted to grant a dying man the fulfillment of generativity over stagnation. It was something else – something Prescott had said just before Ryan left that evening.
Seeing that Ryan was still conflicted as they were preparing to part ways, Prescott had played his final card. “I’m sure at some point, you’ve probably wanted nothing more than to wipe this company I’ve built off the face of the earth. I can tell you with certainty that that could never be accomplished from the outside. It’s too well-rooted. We have legislators and judges at every level who not only invest but sit on the boards of several of our holdings.