A Coffee Date and a Corporate Scheme
"Hello?"
Grace Fairfax was standing there with her arms folded, looking at me.
"I was waiting for your call. It never came."
In her hand was a thin stack of mail, the kind that looked as though she had just taken it from the dormitory mailbox on the first floor.
I asked, "I was about to call you, actually. Since it got late today, I was going to ring tomorrow morning. But who told you? That I was planning to call you."
"...Some of the girls in my class."
Grace answered with her gaze slightly averted.
"They came by bragging that they had made you promise to call me, and then they told me to buy them dinner or something..."
She cleared her throat.
"Ahem. Well, it doesn't mean anything. I just came down to sort through the mail as well. I'd appreciate it if you didn't misunderstand. I wouldn't want to look like someone who was just waiting for a chance to talk to you and came down the moment it appeared."
"I don't misunderstand."
Grace looked away for a moment, then met my eyes squarely again.
"Are you going to stand here all day?"
"..."
"Let's go somewhere first. Get coffee or something."
She started walking ahead of me.
***
A twenty-four-hour cafe a few blocks from the dormitory.
This was where Harvard students came when they were burning the night away on assignments or cramming for exams.
Jingle.
The bell on the door rang as I stepped inside.
On the counter sat a tip jar that was only half full, and along both sides of the aisle were piles of newspapers delivered before dawn, still unopened.
The front-page headline caught my eye.
Oil Prices Keep Plunging! Small and Mid-Size Gas Stations Go Bankrupt in Droves! Texas and Oklahoma Oil Companies Collapse One After Another! Refineries Flood the Auction Block!
The shadow of the recession was deep.
Beneath the article was a dense list of gas stations up for auction.
...I should head back to Garden Queens soon. No, come to think of it, maybe I should go down there tomorrow.
I needed to see whether there were any cheap gas stations for sale near my father's station.
One man's crisis was another man's opportunity.
Then.
Swish, swish...
Before I knew it, a waitress had come over and refilled my steaming coffee, interrupting my train of thought.
As soon as Grace took her coffee, she spoke.
"Do you remember our first class in Financial Markets and Decision Theory?"
She leaned her upper body toward me.
"Professor Cromwell asked you something that day. Why you were taking his class."
"I remember."
I nodded.
At Professor Warren Cromwell's question, I had answered this way.
I want to make money. A lot of it.
Grace let out a small laugh.
"That answer left an impression on me. I watched you after that. Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Why do you want to make so much money? Is there something you want to do?"
I could answer her immediately.
"Not really."
"Nothing you want to do? Then why do you want to make so much money?"
"So that when something I do want to do eventually comes along, I won't be at the mercy of money."
"...!"
At that, Grace's eyes widened a little.
I took a sip of coffee.
"What I want to buy is the freedom to dream any dream I want. That's very expensive."
"...That's strange. I've never heard anyone put it that way."
"Let me ask you one too."
This time, I was the one asking the question.
"You're an owner in the GreenHell Group, aren't you? You already have more than enough money, so why are you interested in founding a company? I mean, wouldn't you already have more than enough capital? Wouldn't it be more profitable to buy an already proven small business?"
"Hmm. Easy question."
Grace went on.
"It's a Fairfax family principle. There's no such thing as a free succession."
It was structurally similar to the proverb There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Popularized by the economist Milton Friedman in the 1930s, it meant that if you wanted something, you had to pay for it.
Even services or goods that seemed to be offered for free always came with some underlying purpose or cost attached to them, whether labor, taxes, or something else.
Government welfare that was handed out for free was ultimately paid for by someone’s taxes, and so-called free services from corporations were really just hiding purposes like advertising, data collection, or market domination.
Grace's idea of "succession" could be explained in much the same way.
"Nothing in our family is simply handed over. Our grandfather, who founded GreenHell, always said that heirs should not be raised like flowers in a greenhouse, but like predators in the wild."
She wasn't wrong.
In fact, not only in the United States but in Europe too, the major old-money conglomerates raised their heirs in exactly that way.
Grace continued.
"The inheritors in GreenHell compete fiercely from an early age. They mostly fight through school prestige and grades. Once they become adults, they go straight into society. They have to start with nothing and secure at least the social standing of a GreenHell subsidiary president. Without family help, only through their own efforts. Only then can they put their name into the succession race."
"I heard GreenHell's founder started from nothing. So I also heard he despises the idea of inheritance to an extreme degree."
"You know your facts. That's right."
Grace nodded at my words.
"I want to become GreenHell's CEO. To do that, I have to prove I'm qualified before I graduate. That I have the right to take control of GreenHell's shares and management."
The streetlight glow spilling in from outside the window lit the side of her face.
I asked, "And what will you do with GreenHell once you inherit it?"
"..."
Grace fell silent for a moment.
A long silence passed.
Then she said, "I haven't thought that far."
"Why not?"
"Sartre said it, didn't he? Human beings are thrown into this world."
Grace rested her chin on both hands.
"There's no purpose or meaning in being born. You were simply born, that's all. Since you've already been born, you struggle hard just to live. You find the meaning afterward."
You were born into a chaebol family.
Since you were born into one, of course you fought to take over the group.
The meaning or purpose of life came later, if it came at all.
That was Grace Fairfax's philosophy.
...Feels a bit like some ancient barbarian warrior.
In a way, there were similarities to the person I had been before regression, so I gave a faint smile.
"Why are you smiling?"
"It's nothing. I just know someone who lived that way."
"Who?"
"Someone."
At my answer, Grace's brow furrowed slightly.
And then.
Clunk.
Grace set a thick stack of documents down in front of me.
On top of the papers was the following title:
'Blood & Guts' Investment Club Founding Approval
At last, the club had been approved.
Grace said, "We're now an officially recognized club in Harvard's history. All we need is results."
"You plan to build results and launch it as a proper company?"
"Exactly. Like I said before, I'm going to take Blood & Guts public on Nasdaq."
"And then you'll sell the company to GreenHell. That would prove you were capable of running one of GreenHell's subsidiaries."
"...Yes. Exactly right. Do I sound like I'm chasing a foolish dream?"
A mere college club becoming a legitimate company, then going public on Nasdaq, and on top of that being acquired and merged by a giant like GreenHell.
Anyone hearing it might laugh and call it nonsense.
But.
"No. There are already plenty of real-world examples."
I thought Grace's idea was entirely realistic.
A representative example was Dell at the University of Texas.
Michael Dell, the CEO of the company made famous by Dell computers, started assembling and selling computers out of his dorm room from his freshman year of college.
He founded the company in 1984 at the age of nineteen, went public on Nasdaq in 1988, and at the time its market capitalization was a staggering $85 million.
And I didn't even need to look that far. Right here at Harvard, there was already a company called Harvard Student Agencies.
Known as HSA, it was a student-run company founded in 1957.
They dealt in anything related to student life, from laundry and refrigerator rentals to tutoring referrals, publishing, and advertising services.
They picked up laundry right at the dormitory entrance and even sold bundled used textbooks to freshmen.
With annual sales in the millions and a structure in which the student founders shared the equity.
Grace set down her coffee cup.
"My goal is beyond that. To make Blood & Guts a unicorn company."
A unicorn company was a startup with a valuation of over one billion dollars before going public.
The name came from the fact that, like the unicorn in legend, it was rare.
Grace extended one finger, pressed it to her forehead, and mimed a unicorn.
The unicorn's single horn pointed straight at me.
"To do that, we need to secure good early-stage investment. Angel investors."
Originally, angel investment was a term used on Broadway.
When a performance was on the verge of failing, wealthy backers who poured in their own money to save the show were called angels.
The same thing applied in the startup world.
No one paid any attention to inexperienced investors who had nothing but an idea and no results, and the people willing to invest serious money in them were the angels.
They didn't just provide money, either; they shared their know-how and their connections, truly earning the title of angel.
"They don't even force you to sign a clause that lets them claw back the money if the company goes under. So tell me, how is that not great?"
"I can see what you're after."
I spoke while sifting through the memories from before my regression.
"You want backing from the Harvard Alumni Association."
"...How should I put this? From the beginning of this conversation, it's been progressing unnaturally smoothly. You're the first person who's understood what I meant this well."
Grace nodded, looking genuinely surprised.
The Harvard Alumni Association was a massive network of socially successful Harvard graduates that provided countless forms of support, from investing large sums in the startups of underclassmen to offering advice and connections from experts in every field.
They were also known as A+ tier angels because even if the money they invested vanished through a younger student's business failure, they usually didn't file lawsuits to recover it.
I searched through the memories from before my regression and recalled what path Grace had taken as a freshman.
And the Grace sitting before me now matched those hazy memories in her words and actions more or less exactly.
"Then maybe you know this too. There's something called the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition, held every year by the economics department. Have you heard of it?"
How could I not have?
It was the first campus competition I had ever won before regression, and the credential that had drawn the most attention from the interview panel when I joined Black Diamond.