A Contract Written on a Napkin
Oddball Entrepreneur Competition.
Grace began explaining the competition.
“You might not know this. No, actually, that’s normal for freshmen. Most of the participants are seniors, anyway.”
“I thought it was basically an Ig Nobel Prize-type competition.”
“An Ig Nobel Prize?”
I clamped my mouth shut, realizing my mistake.
The Ig Nobel Prize itself hadn’t even been created yet—it was only October 1991 at this point—so comparing the two was a bit of a stretch.
In simple terms, the Ig Nobel Prize was a parody of the Nobel Prize.
Held every year at Harvard University, it was awarded to research that sounded ridiculous at first glance but revealed genuine scientific value when you thought about it more deeply.
For example: a study on why cats move like liquid even though they’re solid.
That research seriously examined how a cat’s body deforms to fit the shape of any container it’s placed in, and it was praised for offering a new perspective on fluid dynamics and contributing to the development of soft materials.
It even had positive implications for things like rescue robots that could squeeze through narrow gaps after an earthquake to deliver supplies into collapsed buildings.
There was also a study proving that dogs could indicate north and south by the way they pooped.
After tracking canine defecation more than five thousand times over two years, the researchers found that when Earth’s magnetic field was stable, dogs tended to align themselves along the north-south axis.
That overturned the old theory that only certain animals like migratory birds or sea turtles could sense magnetic fields, and it demonstrated that mammals, too, possessed an internal navigation system.
Another study asked whether the smell of wasabi could wake a sleeping person.
Building on the fact that allyl isothiocyanate—the pungent compound in wasabi—could trigger brain arousal even during sleep, the research contributed to improving fire alarm systems so that hearing-impaired people could actually notice alerts while asleep.
There was also a notable study that discovered it took most mammals twenty-one seconds to urinate.
Regardless of body weight, all mammals from mice to elephants took about twenty-one seconds to pee, with a margin of error of around thirteen seconds. That was the finding of a Georgia Tech research team.
What they called the “law of urination” was later applied to diagnosing bladder disease: if a patient’s urination time deviated significantly beyond twenty-one seconds, the likelihood of illness was high. It was also used in the discharge systems of water tanks and dams.
There were other oddities, too, like research on whether crocodiles’ voices changed when they drank helium, which led to studies of reptilian vocal cords and lung structures—and even to attempts at recreating the roars of prehistoric dinosaurs—or the investigation into why toast always landed butter-side down, which showed that at a typical table height of about seventy-five centimeters, physics simply made it impossible for the bread to complete a full rotation. That sort of thing.
At a glance, it looked like the pointless research of eccentric cranks, but there was always the possibility that it might one day contribute to scientific progress.
Respecting that possibility was the whole reason the Ig Nobel Prize existed.
······And Oddball Entrepreneur Competition, the competition Grace had her eye on, was similar.
Grace leaned in as she spoke.
“Normally, there are only two criteria for judging investment clubs: profitability and sustainability. But this competition has a third.”
“Creativity. Or, if you want to put it nicely, freakishness.”
Or, to put it another way, sheer weirdness. A little mad-scientist energy. That sort of thing.
You made money, yes—but how bizarre was the method?
More to the point, how spectacularly did you shatter the biases and assumptions of conventional economics, and what fresh, original perspective did you bring to the table in the process?
Grace leaned farther across the table.
“There was a winning team once that created a ‘professor mood forecast service.’ They tracked the daily routes of thirty major professors on campus like paparazzi, then updated their moods in real time on a one-to-five scale. If a professor was humming to himself, that meant good mood. If he circled the parking lot three times because he couldn’t find a spot, that was a warning sign. That kind of thing. Undergrads were only lukewarm about it, but apparently the graduate students went completely wild. During graduation season or thesis defense season, they raised the subscription fee tenfold and still didn’t get a single refund request. Later on, didn’t they turn into a legit magazine that tails celebrities?”
I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Because before my regression, I had won this competition during my senior year, and thanks to that, I’d even gotten calls from major Wall Street firms.
That was how highly the industry valued the creativity, madness, and raw drive of the competition’s winners.
Grace’s eyes gleamed.
“If we win this competition, we get placed on the Harvard Alumni Association’s angel fund review list. That alone is enough. It means our file goes to the top of a pile of hundreds.”
“As long as we don’t blow up in some major scandal or have some serious ethical defect, we’d get funded without much trouble. And we’d get contacts and information, too.”
“With no repayment or penalty clause if we fail.”
“Exactly. To win here, first we need to—”
Grace pulled out the notebook where she had written down the competition stages and checked the contents.
But I remembered everything about this competition even without her explanation.
“Stage one: submit a business plan. Stage two: pitch in front of the Harvard Alumni Association’s angel fund. Stage three: due diligence. The professors and alumni panel go through the ledgers and contracts with a fine-tooth comb, then examine the intellectual property and equity structure. You have to pass all three stages before the money comes through.”
“······Exactly.”
Grace closed the notebook with a look of surprise.
“You know more than I expected.”
“······”
That was true.
I knew far more than she imagined.
For example, I knew that her challenge would ultimately end in failure.
At first, the memory was hazy. Now it’s coming back.
Blood & Guts, the club Grace had built in my previous life.
It had started as a business that matched student startups with angel investment and took a fee.
After that, it made a decent amount of money through real estate—bringing in a few commercial buildings near Cambridge as deal sources, remodeling them, and flipping them.
Then, during the dot-com boom, it hit the jackpot by investing in a handful of early IT startups.
Grace turned the club into a formal limited liability company, and before graduation she even succeeded in getting it listed on the Nasdaq.
Then GreenHell acquired it through a merger and made it an official subsidiary.
It was all a string of successes, but in the end Grace lost the final battle.
She never became the heir, and that position went to one of her other siblings.
Blood & Guts’ achievements alone hadn’t been enough to put her in the CEO seat at GreenHell.
But this time, things are a little different.
Because I planned to end up owning more than half of Blood & Guts.
In this life, I knew the flow.
I knew how Blood & Guts would grow, what investments would become home runs, and which decisions would turn out to be mistakes.
My stake in this club was an option on the future.
A ticket that would one day be placed on the M&A table of a transnational giant like GreenHell.
And it didn’t even have to be GreenHell.
What mattered was having the qualifications to sit at the same table as companies of that caliber.
And if I remember correctly... Grace won the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition in her sophomore year, didn’t she?
I knew because I had been the senior-year winner myself.
When I’d reviewed the business ideas of past winners, Grace’s name had been there under the two-years-ahead category.
That meant Grace would taste defeat in this attempt, only to lift the trophy on her next try.
Then—
“Five-fifty isn’t fun.”
Not knowing what I was thinking, Grace wrote something on the napkin in front of us with a pen.
BETTING.
A bet.
She wanted us to put something on the line.
Grace said, “There are only two members in the club—just you and me. That doesn’t mean we have to split the equity fifty-fifty, does it?”
“You mean we compete to see who can show the higher return and the more outrageous weirdness?”
“Exactly. Two business ideas. Two proposals to submit to the competition. We split the club’s equity based on the outcome. If you win, your share goes up. If I win, mine goes up. Fair, right?”
“Not bad. The numbers will speak for themselves anyway—expenses and net sales—so we won’t even need a judge.”
“Sign it. This is a contract.”
We each scribbled our initials on opposite corners of the napkin.
The sight of two college freshmen sitting across from each other and doodling on a napkin was innocent enough, but if you considered that this was actually the allocation of equity in a profit-making entity that would one day become a limited liability company, it was a disturbingly sharp-edged moment.
After she finished signing, Grace said, “So, Sanha. Have you got a business idea in mind?”
“I’ve got a few I wanted to do on my own. I was thinking of bringing one of them out.”
“Same here.”
She stood, then continued, “This isn’t a mock investment exercise from class. I’m going all in, so let’s be serious about it.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
I didn’t get up. I just nodded.
* * *
By the time Grace and I finished talking through the night, the morning sun had already risen.
I returned to my dorm room.
Victor was lying face-down on his bed, clutching a pillow to his chest.
Judging by the way he was sniffling, that Turkey drop must have hit him pretty hard.
“Victor.”
“······Yeah?”
“I’m going home for a bit. Before Thanksgiving.”
“What? All of a sudden? We could just go down together for Thanksgiving! Besides, my dad already told me to come with you sometime—”
“I think I’ll be busy during Thanksgiving, so I want to go early.”
“Why? Something wrong?”
I pulled my suitcase from the closet and answered, “I think my parents and uncle are overworking themselves. The way the gas station sells fuel is a little inefficient. I’m going to go help straighten things out.”
“······”
Victor wore a strange expression.
It was a face mixed with dejection and envy.
“What’s with that look?”
“No, I just...”
Victor mumbled into the pillow in his arms.
“You really are amazing. You study hard and still take care of your family.”
“Come on. I take fewer classes than you. Most of mine are gen ed anyway.”
“Honestly, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t go home this Thanksgiving.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to see my father... no, I think my father might not want to see me.”
“That girl, Becky. Don’t you have to go down if you want to see her?”
“T-that’s...”
“You said you’d see each other at Thanksgiving.”
“I did... I did, but... will Becky really come?”
“If you don’t go, you’ll never know.”
“Ugh...”
Victor buried his face in the pillow and groaned.
I chuckled and zipped up my suitcase.
“I’ll be back.”
“Y-yeah. Come back fast. You really need to come back fast. I’m lonely, you know. Just thinking about being alone in this vast, empty room...”
The room was neither vast nor empty.
Only Victor’s heart was.
He sprang out of bed and followed me all the way to the door.
“All right. I’ll be back in a few days.”
I gave him a light wave and stepped out.
As I walked down the hall, I thought about how to sell fuel more efficiently.
Right now, my parents’ gas station sold the gasoline it refined itself through its own network of contacts.
Even now, it wasn’t a bad business at all, but its limitations were obvious.
The answer is franchising.
Gas station franchising.
A massive distribution network spread across the United States.
During this vacation, I planned to sketch out the entire thing.
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