Prisoner (1)
My words made David give a faint snort.
“I really hope so.”
He held out a document to me.
“What’s this?”
“My employment contract. I never thought I’d end up drawing up my own contract with my own hands.”
I skimmed it once and signed.
“What exactly am I supposed to do?”
At that, I told him what I expected of him from now on.
“As the CEO, I want you to lead Continue Capital. You’ll be co-CEO with me, but I’m going back to Korea anyway.”
So for now, the company only had two CEOs.
Once the employment contract was official, I got straight to the firm’s financial situation.
“After paying the signing bonus, we have $112 million left.”
“I see.”
David looked a little underwhelmed.
For an individual, $112 million was an unimaginable fortune. But for a private equity fund, it was small change.
If you wanted to call yourself an investment firm with any confidence, you needed at least a billion dollars.
In the investment world, the size of your capital was everything. If you didn’t have money, you didn’t even get to sit at the table.
“By the way, how did you raise this money? Did you take on investors?”
“No. I earned it myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Making over a hundred million dollars on your own wasn’t exactly easy.
If we were going to work together from here on out, I needed to clear up his doubts.
I told him, “Ask me anything you want.”
He had a lot he wanted to know.
David started with Primus Fund.
“How did you figure out the fund was rotten?”
“The returns were too high for something that claimed to invest only in AAA-rated bonds. And the yield kept staying suspiciously constant no matter how interest rates moved. So I dug into the trading records, found a few inconsistencies, and that’s when I started to suspect something was off.”
Now that I thought about it, it was almost laughably simple. What was strange was that no one had caught on until then.
Once a fraud was exposed, it always looked obvious in hindsight.
But seeing the truth while everyone else was being deceived—that wasn’t something just anyone could do.
The rest of the story was just as interesting.
“You made ten times your money riding a manipulated stock, then another ten times by investing in junk bonds?”
“Yes.”
Making ten times your money on a manipulated stock wasn’t all that impressive. If the information was solid, anybody could do it.
But junk bonds were a different matter.
“You met Yoo Jae-ho personally?”
“Yes. Yuseong Group’s headquarters were in my neighborhood. It wasn’t far from my place.”
“...If the chairman of Yuseong Group is in the same neighborhood, is he someone you can just go meet that easily?”
Yuseong Electronics was a global IT giant and the dominant force in the semiconductor market.
Because of that, I knew very well who Chairman Yoo Jae-ho was. He wasn’t the sort of man an ordinary person could simply ask to see.
“Ah! Luckily, the former colleague I mentioned earlier put us in touch. The Korean chaebols all know one another.”
When he said he had persuaded Yoo Jae-ho to acquire Dongwoo Precision, I found myself genuinely impressed.
“There’s something I’m curious about.”
“What is it?”
“If Chairman Yoo had refused the acquisition, the BW would’ve been worth less than toilet paper. You had no way of knowing whether he’d meet you, or whether you’d be able to persuade him. Why buy first and meet him afterward? Shouldn’t you have met him, convinced him, and only then bought in?”
At that, Han Miru shrugged.
“Because I was sure it would work out. And if a company is good enough that you’d tell someone else to acquire it, isn’t it only right that I buy it first?”
It was easy to say, but it took an unusual amount of nerve to actually do it.
I had a hard time believing it. ‘He exposed a rotten company only six months after joining IB, then left and turned his investment money into a hundred times more through manipulated stocks and junk bonds.’
There were plenty of investments in the market that could multiply tenfold. But the number of people who actually made money on them was tiny.
It was easy to talk about anything. Carrying it out was what was hard.
And yet he had done it.
Is he really no ordinary person?
After thinking it over, David spoke again.
“What’s Continue Capital’s goal?”
Han Miru answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“To be the best in the world. If that hadn’t been the goal, I’d have spent the rest of my life coasting on this money. Why would I have started a company?”
“Ha.”
David burst out laughing before he could stop himself.
At the very least, it was obvious he wouldn’t be bored working with this man.
“What’s the plan from here?”
“I’m going to invest in startups with high growth potential.”
He frowned slightly.
“That won’t be as easy as it sounds.”
“Probably not.”
It was true that newly founded private companies often grew faster than established public firms with history and tradition behind them.
But that came with risk. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
Nine out of ten startups fail within three years. And of the ones that survive, only one in ten becomes a true hit.
The odds were barely above one percent.
In fact, the very Victory Investment David had worked for had gone under after making the wrong bet on a startup.
Startup investing wasn’t something to take lightly, not even for private equity firms staffed with experts who analyzed every angle before they put money down.
But Han Miru looked utterly confident, as though he already knew which companies would succeed.
“I’ve already picked the companies I’m going to invest in.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain in detail on the way.”
The two of us took a taxi to the airport.
The destination was Los Angeles.
Since this was a business trip, we boarded business class.
For a moment, I found myself missing the free business-class upgrade I’d given to Chris. Had I been too generous?
On the plane, I asked David to draft the contract I’d be sending to Sean O’Connor.
David stared at me, dumbfounded.
“You invested $100,000 in some young guy you happened to meet in a bar yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the burger was good.”
At that, David looked as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“So you decided to invest because the burger was good?”
I said it matter-of-factly, “Even if the original business doesn’t pan out, he could probably make back the principal just by selling that burger. I’m telling you, it was the best burger in New York. You should try it sometime.”
“...”
He still looked unconvinced, but he wrote up the contract for Sean O’Connor anyway.
While he worked, he seemed curious about the taste, because he asked me the name of the place and where it was located.
“You like burgers?”
“My daughter loves them. I can’t eat them often, though. Now that you mention it, I really want to bring one back for her.”
There he was, a complete doting father.
When a smile came to his face at the thought of his daughter, he asked me, “So what kind of company are we investing in this time?”
“Do you like movies?”
David nodded.
“I do. I just haven’t had time to watch many.”
There aren’t many people in the world who don’t like movies.
“Then what kind do you like?”
“Light comedies or action films.”
“That’s surprising.”
“What did you think I’d like?”
“Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Ben-Hur, The Shawshank Redemption—that sort of thing?”
At that, David gave a faint laugh.
“I don’t hate those. I just don’t want to think too hard while I’m watching a movie. I prefer something I can relax and enjoy without putting my brain to work.”
“That’s a relief. Then I’ve got a movie recommendation for you.”
“What movie?”
“You’ll see when you watch it.”
I took out my tablet and handed it to him.
“You want me to watch it now?”
“Yes. Think of it as work. It’s not like you’ve got anything else to do on the plane.”
“Understood. It’s been a long time since I watched a movie.”
David set up the tablet and put in his earbuds.
The movie started with the studio logo. About five minutes later, he stopped playback with a stunned expression, pulled out his earbuds, and looked at me.
“What on earth is this...?”
I told him, “Just keep watching for now. We’ll talk after you finish.”
“But—”
“You have to see it all the way through.”
“However—”
“Put your earbuds back in.”
Under my insistence, he put them back in, and I politely hit play again for him.
Two hours passed.
When the film ended and the credits rolled, David pulled out his earbuds again.
Han Miru asked with a hopeful look, “So? What did you think?”
The cultural shock was so overwhelming that it was hard to gather his thoughts.
After a long silence, he groaned, “What in the world kind of movie was that?”
The title was Zombienado.
Basically, a tornado sucked up zombies, swept them over a city, and then zombies fell from the sky like rain while the protagonist’s family fought back.
Just from the premise alone, it was beyond anything in this world, and to make matters worse, the terrible CG and wooden acting were just the icing on the cake.
Is this what they call a B-movie?
No, this was more than a B-movie.
I’d never seen or even heard of anything like it in my life.
“Wasn’t it fun?”
“Fun? You think that was fun?”
“Hey, a lot of people think it is.”
David pressed me, “Why on earth did you make me watch this?”
But astonishingly, there was a real reason.
“Because we’re on our way to acquire the film studio that made it.”
“What?”
“They apparently ran out of budget, so Zombienado 2 got put on hold. I’m going to buy the studio and make them produce it.”
“Ah...”
David was the kind of man who clung stubbornly to principle. He never forgot the kindness shown to him in difficult times, and only moments ago he had vowed to work hard for Continue Capital.
But after hearing this, his thoughts started to shift.
This might have been a mistake. Should I just tell him I’m quitting now?
Simon Linus and Fernando Sanchez first met in a college film club. They were both movie fanatics, and their tastes were astonishingly similar.
More than anything, the two of them shared a deep hostility toward Hollywood.
“These days Hollywood movies are a mess.”
“Is it even right for investors who don’t know the first thing about film to dictate everything?”
“Movies driven by capital aren’t real movies!”
“Hollywood can go to hell!”
After graduating, they joined forces and started a film studio.
That was how Prisoner was born.
Their goal was to make movies that weren’t beholden to Hollywood’s giant pools of capital.
It was a co-CEO arrangement, but since Fernando served as director, the job of actually running the studio naturally fell to Simon.
They took no outside investment at all and produced low-budget films.
They sold those films to cable TV and OTT platforms to recoup production costs, then used the profits to finance the next one.
Over five years, they made more than a dozen films, and in time they’d even built up a small but loyal fan base that genuinely loved Prisoner’s movies.
That was when they decided to raise the stakes a little.
With the megaphone in hand, Fernando Sanchez shouted proudly, “I’ll show those Hollywood idiots what real movies are!”
