Over the next three years Nubilant expanded, somewhat jerkily, as its CEO leapt from one funding predicament to the next like a video game character being presented with various contrived, dire challenges. With each round of funding its valuation grew and Corvallis’s theoretical net worth became larger. He began to consider whether it might be time to begin having a social life. He was not quite sure how to go about it. Much of his spare time was devoted to his hobby: the painstaking reenactment, in parks and on beaches around the Pacific Northwest, of the activities of a Roman legion of ancient times. It was an almost exclusively male pursuit, which would have been very convenient if (as rumor apparently had it) he were gay, but he was pretty resolutely heterosexual. When he did engage in normal social activities such as going out to dinner, it tended to be with Csongor, Zula, and Sophia, who had become like family to him. Sometimes, unaccompanied females would be present and Corvallis would become tongue-tied and withdrawn as he realized that Zula was trying to set him up with potential dates. He rationalized his failure to have a social life by saying that he was in “startup mode” and when you were in startup mode, normal rules didn’t apply. There would be plenty of time to sort things out after Failure or Exit, which were the two possible end states for a startup.

Exit—in the sense of suddenly becoming more rich—happened when Nubilant was acquired by Lyke, a Bay Area social media company that was much larger. Lyke had cloud computing systems of its own that were much more capable, by most measures, than Nubilant’s. But thanks to some canny decisions that Corvallis had made, Nubilant happened to be especially good at certain things that had turned out to be important to social media companies and so was doubly desirable—both on its own merits as a company and because of the prestige, and the bragging rights, that came from having snatched it away from the competition. Thus did Corvallis Kawasaki, just short of forty years old, become a centimillionaire. He was now the chief research officer at Lyke, which was a major publicly traded company based in Mountain View. He could easily have retired but chose to stay on because he enjoyed his work and because he felt some loyalty to the team he had recruited and nurtured in Seattle. He purchased fractional ownership of a private jet that he used to fly down the coast every week or so.

He had barely settled into his new life when he was awakened early one morning by the ringtone he had associated with the personal number of his new boss: the CEO of Lyke.