Ivan shook it off with a frown. “What makes you think I’m ready to start offering up pieces of the company already? As far as I’m concerned, we’re just getting started. We haven’t even set up our office yet.”

Ivan was a little defensive. His team sounded as if they were getting paranoid too early about being swindled on a buyout. He assumed that it was mostly coming from Eddie. He was a business veteran who had broken off to do something different. And maybe he was becoming greedy too fast.

Eddie grinned and took a sip of his soda from the straw. He said, “We would just like a first-option clause, that’s all. With us helping you to build this thing, we thought that would be fair for all of us.”

Ivan paused and calmed his nerves. There was no sense in him getting too excited over speculation. He had to manage it.

He stood his ground and said, “The first thing we need to do is focus on making sure the website continues to grow. So I’m using all of my resources, just like you are, to make sure that happens. Now, as far as me giving you guys a first-option clause, the biggest problem with that is not knowing what the value is yet.”

Eddie said, “Well, we could all sit down and work that out later, Ivan. We just want to make sure that we would have a right to have those conversations with you.”

Ivan thought it over and mellowed out. Eddie was only being a good businessman. Ivan had to admit that their input, creativity, and professional efforts had all worked in tandem to create something special.

Finally, he nodded and said, “All right, that’s fair. I’ll have my lawyers draw up something.”

Eddie nodded back to him and grinned. “Great. Now I have a lot of good news for you. And none of this is definite yet, but it’s definitely gonna happen for us in the very near future.”

He pulled out several files of paperwork from his briefcase and set them all out on the left side of the table.

“After thinking about the editorial content, I went ahead and printed out some articles we could share with the writing staff that would really help us to get after these sponsorships a lot more aggressively.”

Ivan looked at all the paperwork Eddie had printed out to present him, and he read the situation correctly.

Okay, the man is trying to show off all of his value to me now, he told himself. He smiled over the table and remained speechless. And I notice he didn’t show me anything until he got what he wanted on this first-option clause. I guess that’s just what good businesspeople do, he mused. I probably would have done the same thing.