Breaking Gravity

2. Presentation-1

2

Presentation

I’m convinced that my mother’s heart was holding out for my acceptance to Emory. Going into my final high school semester, I had graduation in the bag and acceptance letters from all three of my backup schools, but no word yet from Emory.

Emory is world renowned for its schools of Medicine and Law, but the School of Business quietly competes at a very elite level with far less fanfare. Though my SAT score put me in the top 99.9% of those who took the test, my grades were average at best, and I hadn’t participated in any school-sponsored team sports or any of the other stuff, like volunteer work, that college-bound kids did to pad their applications. I figured I was doing well just to stay out of jail.

So knowing how elite the school’s business department was, I never got my hopes up. But Mom seemed to believe it was my destiny, so I applied. Having little else to point to, I focused my application letter on the fact that I had taken a Silver Glove when I was fifteen, and a Golden Glove the following year.

Despite my pessimism, two days before midterms I received an invitation to join Emory University’s Boxing Club. The next afternoon I arrived home to find my mom holding my acceptance letter, tears of joy rolling down her cheeks.

And the following morning I found her lifeless body crumpled on the kitchen floor.

I arrived at Emory with a spiritual directive: I was on a mission to live the life that my mom had envisioned for me.

At times like these—huddled in a hallway with a bunch of nervous, sweaty over-achievers—I wondered if this was precisely what she had in mind.

Professor Treadwell—or “Tom” as he preferred to be called—had scheduled New Venture business plans to be presented over three marathon days, ten presentations each day. We were each expected to present our business plan in ten minutes, which would then be followed by a five-minute Q&A session. This was the first day, and ten of us sat in the hall, waiting to be called in.

Greg nudged me. “Check out Kermit.” I looked up, and he nodded down the hall.

Jessica was smiling broadly at the wall in front of her, her lips moving ever so slightly like a crazy lady at a bus stop, clearly practicing a speech in her head. I shared a nervous chuckle with Greg.

Every class has one. Jessica was the first to put her hand in the air the moment a professor stopped speaking; was frequently spotted coming out of a teacher’s office; automatically volunteered for any kiss-ass endeavor; and would probably melt down completely if she ever received a B.

She was very tightly wound, and somewhere along the line somebody had pointed out that her ass was probably as water tight as a frog’s butt. Thus the nickname Kermit was born.

When it came time to schedule the presentations, Jessica, as usual, had volunteered to go first. Then, when no one else volunteered, Treadwell said the rest of us would go in alphabetical order.

Lord, I hate that.

With a name like Dale Adams, you get used to going first whenever teachers “randomly” decide to go in alphabetical order. I’d been putting up with that for my whole life. So thank God for Kiss-Ass Kermy or I’d be going first yet again. I was still second, but hey, small victories.

As I watched Jessica rehearsing her speech, a large, white-haired man in a suit came lumbering down the hallway pulling a briefcase on wheels. He passed through the middle of us without even acknowledging our existence, and when he stopped at the door to the conference room, I had a sudden thrill of nervousness. His late arrival must account for why nobody had been called in yet… so maybe the stay of execution was over.

The nervous chatter ended as everyone else in the hall realized the same thing.

Suddenly I was acutely aware of how much I hated wearing suits. The collar chafed my neck, my pants felt bunched up on my crotch, I was hotter than hell, and the jacket was driving me crazy.

But this was the life I had chosen. If professional baseball players could be comfortable in tight pants, then surely I could come to terms with business attire.

Finally the door to the conference room opened, and Mr. Treadwell popped out. “Ms. Osgood?”

“Yes, Tom?” came the cheery answer from down the hall. Jessica stood up quickly and made her way forward without waiting for an answer.

“I don’t envy you having to go after Kermit,” commented Greg. “I’d rather be the only non-Asian in a calculus class.”

I couldn’t help cracking up. “Yeah, well…”

Treadwell ignored the other students in the hall as he ushered Jessica in. He was a tall, thinly built man, and wore dark slacks and a white suit shirt, but no tie. The disheveled hair, too-long goatee, and casually undone top buttons on his shirt told the world that he had earned the right to take leave of corporate norms. He had no one to impress. This was further proof of Treadwell’s mantra: “I ain’t some ivory tower professor.”

And it was true. The guy was a rock star in the business world. He had a weekly column in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, had written three books, and his op-ed pieces frequently showed up in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He was a regular guest commentator on Money Line and other news programs. Twice he left our class early because he was due across town at CNN’s studios.

Competition had been fierce when it was announced that he was teaching one MBA and one undergrad class, with only thirty slots available in each. The undergrad class had been limited to graduating seniors, and within that group all interested names went into a lottery. I was elated to get in. Not only was I a graduating senior, but this would be my very last class. Talk about going out with a bang.

From the beginning, Treadwell had told us he had no interest in attendance—if we didn’t show up, it was our loss. He didn’t care about grades, either. On the first day of class, he told us, “You’re all getting an ‘A’ in this class. Merry Christmas.”

There would be two tests, a midterm and a final. All we really had to do was sign our names to them. “Yes, I will still grade the tests,” he pointed out, “but that will only be to satisfy my curiosity.”

The only work we had to do was come up with a business idea, support it in a detailed formal business plan, then present it to real investors.

This presentation was truly a testament to the epic magnitude of getting into Thomas Treadwell’s class. This exercise was pointedly not some theoretical simulation dreamed up by an academic with no real-world experience. We were presenting our ideas to real venture capitalists and angel investors.

Suddenly the conference room door swung open, and Jessica burst through. I glanced at my watch: twelve minutes exactly. What the…?

Jessica stormed past, nose in the air, tears streaming down her face, right down the middle of the hall without so much as a glance left or right.

Treadwell’s words came back to me: “These guys aren’t coming here for the fun of it. I told them you’re the very best Emory has to offer. One of you is going to give them their next big venture. They’re coming because they want to make money. This is the real thing. If you come in with a half-assed idea that you aren’t prepared to defend, they will rip you to shreds.”

Statistically speaking, just getting a raw idea in front of a group of serious venture capitalists is pretty rare. Rarer still is one of those raw ideas actually getting backing and being brought to fruition through VC. Sure, someone might fail to get VC attention, go off and scrounge up a bit of capital, put things in motion on their own, and then—once some promise is on the table—maybe bring in VC at a later stage. But a VC almost never wastes their time on a raw, unproven idea.

“During a pitch to investors,” Treadwell had said, “there are two forces at work. First, the VCs want to make money: they want ideas worthy of investment. Second, and more important, the VCs do not want to lose money. You guys will be given precisely ten minutes to make your case, and precisely five minutes to defend it during a vigorous discussion. And that’s only if you’re pitch is worthy of conversation. Your job will be to convince some very cagey people into giving you money, so come prepared or you will embarrass yourself. And me.”

As I watched Jessica’s figure retreating down the hall, Treadwell’s warnings became very, very real.

Turning back, I found all eyes on me, wide with fear. Treadwell had used the word “vigorous” to describe the Q&A, but…

Oh God.

After what seemed like a million years, the door opened again. “Mr. Adams?”

Oh God.

Now I questioned the wisdom of coming in here with a less-than-half-baked idea. I had dropped my original business plan two weeks earlier, the same night that my can of Coke exploded, and rushed to build a new plan. Then, a mere two nights ago, I’d scrapped that plan, too, and started over. Two days’ prep time. Two months wouldn’t have been enough.

Oh God.

I mustered what courage I could, stood up, and made my way in, lugging a duffel bag with me. The room was long and narrow, with a large, shiny oak table in the center. There was a computer off to the side nearest the door and a large screen on the wall. On the screen was a PowerPoint slide reading “Questions & Answers.”

Jessica left her presentation on the computer? Wow. The queen of composure must have been completely dismantled by the end of her presentation.

Mr. Treadwell took his seat at the end of the table, directly facing the screen, and I walked over to the computer. My hands shook as I removed Jessica’s thumb drive and replaced it with mine.

It took me a few moments to queue up my PowerPoint presentation. All the while, silence. No chitchat. No recap of Jessica’s presentation. No nothing. Just silence.

I looked up. The guy closest to me had been watching me intently… but suddenly he yawned and looked away. Seven bored faces, no emotion. One was slouched in his chair, tapping his pen on the table, staring at the ceiling. Another shuffled through some papers in front of him. No communication. In fact, no one was looking directly at anybody, except for Treadwell, who was watching me with a patient half smile.

There was no emotion here whatsoever. Not even a hint of residue left from whatever drama had brought Jessica to tears.

What was it that felt so familiar?

“Mr. Adams, we don’t have all day,” came the uncharacteristically stern admonishment from Treadwell.

I knew exactly what this was. I was at a beer-soaked game of poker in a frat house. The stakes had gone uncomfortably high because they all had good hands. But they were trying to act like they didn’t care. These guys were old chums. They were planning to chew me up and spit me out. The only thing missing was cigar smoke.

Shit.

I reached into my bag and pulled out seven information packages, each containing a copy of all my PowerPoint slides and a thirty-page formal business plan. I walked around and distributed these packages. I glanced at my watch, queued up my first slide with a tiny remote, and turned to face the firing squad.

The slide featured a floating astronaut and proclaimed:

No G Enterprises

presents

The Future of Everything

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said loudly, smiling at the expectant faces around the table in an attempt to project confidence. No one was fooled. “No G Enterprises is an electronics manufacturer dedicated to revolutionizing the world by exploring and developing products that defy gravity.”

I glanced around at the uninterested faces and clicked to the next slide, which showed an old Powell Peralta skateboard along with some skateboard industry statistics. I continued: “As you can see, there are more than eleven million skateboard enthusiasts in the US, and that gives us a domestic market worth more than $4.8 billion dollars last year.”