Something else Mack always left out of his talk was how his dad had built an incredibly successful contracting company from nothing—but he had never forgotten that he’d been turned down by five banks in Dallas for a small-business loan when he was starting out. If he’d had the same access to capital that Mack had had, he’d probably be one of the richest men in Texas by now. But VC firms were built to understand and profit from this new world. So what if they ended up owning a chunk of your company? They knew that it took money to make money. In fact, it was considered a bad sign if your company was profitable too soon; you had to spend the money you were earning to build your business or else your investors would wonder if you were thinking big enough and taking enough risks. That was Startup 101.
Mack’s dad still didn’t totally understand what Mack did, or what the company did, or even really how VC funding worked or why Mack would take money from someone else and “let them get into your business like that,” but he loved to talk about how entrepreneurship was in the genes, and Mack had overheard his mother on the phone with one of her friends when he was home for Christmas last year bragging that he was going to be on the local news in Dallas talking about being a tech-company founder. What they really didn’t understand, though, was why he was single. His younger sister, Hailey, had gotten married three years ago, when she was twenty-three, to a guy she’d met at SMU, and everyone at the wedding had seemed surprised—Hailey’s single girlfriends, pleasantly—that Mack came unattached. He’d ended up hooking up with one of Hailey’s sorority sisters and her best friend from high school, and he was pretty sure that neither of them knew about the other and that Hailey knew about neither of them. He still occasionally got texts from the high-school friend; he responded if he knew he was going to be back home for a few days. She was always up for something fun.
His parents knew he dated around but didn’t ask too many questions. The closest they had come was when he was home briefly at Christmas; he’d been watching football with his dad and Hailey’s husband, Colton, and when Colton got up to get a beer from the kitchen, Mack’s dad had said, quietly, “Your mother’s worried about you.”
Mack’s response was to laugh, a little nervously, until he saw the dead-serious look on his dad’s face. “I mean it, son, she’s worried about you. I know things are going well with the company, but she is just worried that…well, she’d just really like you to meet someone, is all.”
Mack had to laugh again to break the tension. If only they knew…“Dad. Please, she has nothing to worry about. You have nothing to worry about. I do fine.” This seemed to do it; his dad clapped him on the back and said, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Still, they were old-fashioned in their way. They didn’t want to meet any of Mack’s girlfriends unless Mack felt like it was serious. And Mack would probably have to bring the girl to Dallas because his parents had yet to set foot in New York. Until very recently, he hadn’t been with anyone he’d even remotely considered taking to Texas. But lately, the thing—he hesitated to put a more concrete label on it—he had with his coworker Isabel seemed to be getting more serious. They’d been seeing each other secretly, and nonexclusively, for the past year, neither of them willing to articulate anything that suggested a desire for commitment, but now Mack was starting to think he was “catching feelings,” as they used to say in middle school. And he had probably felt this way for a while, if he was being completely honest with himself. Maybe the next time he and Isabel hung out, he would broach it.
He suddenly realized that the applause had died down and people were looking at him expectantly. “Are there any questions?” He took a sip of his coffee. In the back, Sunil raised his hand. “Yes?”
Sunil nodded. “First of all, thank you for coming today—your talk was truly visionary and inspiring. Second, my question has to do with scale and hiring. At what point did you need to add layers of, shall we say, administrative staff? You know, finance, HR, and the like. My company is obviously way too small to start thinking about this, but I’ve seen a couple of friends get tripped up by it and I was curious how you’d handled it.”
“Sure. To be honest, we’ve been winging that stuff a little bit. Investors don’t want to hear about you hiring a head of HR. They want to hear about you hiring engineers. So it’s on our radar, sure, but not totally a priority.”
“Thanks,” Sunil said. He didn’t seem totally satisfied with the answer but didn’t ask a follow-up.
“Any other questions?”
“Where do you see TakeOff going from here?” This was from a woman sitting near the door. He’d noticed her on his way in—she was a little chubby, with curly blond hair. He’d dated girls like her in high school.
“I was waiting for someone to ask me that question.” He smiled at her. Was she blushing? She was blushing. “What was your name?”
“Bella.” She smiled back at him. Maybe she was cuter than he had initially thought.
“So, Bella, the goal right now—and by now, I mean, let’s say, the next nine to twelve months—is to scale as fast as we can. We’ve got a new product that’s launching very soon that I can’t say anything more about, but as soon as that launches we’re going to be kind of in a new phase. We’re going to need probably a dozen new developers ASAP. And then, I mean, we’re looking at international expansion, we’re looking at a version for teenagers, we’re exploring partnerships with some major companies right now…there’s a lot happening. It’s a very exciting time.”
All of this was, of course, totally true, but also hugely exaggerated—but, he told himself, in a “fake it till you make it” kind of way. And it wasn’t completely faking it—so far, everything he had “faked” he had subsequently “made.” So he had no doubt that, even though it would mean everything going 1,000 percent according to plan, he would be hiring a dozen new developers, even if that depended on getting the money from Gramercy and being able to find a dozen developers. And he hadn’t exactly discussed the viability of international expansion or a teenage version with anyone on his staff, but these were things that certainly could happen. The two most important things anyone needed for success were vision and willpower. And he had both. Now he caught Peter’s eye, and Peter nodded imperceptibly.