Page 40 of The Hard Launch

“Is it too late to call?” I ask.

“There’s no such thing as too late when you have three kids under the age of three. We’re running a 24-hour operation over here,” Glenn tells me.

I ask about the baby, about the twins. How Jen’s doing, how he’s holding up.

“Babies and startups are both exhausting; the one difference is that babies are boring in a way that’s almost soothing. Not true for startups. And since you’re calling me at ten o’clock at night, I suppose the better question is, how are you holding up, Lacey?”

I say that I’ve been working more hours than I ever have before, but there’s something nice about it all being for a vision I had a part in. Sure, there are ups and downs— but maybe there were a lot of downs today. I tell him about Edmund showing up, and how Jude’s now backing off the tactical in favor of the strategic.

“That’s probably the right move,” Glenn says. I know my opinion on this has more to do with Jude than Lettercat, so I don’t complain. I also leave out the tantrum I had this morning, the call from the recruiter, and everything that happened last night after dinner. So, pretty much everything. But I do mention that I talked to Ella.

“Are we going to be acquired?” I ask.

He sighs. “Come on, Lacey. I know you’ve done this before. Part of the excitement of working at a startup is that you never know what’s going to happen. The thing that makes it terrible is also what makes it interesting.”

“I know,” I say. “I just had one of those days where I’m questioning what I’m doing this for. Like, how can Jude can ask so much of me when he knows it might all go away?”

Glenn’s quiet for a moment. “Maybe that’s why he’s asking so much of you. Because you’re a person who can help make sure it doesn’t.”

Goddammit, Glenn. Always making me see reason.

We have a Project Roar update scheduled right before lunch, but in the morning I DM each member of the team and tell them we don’t need to meet. Everyone’s so happy to have the time back that they don’t question why I didn’t just cancel the meeting. I didn’t do that because I’m up to something.

Jude, arriving late, puts the brakes on when he sees I’m the only person in the conference room.

“You’re in the right place,” I tell him. I gesture to the chair across from me. “Please have a seat.”

I’ve put a short deck together and I share it. The agenda items: Overstepping, Accountability, LinkedIn Settings / Jumping to Conclusions, Lettercat’s Core Values. I run through the first three items briefly and professionally. There are screenshots.

The final slide has the full list of values, but with Transparency and Honesty in bold.

“I know you can’t tell everyone everything,” I say, looking across the table for the first time. “But arguably, you should have told me we might be acquired.”

The Jude looking back at me isn’t the one who finds the problems with my ideas. It’s the one who called me when he was worried about Jen, or feels bad that I have to manage upward with him.

“It’s hard for me to talk about,” he says, “but I should have told you. I’m sorry I didn’t, you deserve to know.”

“Apology accepted,” I say.

I hesitate before I launch into the next part, the one there isn’t a slide for.

“The other night—”

“Was great,” he says quietly. “It was.”

I refuse to listen to the flutter in my stomach that agrees with him.

“But it made everything today worse.” I look at the door, to make sure no one’s within earshot. “Maybe it’s not a good time to make things more complicated than they already are.”

“Sure,” he says. He looks at the monitor instead of me.

“But I don’t want to be anywhere else. I love it here. And you and I work really well together.”

“We do,” he says, keeping his eyes on the Core Values. “Maybe we focus on that for now.”

“For now,” I repeat, but I don’t even know what that means.

Instead I open a report I’ve been dying to show him, one that I made with some newly acquired Excel skills to merge the net new sales report with the client onboarding survey. There’s a chart, too, showing a new sales spike shortly after Tooity announced their Corday Ford partnership. The intake form shows that a significant number of Tooity newsletters have begun migrating to Lettercat.