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Fuck. Wake the fuck up and pay attention. “Bread’s great. Foot’s great.” Imbecile. Fuuuck.
He shovelled scrambled egg and bacon, and slurped coffee, while Jay turned his back and cleaned up. The only way this could be more awkward was if Jay was Malcolm and he’d been caught out doing the walk of shame by his boss’ boss’ bosses. Fuuck.
“Cin tells me you work in Wentworth’s IT group.”
Shit, she’d done nothing to sell him up. “Yeah. Day job.” She still wouldn’t look at him. She’d slipped away without waking him and kissed him on the fucking shoulder as if she couldn’t stand to touch him.
“You wrote a program for assessing shareholder vote preferences based on prior deal activity and portfolio spend.”
Any halfwit coder could’ve done that. She might as well have stuck him in a boat and shoved him down the river. Well fuck her.
“Yeah, though what I wanted to do was create a new algorithm that would’ve given a long term indicator of investment propensity, but the company didn’t see its value.” And fuck and fuck and fuck. Now he sounded like an arrogant shit.
He had to clench every muscle not to fling thousands of dollars worth of stools across the room when she put her hand on his back. “Take it easy, Mace. Tell Jay what you told me.”
At least she didn’t say, in the bath.
“You obviously know who I am, Mace. I fund speculative IT businesses. I make a lot of money doing it. I don’t have to bake my own bread.” Jay came around the counter. “Cin asked me to hear you out so here I am, but if you don’t want to do this, if it’s not right for you, I understand.”
God. Fuck. The man was worth billions, he’d cooked Mace breakfast, and was offering him a chance hundreds of dudes would give their left nut for and he was stuck in a funk because he’d thought last night meant something and Jacinta might’ve wanted more than what they’d started with. More than the day and two nights.
He was a fucking idiot.
He stood and took his plate around to the sink. “I’m the developer. It’s my idea, but my partner Dillon is the business head.” When he turned back Jay had settled on the lounge with Jacinta. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk to you. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll do my best to explain what we’ve got. What we plan to do.”
“I can’t ask for better.”
He took the enormous winged chair and looked down at his bare feet. He felt more naked without his laptop. Jay was casually dressed in jeans and a shirt. He had boat shoes on. He probably owned a boat. He could probably afford to raise the Titanic.
“Start with your professional background.”
He looked up. Dillon had economics and marketing qualifications. He had two degrees and the kind of work experience that easily demonstrated his credential. He was a mad git, but he had professional stripes. Mace was entirely self-taught. No degree, no history of approved study, no faculty to grant him a certificate for his wall, just hours and hours of experimentation, development, and his own study. There were two schools of thought about self-taught programmers. He hoped Jay wasn’t affiliated with the school that thought they sucked arse.
He felt more comfortable when he moved on to talk about the program. From dream to inception to plan and prototype. He forgot where he was, forgot Jay was a rich fuck who baked bread and made Jacinta comfortable. He forgot her. He talked. He let it flow out, in detail, descriptive and explicit. He was logical, persuasive. He was comprehensive and authoritative. He was his best self when he lost all sense of time and place and was so heavily in the zone he was indestructible.
“You’re talking about predictive modelling. There are a number of—”
“Not just predictive.”
Jay sat forward. “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying—”
“That’s just the beginning.
Jay stood. “You’ve built this already?” He turned to Jacinta. “Can I borrow a pad and pencil?”
She unfolded from the lounge and went to get them.
“I’ve got a working prototype but we need to test it. I want to build it out so it stands up now and is robust enough not to be challenged.”
“And you have a business model?”
He nodded. They did, but that’s where he genuinely turned into a blue screen of death. Jacinta came back. Jay scribbled a few notes.
“Tell me about funding requirements.”
“I, ah.” Shit. Nothing he’d yet said, from his own lack of formal qualifications to the disruptive nature of the modelling, had wiped the look of concentration off Jay’s face. Talking about the product, the interface was easy. Mace lived it, he breathed it; if you analysed his blood, it’d have basic algorithms in it, but competitive pressure, the legal, jurisdictional ramifications, privacy issues, the ramp up, the scale, the burn rate, these were all Dillon’s dropdown.
“Call him.” Jay looked up. “Your partner, get him on the phone.”
