And it comes with a condition. I've got some questions about this anti-discrimination framework thing. Transparent scoring, publishing our criteria. I want to understand what I'm signing up for before I sign up for it. Ask your questions.
Straight one. Then is this real or is this window dressing because I've been offered money before by people who wanted me to hang a nice sign in the lobby and change nothing behind it. If that's what this is, I'm not interested, no matter the number. Nathan sat down the dish he'd been drying. Emma was in the next room and he lowered his voice.
Mr. Brooks, two days ago, I walked into a company we were about to give $180 million, and I put my hand out to shake, and the CEO looked at my suit and decided I wasn't worth the courtesy of a handshake in front of her board. He heard Brooks go quiet on the other end. I've spent my whole life being that man in the plain suit, and I decided standing in that parking lot that I was done being quiet about it. So, no, Mr. Brooks, it's not window dressing. It's the whole point.
I don't want you to hang a sign. I want you to build a company where the next man in a plain suit gets his hand shaken before anybody knows what he's worth. And I want the rules written down where he can read them so he never has to wonder. There was a long silence on the line. My father, Brooks finally said, was a janitor, cleaned office buildings at night for 31 years, and I used to help him sometimes on weekends when I was a kid.
And I watched the way the day people talked to my dad, or rather the way they didn't talk to him. The way they looked right through him like he was part of the furniture. I swore I'd never looked through a person like that. Built my whole company on it. His voice thickened.
Mr. Carter, I don't need to think about your condition. Your condition is the reason I built this place. I'll sign it tonight. Then we have a deal, Nathan said. And Mr. Brooks, one more thing.
Name it. When we announce, I don't want it to be about them. I don't ever want to say Summit's name. I don't want a single word that could look like revenge. I just want us to stand next to what we built and let people compare.
Can you live with that? Mr. Carter, Brooks said, I've been standing next to what I built and letting people compare for 30 years. That's the only marketing I've ever known how to do. They hung up and Nathan stood in his kitchen for a moment and then Emma called from the other room. Daddy, who was that?
And Nathan said, that was a man who shakes hands, sweetheart. And Emma said, Everybody shakes hands. And Nathan said, No, baby, not everybody, but the good ones do. 2 Days later, the funding round collapsed completely. It happened fast, the way these things always do.
At the end, the slow leak became a rupture in a single afternoon. The third co-investor pulled at 11:00 a.m. By noon, it was on every wire. By 1:00, a downgrade watch had been issued on Summit's credit. By 2, the stock had shed 19% from where it had opened 3 days before, and the trading was heavy. And the analysts who'd been quiet were suddenly not quiet at all.
And the phrase that kept appearing over and over in every note and every segment was the phrase that would follow Victoria Hayes for the rest of her professional life. Governance concerns. Nobody knew the specifics. The investigation was airtight and Coleman had run it clean and not one document had leaked. But the market didn't need the specifics.
The market only needed the shape of the thing. A legendary investor walking away without explanation. A company suddenly unable to say why. A special committee, a stock in free fall, and the market filled in the shape with the worst thing it could imagine, which was, as it happened, roughly the truth. Victoria watched 22 years of work lose a fifth of its value in 6 hours, and she did the only thing left in her broken playbook.
She called a mandatory all-hands meeting. She was going to give a speech. She was going to rally the troops. She was going to stand in front of the whole company and remind them who they were and where they were going. The way she'd done a hundred times before.
Because Victoria Hayes had always been able to talk her way out of anything, had built her entire identity on the power of standing in front of a room and bending it to her will. It was without question the single worst decision she had made in a week entirely composed of them. The all-hands meeting was at 4:00, with 1,500 employees on the video feed and 300 in the auditorium. And Victoria Hayes walked out onto that stage with her chin up and her voice strong and she began to speak and for about 90 seconds it almost worked. I know the last few days have been frightening, she said.
I know you've read the headlines. I know the stock has moved against us and I want to stand here and tell you the truth, which is that this company is fundamentally sound, that our people are the best in the industry and that we are the victims. Yes, I'll say it. The victims of a single powerful individual who decided on a whim over a personal slight to punish 2,000 hard-working families for a misunderstanding that lasted 30 seconds. And in the back of the auditorium, a hand went up.
It was not a planned thing. All hands meetings at Summit did not have Q&A. Nobody raised hands, but a hand went up anyway, and it belonged to a woman. Victoria didn't recognize a software engineer named Priya Nair. 7 Years at the company and before anyone could stop her, Priya Nair stood up and spoke and her voice carried in a room gone suddenly dangerously quiet. With respect, Ms. Hayes, that's not the story going around the engineering floor.
The story going around is that he introduced himself and you wouldn't shake his hand because of how he was dressed. Is that not true? Because if it's not true, I think a lot of us would feel a lot better hearing you say clearly that it's not true. Victoria's smile froze on her face. 1,500 People leaned toward their screens, and Victoria Hayes, standing on a stage in front of her entire company, had one clean chance to tell the truth, and she could not do it.
The word sorry was still unsayable. So instead, she reached one more time for the version where she was the victim. I'm not going to dignify a piece of gossip with it's not gossip if it's true. Priya said it's only gossip if it's false. So which is it?
Sit down, please. I'd rather stand if it's all the same. There are a lot of us who've been told for years that we lack executive presence. A lot of us who watched vendors who looked like our families get turned away for not being the right cultural fit. We didn't have a word for it.
And then a man in a cheap suit got his hand left hanging in the air and suddenly we all had the same word at the same time. So I'm asking in front of everybody, did it happen the way we heard it happened? And there it was out loud in front of 1,500 people. The thing that had lived in the walls of Summit Dynamics for years, finally spoken by a woman brave enough to stand up in an auditorium and say it. It was not a question anymore.