Jayashree watched Shankar’s face as he stared into his tea cup. “I really thought Raj would be here by now. Just tell me the deal Shankar. Raj probably had something come up at work.”
Shankar looked at her directly for the first time since he met her at the Internet Café. “Well, that’s a nice segue into our investors’ feedback. They expect you to both give notice right away. You said you were cool with that, right?
“Depends. How am I going to pay the rent?”
“As soon as you quit, you go on salary. They’ll match your current rate with a 20% raise. They would like to see your last 2 pay checks as artifacts.”
“No problem, Shankar. What about our programmers?” Jayashree was in an intense mood although the thought of a raise nearly distracted her.
Shankar looked out the window as he said, “You sure you don’t want to wait for Raj?”
“I’m sure.”
Shankar faced Jayashree again and looked at her for a few moments before finally saying, “Like I expected, they want to hire the programmers themselves.” Shankar knew she expected this too but waited for a response. Anything to delay the coming storm. No response from Jayashree, just big round, unblinking, dark brown eyes. “The programmers will all be skilled in Ruby.” Did she blink? She might have. “They are being hired to expand our data feeds. These guys said support features can wait until we need support. They want to go to market with as wide a scope as possible.” Shankar lost his train of thought as he saw Raj walking up through the window enabling Jayashree to respond.
“Holy cow Shankar! You total foot wipe!” Jayashree stopped as she saw Raj walk in and simultaneously realized the entire café heard her outburst.
Upon entering Raj noticed everyone in the café looking at Jayashree and Shankar, and was unsure whether to talk to them or the crowd. He nodded toward his partners in a hushed voice, “Hey guys.” They just stared at him quietly as he took his seat.
Jayashree maintained the hushed voice and pointed to Shankar with her left hand as she exclaimed to Raj, “Our partner just hired ruby programmers to develop ETL for new data feeds.” She paused to let that sink in for Raj.
Raj stared at Shankar for half a minute before asking him, “Clearly, you lost the argument for developing a robust product, but did you not know that our ETL is in Python? It’s just the web services and Jayashree’s stuff that’s written in Ruby. This is a train wreck. What else should we know Shankar?”
“Our ownership will now be diluted to half with these guys. So Jayashree, you go from 35% to 25% and we each go from 17.5% to 12.5%.”
Jayashree broke the hush and shattered all sense of decorum as she shrieked, “WTF! No deal Shankar! No deal! Are you hearing me?”
Shankar remained his composure and his hushed voice as he responded, “They said if you had issues with that, they could double your rate.”
