Chapter 15

The crowd milled around in the courtyard of the Federal building. Having the citizenship ceremony outside, rather than inside, the building probably reduced the security requirements. They did have a metal detector at the gate, and we did have to empty our pockets. I wondered what they did when you actually had to enter the building.

Familiar faces dotted the crowd. Sanjit and Raya were grinning ear to ear. Rajiv and Indira and Kumar were there with them.

Warren ran up to us. "My friend Itzak is here, You should meet his parents."

I had always missed parent's nights at Warren's and Sarah's schools. Susan had claimed them as her due. I had had few chances to meet the families of my kids' friends.

Warren introduced us to Itzhak, and to Itzhak's parents, Yakov and Tsiporah ("call me Tessie.") And to Itzhak's uncle, Ziv.

Ziv chuckled at being introduced. "Long time no see. This is a happy occasion. I don't have to look out for my little brother any more."

Yakov gave his brother a fierce glare. "Did you ever?"

"I got you over here and got you to work, didn't I?"

"True. But ninety hours a week for that startup? I didn't even have to work that hard in the army."

Ziv turned to Lisa. "That reminds me. Are you still with the bank?"

"Semi-retired. Herb joined the bank, so I'll be with him."

Ziv turned to me with a confused look. "I thought you were at... ?"

I smiled. "Out. As of Friday. Now I'm the bank."

Ziv's look remained confused. "I'll never understand how that bank works. All I ever get told is 'yes, ' 'no, ' or 'don't do that.'"

Lisa laughed. "That's how we work."

Ziv nodded. "That's the one part that I understand. I've had exactly two conversations with Assad. The first was, 'We said yes, and we don't send out engraved invitations.' The second was, 'Lisa said "no." "No" means no.'

"So you're now the bank, whatever that means. Maybe that means that you could help me. Not really me, but some of my former investors.

"It's the endowment of a small Midwestern college. They hooked up with some second-tier venture capitalist back in the dot-com era, and invested. When the dot-gones happened, their VC disappeared and just turned everything back to the endowment. I took my company public and got them out. This week they're out here trying to figure out how to handle their zombies: they've got investments that are not quite dead, but not growing or don't have enough buzz to go public. They've visited up and down Sand Hill Road, but no one out there has anything invested in their collection of zombies, or has the extra staff to spend on figuring out what to do. The Sand Hill crowd would be happy to find a buyer if they could put a clean deal on the table, but they can't. They need some serious advice, and I really can't take care of them. Conflict of interest, Sarb-Ox, and all that.

"Remember what you said back when you were at that Internet security company? Something like, 'I'll worry about the product, let the bank worry about the company.' So you're now the bank. You want to worry about some companies?"

Lisa laughed. "So it's triage time?"

Ziv backed up a step. "Get Doctor Death away from me. You cut off a perfectly good subsidiary."

Lisa warmed to the bait. "They were hemorrhaging money. Way too much money. Lots of money. Lots and lots and lots of it. In another three months everything you had would have gone under. Their general manager was burning the capital budget to fund operations. You wouldn't have been told about it until the bankruptcy auditors went through, and maybe not even then."

Ziv turned to me. "Herb, you've got to stop feeding her raw meat. She's too bloodthirsty for us normal folk."

Lisa wrapped my arm around her and tucked herself into my side.

Ziv continued. "You understand technology, and she... you'll make a great couple. Do you have a card? I'll have them call you."

Lisa smiled. "Send them over to the bank this afternoon. We both got dressed, we both got out of the house. We're on a roll. Say, about one-thirty or two. We'll talk to them."

Ziv nodded agreement, and scratched a note into his Palm Pilot.

Yakov had been watching our interaction. "Herb, my brother acts like he never retired."

I smiled. "Maybe he never did. He seems to always remember to never run beyond the range of his logistic support."

Ziv smiled. "Or my air cover." He and Yakov and Tessie wandered off.

I turned to Lisa. "How does the process really work? The few times that I was the beneficiary, I was usually pedaling too hard to enjoy the scenery."

"Couple of ways. Depends what the buyer wants. First you figure out what's there. Sometimes more easily said than done. Then trim the fat so the books look prettier. There's always fat, so there's almost always something that can be trimmed.

"Some folks want just the IP, so everybody goes except for the two interns who might understand the repository. Other folks want the technology and the products, so you keep most of the engineering team. Offshore folks want somebody who understands the customer, so they tend to want some of the marketing team. There are even necrophiliacs out there, folks who want to buy a serious ugly messy disaster area for reasons best left unspoken. Everybody wants something different. Once you know what you've got, you can go looking for the buyer.

"The biggest problem is understanding what you've got, not whatever product the company thinks they're peddling. You need someone around who can get past the PowerPoints. VC's used to keep a couple of technogeeks on hand to separate the wheat from the chaff, but that died out when they had to cut back their own overhead. So freelance bankers for hire with technology smarts are few and far between. If you're willing to work a couple of days a month we can make oodles and oodles of money for the bank.

"And I'll need something to do, and I'm not a big shopping freak. Although I could learn."

I blanched. The cost of our lightning expedition to upgrade my wardrobe would make most Lexus salesmen happy.

"And Ziv said that I should keep some protein in my diet."

We wandered into the Farzoun building after a pleasant lunch, a little after one. Warren had elected to spend the afternoon with Itzhak. We would pick him up at Yakov's after we picked up Sarah.

We were ushered into a conference room. The endowment folks were already there. An man in his fifties wearing a stiff wool suit, a male twenty-something in virgin off-the-rack polyester, and a well-dressed thirty-ish woman. The two men had that glazed look of "farm folks in the big city" that was big on the humor circuit seventy-five years ago. Silicon Valley was way too foreign for their sensibilities. Our appearance didn't help: Lisa was wearing the Lisa version of the djinni uniform, and my sport jacket needed at least a trip to the cleaners, if not the recycle bin. After we claimed Saturday's spoils, it would probably simply get recycled. Nariya's ever-elegant and gracious sari-clad appearance just confused them further. I didn't have business cards, and Lisa's had her old title.

Eric, the head of the endowment fund, looked at us askance.

He attempted an ingratiating grin, cleared his throat ostentatiously, and began. "We've got something like forty million of our endowment tied up in four firms out here that don't seem to be going public, don't want to be merger candidates, and that aren't willing or able to attract other capital to buy us out. We've been stuck this way for the last few years, and this trip is our latest attempt to get ourselves out. We're afraid that it may be our last.

"I've talked to all of the venture capital groups that I could reach, and none of them are in a position to help us. A couple would be happy to let us into their new funds, but they didn't have the time or the manpower to get us out of our current investments. Ziv says you can help us. How can you help us?"

Lisa leaned back in her chair. She picked a pen off the table and toyed with it. "Farzoun Private Bank is, as the name says, a private bank. For the most part, we do discreet banking for our clients, who include executives of a number of major Silicon Valley firms. We work to get our clients into situations where they can achieve significant growth, and we extricate them from situations that they no longer wish to be in. Think of us as hedge fund advisors for folks wealthy enough to be their own hedge fund. We're intimately familiar with the technology marketplace."

Eric pressed on. "What could you do for us?"

"For starters, we don't want to manage your endowment. We're not in that part of the business. For a negotiated fee, we could evaluate your individual holdings, and suggest courses of action. For a 'reasonable and customary' commission, we would execute a course of action, that is, sell or merge a particular holding."

Eric looked a little dubious. "We checked around after Ziv called, and those folks who knew of you, recommended you highly. But some number of folks that we asked have never heard of you."

Lisa grinned. "As I said, we're in the private banking business. Most of the folks who haven't heard of us have no need to hear of us: we couldn't provide them with any meaningful services. Ask the man on the street about a Breitling and you'll get the same response."

The twenty-something looked clueless. I stared pointedly at my watch.

Eric seemed to figured out that it was time to fish or cut bait. "What would you need from us to get started?"

"Letter of engagement. Call your bank and have them transfer the evaluation fee."

"And when would you get started?"