The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

doubted, the better she behaved.
    At work she was the peacemaker. She wasn’t just the chief executive officer of the company; she was the adult when her partners behaved like children. Admittedly her colleagues were young. Alex Zaslovsky, Veritech’s chief technology officer, was just twenty-two. He had come to America at fifteen, and still spoke with a slight Russian accent. He’d been a math prodigy and skipped several years of school. He’d also been late to grow, so that even now he had a slight frame. He had black eyes, long lashes, a thatch of thick brown hair. He’d heard a secretary whispering about him at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “How old is that one? Twelve?” He turned on her and gave her the finger right before his presentation to the board.
    “Alex!” Emily whispered, and Milton Leong, the company’s twenty-five-year-old CFO, turned red with suppressed laughter. She appreciated Alex’s mind, and Milton’s sense of humor—his jovial personality set the tone for a company profiled in the San Jose Mercury News as “the most happy start-up.” But there were times when the two of them tried her patience. In a young industry, Alex and Milton acted their age.
    This was the story they told about Veritech’s beginnings: Once upon a time, back in ’96 when Alex and Milton were grad students, they stayed up late finishing a paper, and they decided to order takeout. They started shuffling menus, and just as they settled on Thai food and began debating between Shrimp Delight and Shrimp in Love, a new paradigm for large-scale data storage and retrieval came to them. Each cache of data should have a take-out menu.
    “Very funny,” Milton said, but Alex wasn’t joking. They met Emily, who saw the potential of a new data-storage paradigm, which was ingenious and elegant, and she drafted a business plan. Within months, Alex developed V.0, Milton found the first clients, and Emily organized the company.
    The true story of Veritech’s beginnings was complex and technical, and had more to do with the paper Alex and Milton had been writing than the collection of take-out menus. They had not debated which sort of shrimp to order, because Alex was allergic to shellfish. Nor had they simply met up with Emily. She had come to them looking for an infrastructure project. But it was the business with the take-out menus that reporters fixed on. A take-out menu with numbered specials was something every interviewer could visualize, an endearing symbol for a couple of brilliant students brainstorming late at night. Veritech’s goal was to become the biggest Web-based data-storage company in the world, but its origin myth was all fun and games, as if once upon a time some guys got together and said, “We’ve got enough talent here. Let’s put on a show!”
    There had been freedom in the early days, a sense of unlimited possibility, but with each new round of funding, Alex and Milton and Emily felt more constrained. They had to answer to VCs on their board, particularly to the forty-one-year-old Bruno, with his fair hair and sunburned brow. Bruno was Swiss, and he had worked at Xerox and at Apple before moving to Sirius Venture Partners. He cycled competitively, stayed late, and woke early to shoot out e-mails to everyone, “trying,” as Milton put it, “to give us marching orders for the day.” As they filed for their blockbuster IPO, Bruno’s pronouncements and e-mail warnings intensified. “Sensitive time! Remember, we are making an important transition which requires the utmost care. There will be many visitors in the building. Please be discreet in elevators and public spaces.”
    Of course everyone down to the secretaries knew that this was a sensitive time. Emily had braced herself for arrogance and gloating, a sense of entitlement at the company, but in fact, the ethos was the opposite—one of indebtedness to investors, to underwriters, to the world. With floodgates of cash about to open, everyone