“Reed Financial has been trying to build a technology investment division for four years. We keep hiring people with the right credentials and the wrong instincts, and the division hasn’t found its direction. I’ve been thinking recently about what it would need.” He paused. “It would need someone who understands both the human side of building a company—the actual operational reality of it, the things that don’t show up in pitch decks—and the financial fundamentals. Someone who has sat on both sides of the table. Someone who knows what it looks like when a company is being held together by the genuine belief of the people inside it, versus when it’s being propped up by optics.”
Emily was quiet.
“The role would be Director of Technology Investments. It would mean building the division from a real foundation—hiring, strategy, portfolio management, the whole thing. You would have genuine authority and genuine accountability.” He paused again. “And I want to say clearly: the reason I’m offering this to you is not because you are my daughter. It’s because you are one of two people I’ve met in thirty years who actually understands what I just described. You are the other person.”
“Who’s the first?”
“Your mother,” he said. “But she became a landscape architect, so she’s not available.”
Emily laughed—a real one, the kind that surprises you by arriving—and pressed her hand to her mouth and let it pass.
“I need to think about it,” she said.
“Of course.”
“Seriously think about it. I’m not going to say yes just because it’s you.”
“I’d be disappointed if you did.”
She looked out at the city. The lights were very bright in the dark.
“Give me a week,” she said.
She took the week. She spent it doing what she always did when she needed to think clearly—she worked. She went through every piece of financial analysis she could find on technology investment as a sector, read four years’ worth of Reed Financial’s public reports, drew her own organizational map of what a functional technology division would need, and built three different models for how it might perform under different market conditions. She slept well. She cooked her own meals. She went for long walks in the neighborhood and looked at the buildings and thought about the relationship between a structure and its foundation, which was a thing she had been thinking about a great deal lately.