They had coffee for the next 11 years. Not literally, but in the way that people who become genuine mentors to each other make coffee into a practice. The regular sitting down, the direct conversation, the particular intimacy of two people who have decided to be honest with each other across a gap of 30 years and entirely different life experiences. Edward had grown up poor in rural Georgia. He had built his career in the era when a black man in finance was either invisible or remarkable and was treated like a problem either way.
He had developed over five decades a philosophy about money and power and visibility that Damian at 29 at 30 at 31 learning and listening had absorbed the way dry ground absorbs rain. The problem with success Edward told him once is that it teaches you the wrong lesson. It teaches you that what got you here was the thing people could see, the product, the pitch, the number, when really what got you here was everything you did when nobody was watching. Privacy, Damian said, not exactly privacy. Intention.
You have to know why you're building something before you build it. And then you have to build it in a way that the why stays intact even when the money comes. Damian had thought out this m for 2 years before he fully understood it. He understood it on the day his business partners sold Clear Path Systems without telling him. He was 31 years old.
Maya was 2. Diane had been gone for 6 months. Taken by an aneurysm on an ordinary Tuesday morning that had absolutely no interest in being the kind of event that announced itself with warning signs. The two partners he'd built, clear path with men he'd known since graduate school. Men who had eaten dinner at his table and held his daughter when she was 3 weeks old, had found a buyer, negotiated a price, signed the documents, and notified him by email.
By email, the company he had conceived, designed, fundraised, built, and run was sold on a Thursday, and he found out about it on Friday at 6:43 in the morning before Maya woke up. While he was standing in the kitchen waiting for coffee to brew, he read the email three times. He stood very still for about 90 seconds. Then he made the coffee and he sat down and he was there. When Maya woke up and he fed her breakfast and got her ready for the day and dropped her at his mother's apartment and drove to his office, the office that was no longer his and collected the things that belonged to him and left.
He did not make a scene. He did not call a lawyer that day. He did not call Edward. He did not call anyone. He drove to the lake.
He sat on a bench for 3 hours and thought about who he was without the company and without Diane and what that left him with and whether it was enough. He decided it was not because he felt it. He didn't feel it. He decided it. The way a man who is standing at the edge of something very dark decides not emotionally but structurally.
The way you set a foundation that he is going to choose the direction that leads forward for his daughter. That was the whole equation. He called Edward the next day. Edward listened to all of it without interrupting. Then he said, "How much did they get?" Damian told him.
Edward was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "So you built something worth that much with partners who didn't deserve you? That's useful information. Which part?" All of it. Edward said, "Now you know what you can build, and now you know how to choose who you build it with." They talked for 4 hours.