Location mattered when you were launching a company.
Hell's Kitchen wasn't going to attract talent. Daisy gritted her teeth and rented two offices in Midtown — overpriced, but necessary. She posted job listings online and brought on a handful of college students to write code.
Big data had a low barrier to entry. The idea was the hard part; execution was straightforward.
Her edge was knowing what the next few years looked like. Combined with her predecessor's computer science background, she could design an algorithm that would run three to five years ahead of the current industry standard. By the time competitors recognized the opportunity and started building their own rafts, she'd already be skimming past them on a speedboat.
She spent three days building the framework herself, then handed off the content development to the student hires.
The students had no concept of how significant what they were working on was. That was fine — but the work ethic was another issue entirely. Every other day it was something: demands for time off, requests for office amenities, negotiations over working conditions. Daisy was three steps from throwing someone out a window.
She was in the middle of a frustrated stomp back to her own office when she opened her laptop at her desk to clear her inbox and found an unexpected message.
A job application. The sender's name: David Lieberman. Graduate of SUNY. His cover letter claimed years of software industry experience, but reading between the lines, every cited achievement involved words like "assisted" or "supported." Clearly a support-track guy.
Still, Daisy decided to give him a shot — because she knew who David Lieberman was. NSA analyst. Future ally of Frank Castle. Callsign: Micro. Someone like that shouldn't be struggling to find work. So why was he applying to her glorified garage startup?
Is this some kind of setup? She decided to meet him and see.
They met at a coffee shop.
The moment she saw him, she was confused. "Mr. Lieberman — how old are you?"
"Twenty-six."
That was somehow alarming. She looked at his face — full beard, forehead already creased — and he seemed like a man who had aged at double speed. She checked his ID and résumé twice. Both confirmed: twenty-six. She relaxed. The man had barely left school, was clearly awkward, and most likely hadn't been recruited by the NSA yet.
They fell into easy conversation. Daisy pegged him quickly: rock-solid foundations, but rigid thinking — the kind of person who thrives in structured problems and struggles when the structure disappears.
David had never heard the term "big data," but the concept of finding patterns and meaning inside massive, tangled data sets lit something up in him. He believed that was where he could build something real.
Out of the flood of job listings he'd sorted through, something about Daisy's posting had caught his eye. Now, sitting across from her, he found that she kept articulating ideas he'd been circling for years without quite reaching. The boss was young, her credentials minimal — but her perspective was something else entirely.
Daisy thought well of him too. A future NSA pick was no small thing; by her standards, he was exactly the kind of talent she could actually recruit.
At the end, she couldn't help asking: "Mr. Lieberman, you're clearly capable. Why this company?"
The bearded man went quiet for a long moment. When he finally explained, it came out in pieces — his wife was pregnant with their second child. Their daughter was still young. With a pregnant wife who needed someone around, he couldn't take a job that kept him far from home. And, conveniently, Daisy's office was one block from his apartment.
A family man who chose proximity over prestige. She had nothing to say to that.
David Lieberman was good-natured to a fault — almost spineless. In another timeline, he'd found himself in a situation where a large, dangerous friend he'd trusted had grown very close to his wife — close enough that only the final line had remained uncrossed — while David watched it happen on his own monitors. And his response had been to drink alone and eventually forgive both of them.
Marvel's most patient man. For an employee this mild-tempered, Daisy was happy to welcome him with open arms. If he can endure that, he can probably handle a late paycheck.
They signed the contract quickly. David Lieberman came on as Head of Technology, overseeing the later phases of development.
Daisy walked him through the project's current state and near-term roadmap. He sat down and started working the same afternoon.
She hadn't forgotten her live-in operative. Maki Matsumoto, her maid, was brought into the company under a dual mandate: officially handling legal affairs, covertly keeping an eye on the rest of the staff.
Maki was chronically anxious. To give her something useful, Daisy taught her the karate she'd just learned. The woman's physical potential was startling — in the original timeline she'd become Lady Bullseye for a reason. She absorbed everything at a speed that made Daisy quietly grateful for her own enhanced body. Without it, she wouldn't have been able to keep up.
Office space, computers, servers — all leased. The students were on short-term contracts. David, to be near his family, had quoted a salary well below his market rate. Maki drew no salary at all.
By every measure, this company ran lean to the point of skeletal — and even then, the $100,000 on her bank card was visibly shrinking. Development was only a quarter of the way done.
Cut every corner that could be cut.
She applied that rule firmly to the company — and not at all to herself. She bought a secondhand Ford, kept up her karate and shooting practice, and continued making regular pilgrimages to the nearest Chinese restaurant to eat properly. Life, all told, was good.
By the time the bank account was down to a few thousand dollars, a working prototype of the big data algorithm was complete.
The code was bloated and nowhere near optimized. Daisy locked herself in her office to refine it, then ran it on the rented server.
In this era, information security was almost nonexistent. User data sat open like an unlocked front door. The algorithm performed beautifully.
Development: complete. Next step: convincing clients to pay for it.
The graveyard of New York's financial district was full of brilliant ideas that had never found their market. Not because they weren't good enough — because their creators couldn't sell. Daisy had no illusions about David and Maki as a sales team. She needed someone who could open doors.
She slipped back into old habits. Killed a block of security cameras, identified a target, and spent two days watching before she went to pay a visit — her pistol tucked at the small of her back.
She'd been observing the target for two full days from outside his building in the Upper West Side — a high-end residential tower. He barely left. Hermit-level reclusion. That was why she came herself.
She skipped the front door. A focused vibration popped the window latch. She slipped through the window, crossed the apartment in the dark, and settled into the armchair in the shadows.
She sat the way so many movie villains did — waiting in the dark for the mark to come home.