At seven in the morning, Nick's phone started blowing up, violently ripping him out of a dead sleep. From there, the calls just kept flooding in, pretty much forcing him to drag himself out of bed to deal with the chaos.
The first person aggressively hitting his line was Vincent Ford over at BYA Auto. Nick wasn't exactly shocked that the guy was calling, but dialed in at seven AM? Talk about having zero chill.
For a CEO in his fifties, the dude acted like he had absolutely no patience, completely throwing any corporate composure out the window.
Yawning his head off, Nick answered with a groggy, "Yo."
"Hey, Nicholas! Man, are you seriously still asleep? My bad for waking you up so early," Vincent's booming, high-energy laugh blasted through the earpiece. But despite saying he was sorry for the disruption, the guy clearly had zero intention of hanging up the phone.
"Morning, Vincent," Nick muttered, letting out another massive yawn. "Got back to my room super late last night, so my brain isn't even fully booted up yet. Cut me some slack."
"No worries, no worries, man! Honestly, I'm the one who should be apologizing for hitting you up at the crack of dawn."
After breezing through the quick apology, Vincent got straight to the point with a slick grin in his voice: "So, I caught that global keynote you dropped last night. Holy hell, man, what an absolute banger of a presentation.
I definitely didn't expect you to pull the sheet off that many heavy-hitting, flagship products all at once. Seriously, you guys absolutely crushed it."
'You actually watched the whole stream? Yeah, right, my foot,' Nick muttered under his breath. On the surface, though, he just forced a polite smile and played the corporate game: "Hey, thanks for the hype, Vincent. But compared to what BYA Auto is pulling off out there, our team still has a hell of a lot to learn."
Vincent laughed it off big time. "Come on, man, don't play modest. You are straight-up running circles around the old guard at this point. We're the ones who need to be taking notes on your insane, bleeding-edge R&D capabilities."
"Haha, you're way too kind, man," Nick chuckled dryly, totally matching his energy.
Sensing that Nick wasn't really biting or throwing any real hype back his way, Vincent actually felt a bit awkward. The dude had basically been up all night tossing and turning, and the literal second he figured it was a semi-acceptable time to call, he dialed in to get a head start on the competition—only to realize the guy on the other end was still half-dead in bed.
But since he already had Nick on the hook, there was no way he was hanging up now. Even if the tech founder sounded completely out of it, Vincent had to shoot his shot.
"So, Nicholas... I heard a rumor that you officially announced some insane solid-state Super Battery Tech at the presentation last night?"
'Uh, thought you said you watched the actual keynote? Now it's just a rumor you 'heard'?'
Rolling his eyes at the blatant corporate double-talk, Nick forced himself to wake up a bit and leaned into the mic: "Yeah, the tech is fully real, but we haven't actually spun up the mass production lines for it yet. Why do you ask, Vincent? Your team trying to get a piece of the action?"
'A piece? Try the whole damn pie!' Vincent internal excitement was through the roof, but he kept his voice smooth and professional: "I mean, obviously, man. This is a massive, historic breakthrough in material science.
You already know BYA Auto is completely all-in on dominating the EV and clean energy market, and legacy battery tech has always been our absolute biggest bottleneck holding back the entire lineup. This architecture you're holding is like opening a gateway to a whole new dimension, dragging electric vehicles to a tier nobody thought was possible.
Honestly, with this under the hood, completely deleting traditional gas-powered cars from the market isn't even going to be a challenge anymore."
"Haha, come on, don't hyping it up that much. It's just some solid engineering, nothing crazy," Nick laughed, playing it down.
Vincent shot back instantly, "Man, you are seriously underestimating what you've built here; this stuff is going to change the entire world.
Look, our board is insanely interested in locking down this architecture. What's your calendar looking like? I will literally hop on a private jet and fly out to meet you face-to-face today.
Don't even stress about the terms, man—you name your price. As long as you aren't being completely ridiculous, we will greenlight whatever you want."
Nick was laughing hysterically on the inside, but he made sure to sound completely stressed out and overwhelmed over the line: "Vincent, I am genuinely sorry, man. But as you can imagine, we literally just wrapped a massive global product launch, and my calendar is completely slammed for the foreseeable future. I honestly don't even have an hour to breathe right now.
Plus, to be totally transparent, this battery tech still has a ton of supply chain and regulatory hurdles to clear, and federal agencies are actively running technical safety audits on the cells as we speak. So whether we can even successfully scale this up to a commercial production line is a whole different story.
Tell you what—the second we lock down the manufacturing logistics, I'll clear a massive block of time on my schedule and we can have a real sit-down."
'The second you lock down production, what the hell is left for us to negotiate?' Vincent spat inwardly, but he kept the fake corporate smile pinned on tight: "Hey, that's totally fine, man. Are you staying at your hotel in Austin or flying back to corporate headquarters? Our team can come out to your turf and wait out the schedule. Just hit us up whenever you can scrape together an hour or two to grab coffee and talk shop.
Look, I get that scaling a next-gen architecture into a full production pipeline involves a nightmare of operational headaches. But BYA has an insane amount of mass-manufacturing experience, and we can step in to provide full, uncompromised logistics support to get you across the finish line."
"Hehe, thanks, Vincent. I appreciate the offer, but even with the production friction, our internal engineering team can handle the heavy lifting, so we don't want to drag your resources into the mud. My schedule out here is a total meat grinder right now anyway, so I'll hit your line the second I get back to headquarters."
Hearing Nick's textbook brush-off, Vincent was definitely getting pissed off behind the scenes. But since he couldn't afford to let that irritation show, he kept his tone light and breezy: "Hey, no sweat, brother. That's what friends and flagship corporate partners are for, right?
It's actually perfect timing—our autonomous driving tech division out at the headquarters campus just locked in some massive software breakthroughs. I'm actually flying out that way in a few days to audit the tracking data myself, so we can totally hit the facility together. Besides, it's been way too long since we kicked back, man—I miss you, old brother."
"Haha, visual check, Vincent. Sounds like a plan, we'll link up back at headquarters," Nick agreed. He knew exactly how the game worked—the BYA exec was going to hunt him down and show up on his doorstep sooner or later, whether he greenlit the meeting today or not.
Like the old saying goes, you don't slap someone who comes to your door with a smile. Since the guy was willing to hustle this hard to show his corporate loyalty, Nick might as well give him a stage to prove how big of a check his board was willing to cut, right?
The second Nick gave him the green light, Vincent's grin got a whole lot wider. He traded a few more shallow pleasantries before finally hanging up.
The literal millisecond the call disconnected, the enthusiastic smile vanished from Vincent's face, instantly replaced by a dark, intense frown.
"Well? Did the kid bite, or did he shut us out?" asked another older executive sitting across the room, who was around his age but looked like he hit the gym way more often.
Vincent shook his head, throwing his phone onto the desk. "I told you, this tech prodigy is a straight-up shark. The only reason he leaked that battery data during the post-show press window was to watch all the legacy automakers rip each other's throats out in a bidding war, so he can step in at the last second and extract maximum capital.
Trying to walk away with a cheap deal this time around is going to be virtually impossible."
The other executive just shook his head, totally disagreeing. "We don't need a cheap deal, Vincent. Even if we have to overpay or burn through some initial margin, as long as we get a seat at that manufacturing table, it's a win. This energy-density technology is way too vital for our survival."
"Yeah, it's life-or-death for us—but you think the rest of the automotive giants aren't looking at it the exact same way?"
...Meanwhile, the second Nick tossed his phone onto the mattress, the damn thing started buzzing again. Glancing at the caller ID flashing on the glass, he couldn't help but let out a totally defeated, sarcastic laugh.
"Hehe, morning, CEO Nicholas. Man, I knew your line was going to be an absolute disaster area today. Seriously, I dialed you three or four times back-to-back and it was just a constant busy signal. Who've you been having such a cozy, deep chat with this morning?" a highly familiar, playful female voice echoed from the speaker.
"Let me guess—is Qualcomm trying to jump into the hype train too?" Nick asked, totally unfazed. The woman on the line was William Gerstenmaier, a high-ranking executive over at Qualcomm and a long-time industry contact of his.
William let out a bright, sharp giggle over the line: "Duh, obviously! After that absolute masterclass of a keynote last night, how could we not be tracking your moves? Trust me, it's not just me—our whole VP circle and our CEO Jeff are completely hyper-focused on your data right now.
We are insanely interested in backing the entire flagship lineup you dropped on stage. What do you say we set up a casual summit and talk collaboration?"
"Oh, yeah? Which specific product line caught your board's eye?" Nick asked, a smirk playing on his face.
William paused for a brief, dramatic second before dropping two words: "All of them."
"Damn, talk about a massive appetite. You sure your supply chain can even digest that much volume?" Nick asked, legitimately taken aback for a moment.
"Hey, we won't know unless we take a massive bite, right?" William laughed smoothly. "You're still hanging out in the city, right? Our CEO Jeff wants to take you out for a super chill, low-key boat cruise out on the lake. We can rent a private yacht, grab some iced coffees, and talk about old times."
"Hard pass, no time!"
'Is this lady completely out of her mind? It is literally early March. Going out onto an open lake right now just to freeze our asses off, drink river wind, and pretend to be some artistic, old-school sailors? Who do you think you are, some character in a historical drama?'