After nearly two hours of intense back-and-forth, William Gerstenmaier finally took off, looking completely filled with regret and resentment. And while Nick hadn't completely slammed the door on her partnership deck, he flat-out refused to sign off on anything that actually touched their core operations.
Nick could read her playbook like an open book—or rather, he saw right through Amazon's institutional calculations. On paper, it looked like a total win-win scenario, and she had even flashed a ton of corporate sincerity by personally flying out to hand him a massive bag of cash, but in reality, she was just ruthlessly paving a path for her own empire.
If this had been a year ago, Nick probably would have taken the deal, but now that he possessed way more leverage and choices, why the hell would he tie himself to a single corporate tree?
Even if he did eventually decide to establish a joint venture with them, he wasn't about to immediately state his position; he was going to let them sweat it out and hang on the line for a minute first.
Nick ended up extending his stay in Los Angeles for a grand total of five days. Throughout that entire five-day block, outside of hitting a few mandatory corporate events, his inbox was practically melting from constant networking invites. It felt like overnight, he had suddenly transformed into the absolute most hyped figure in this entire bustling metropolis. Everyone from the local municipal government to famous Fortune 500 enterprises, and even grassroots local organizations, was aggressively trying to secure his good graces.
However, outside of clearing his schedule for a handful of mission-critical executive roundtables, Nick systematically declined everything else. Even with those boundaries in place, his daily planner for those five days was packed completely tight from morning till night.
Bidding farewell to the LA skyline, Nick didn't book a flight back to Austin. Instead, he completely rerouted his flight path straight to Washington, D.C. Liam O'Shea over at the federal research institute had already blown up his phone multiple times, aggressively urging him to get his ass down to the capital as fast as humanly possible.
When it came to this proprietary super battery architecture, both the Department of Defense and the regulatory heads over at the Department of Commerce and Industry were treating it with an immense level of institutional weight. Way before this week, federal task forces had already been actively running intensive verification sweeps on the underlying tech.
But because Nick had been dragging his feet and taking his sweet time to get to D.C., the official verification summary tribunal hadn't been able to kick off. The oversight departments had nudged him on the timeline repeatedly, but Nick had simply been too buried under commercial fires to find a spare second.
So the literal second his tech keynote wrapped up, Nick faced a barrage of high-priority calls, all telling him to get on a plane immediately. Because of that pressure, Nick abruptly cut his LA trip short and hopped a red-eye straight to the capital.
Compared to his previous bureaucratic runs to the capital, the tier of red-carpet treatment Nick received this time around was scaled up exponentially. The feds didn't just deploy a dedicated black car service for his airport pick-ups and drops; they booked him into an upscale boutique business hotel, and this time, they even assigned a specialized liaison whose sole job was to manage his daily itinerary.
After logging a solid night of sleep at the hotel to kill the jet lag, Nick pulled up to the Bureau of Science, Technology, and Industry early the next morning to attend the technical verification and practical application panel regarding the next-gen lithium-ion power cell his team had engineered.
Before the formal committee session actually kicked off, Nick first caught up with Liam O'Shea from the research institute in the main corridor.
"Director O'Shea, long time no see, man." Nick stepped forward, greeting him with an enthusiastic handshake.
"Haha, look at you, Nicholas! Man, you are becoming harder and harder to book these days. I literally rang your line a dozen times; what took you so damn long to get down here?" Liam O'Shea scolded with a warm grin, playfully pointing a finger at him.
Hearing that, Nick scratched the back of his neck with a bit of professional embarrassment. "Man, I've been completely drowning in operational fires. Trust me, just to clear my schedule for this flight, I had to aggressively cancel a massive stack of high-level meetings."
"Look, I know you're running a sprint. You've really turned into a titan, kid. A single global live stream and suddenly your name is trending in every household on the map," Liam O'Shea said, looking him over with a proud smile.
"Heh, coming from a federal director, that doesn't exactly sound like a pure compliment," Nick replied with a wry smirk.
"Because I wasn't trying to stroke your ego in the first place," Liam O'Shea said, his smile instantly vanishing as his tone turned dead-serious. "Kid, you need to start calculating your moves with way more caution moving forward. Stop being so incredibly impulsive. Didn't our liaison office explicitly agree that this super battery architecture wouldn't be publicized until a later fiscal quarter? Why the hell couldn't you just hold your horses?"
"I tracked that our domestic patent filings had officially cleared the registry database, so I figured I'd just leverage the media momentum and drop the announcement during the keynote," Nick said, flashing an innocent grin.
"Alright, drop the act. Do you seriously think I don't map out the exact corporate angles you're playing in that head of yours?"
Liam O'Shea let out a heavy sigh of deep frustration, looking at Nick like a mentor whose star pupil was being unnecessarily reckless. "What is legally yours is going to stay yours; nobody is going to strip your IP away from you. What are you so terrified of when you've got our agency backing you up? When has this department ever let you take a financial hit or get screwed over in a contract?"
"Yeah, but your agency hasn't exactly helped me clear a profit on the balance sheet either," Nick muttered quietly under his breath. Then, locking eyes with the director, he clarified his stance: "Look, I obviously never lose sleep over administrative hurdles when I have your office running interference, but your team doesn't control the commercial battlefield.
If I didn't flash a massive trump card right now to completely intimidate the valley, I guarantee you a dozen tech monopolies would have already coordinated a hostile takedown against me the second that keynote wrapped."
"So you intentionally dropped this battery milestone to use as geopolitical and commercial leverage to counter the aggressive plays the other tech conglomerates are making against your brand?" Liam O'Shea asked, a look of realization dawning on his face.
Nick let out a quiet chuckle. "Duh, why else would I have leaked it on stage? Our ecosystem drops have already made a ton of legacy tech boards completely unable to sit still. If I don't pull out a massive defensive deterrent, I'm terrified these corporations are going to get driven to absolute desperate measures to choke our supply chain."
Liam O'Shea went quiet for a moment, processing the strategic variables before finally nodding in agreement. "Fair point. But you need to have your head completely screwed on straight for what comes next, kid. This new power cell architecture carries an absolutely massive macroeconomic impact, and the higher-ups in Washington cannot—and will not—allow your private startup to completely monopolize it. Allowing a single entity to gatekeep this tech would severely cripple the development of our domestic industrial base, which is a massive liability for national security and economic stability."
"Wait, it's our proprietary R&D, and we don't even get to dictate the manufacturing rollout? Come on, I'm not running some black-market scheme or breaking federal regulations here. If the government handles innovation like this, why would any startup bother inventing anything disruptive in the future?" Nick countered, a sharp surge of frustration coloring his face.
"What are you getting so incredibly defensive for?" Liam O'Shea snapped back, glaring at him sharply before casting a quick glance around the hallway. Lowering his voice to a hushed, protective whisper, he comforted him: "How old are you again? Why are you still acting so childish, completely blind to the macro-level chess board?
Chill out, the royalty checks and financial upside due to your firm won't be short a single penny. Not only will your margins be completely protected, but the monetization framework is going to be insanely lucrative.
More importantly, our agency has tracked your operational achievements, and the executive branch has tracked them too. This entire run is accumulating an ungodly amount of invisible political capital for your career; stop being ungrateful, kid."
The director leaned in closer. "The reality is simply that your lab breakthrough has too massive a global footprint; we cannot allow a vital industrial sector that anchors a huge percentage of our domestic GDP to get cannibalized just to satisfy the ego of one single founder or startup."
"The entire objective of flying you out to D.C. today is twofold: on one hand, you're here to sit on the technical verification board to validate the safety metrics of the battery, and on the other hand, we are here to coordinate and map out the precise commercialization and deployment strategies for this tech."
"Even though our domestic battery manufacturing volume has held a top global rank for years, when it comes to raw chemical engineering, we've still been lagging behind advanced international labs."
"This time around, leadership intends to leverage your proprietary patents to anchor several key gigafactories across the Rust Belt and completely consolidate our domestic energy resources. The ultimate objective is to seize the high-end product market of the global battery industry in a single sweeping move, wrestling the definitive geopolitical leverage away from international competitors."
"As the sole inventor and legal owner of this tech, you are the most critical link in this entire chain. So do you actually parse what I'm telling you right now? Young man, lift your chin up and look at the long-term horizon; stop letting yourself get completely blinded by the petty short-term profits sitting right in front of your face."
As Liam finished laying out the grand strategy, every single ounce of paranoia and doubt brewing in Nick's chest completely dissolved, replaced instantly by a massive surge of excitement. If the federal rollout actually mirrored the blueprint Liam was detailing, this was going to act as an absolute rocket-booster for Militech's institutional growth.
In all honesty, when it came to this battery patent, Nick had never intended to use it as a primary cash cow anyway. His entire overarching thesis was simply to weaponize the immense leverage of the battery to ensure his core consumer hardware lineup could scale globally without getting blocked by legacy gatekeepers.
Compared to the next-gen H2 Intelligent Voice Assistant currently flying off the retail shelves, this battery breakthrough was small fries in the grand scheme of things. In his master roadmap, the aggressive scaling of the Voice Assistant ecosystem and user account registrations stood as the absolute highest priority tasks that needed to happen right now; everything else could take a back seat.
Every single consumer who bought into their ecosystem was legally required to register a unique personal account during the out-of-box setup sequence. And with the hyper-accelerated adoption rate of the voice assistant and their smart home terminals, the daily active user metrics for these accounts were absolutely off the charts.
As long as the consumer base couldn't break their psychological reliance on the convenience of their Militech Voice Assistant, they could never break free from the gravity of that central user account network.
If his firm could successfully scale that proprietary user registry to hit one billion verified accounts across the planet... then at that point, what kind of digital play couldn't they pull off on the internet, and what kind of empire couldn't they build?