First Million-Dollar Room

Marcus's eyes flicked, almost invisibly, toward Ethan. A test inside an accident. Leena noticed. "Wait. Is he why you called me in?" "No," Marcus said. "That was too fast." Ethan should have stayed quiet. He was the poorest man in the room by several orders of magnitude. He had no right to speak into a venture negotiation involving numbers that could erase his bloodline's debt. But the digest had said the payoff was hidden here. And Ethan had spent his life watching powerful people assume silence meant absence. "Your problem isn't valuation," he said. Leena turned on him. "Excuse me?" "It's customer credibility. If you take money from a fund known for financial engineering, every enterprise buyer wonders whether you're optimizing for