Page 37 of Ideal Life

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Rachel, one of the engineers, said, “BiomeLabs made a huge announcement this morning, and their stock quintupled as soon as the market opened!”

“No way.” BiomeLabs occupied the offices above Ideal Life, on the fifth through eighth floors of the building. They were a tech company focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and scientific research of the human gut microbiome. Talia and a lot of Ideal Life’s employees were friends with the BiomeLabs teams, since they shared the same rooftop where everyone liked to eat lunch. (Unlike where Sam lived on the coast, Palo Alto was warm and sunny most days.)

Another engineer, Michael, said, “My buddy Ernest just turned into a millionaire overnight!”

“I think half the employees there had enough stock options that they’re millionaires now,” Rachel said. “It’s so awesome.”

Someone on the other side of the common area said, “I should’ve bought BiomeLabs stock when it was still cheap.” Everyone, including Talia, laughed.

But then she realized she could buy BiomeLabs stock cheap. She could rewind to yesterday.

To be clear, Talia wasn’t being greedy. Sure, on paper, she was about to sell Ideal Life to Omni for $100 million. But most of that was actually going to the venture capital firms, whose investments had been crucial for keeping the startup alive in the early days. The small percentage of Ideal Life that Talia still owned would mostly be converted into Omni stock options, and per the postmerger employment agreement, those options wouldn’t vest for four years.

Put another way, Talia wasn’t getting much money from the Ideal Life acquisition anytime soon, and if she didn’t continue to work for Omni for four years afterward, she’d lose the Omni stock options and never be able to sell them to cash out. Those kinds of employment agreements were nicknamed “golden handcuffs” for a reason.

Erin appeared with a box of donuts. Talia took a glazed one gratefully; she hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning because she’d woken up late.

“Nanobots!” Erin said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Huh?”

“BiomeLabs’ announcement,” Erin said. “Their new product is nanobots!”

Talia’s eyes widened. “I thought microscopic robots were still a futuristic pipe dream.”

“Apparently not. But they did a hell of a job keeping it under wraps until the big reveal, didn’t they? Even Your Gossipy Tech BFF missed it.”

The Segovia twins swept into the room. Jonathan held up his phone while Jody said, “Well, Your Gossipy Tech BFF might’ve missed the scoop, but they’ve still got something to say, and we’re mentioned! New article just posted!”

Talia and half the room scrambled for their phones or started reading on their Omni 3Ds.

The Secret to Silicon Valley Success: High-End Sashimi?

Palo Alto, CA—Damn, what is in the sake in the Sugiyama building? Not too long ago, Ideal Life announced that Omni was buying them for a cool $100 million, and now their upstairs neighbor, BiomeLabs, has blown up the tech market with the announcement of viable nanobots.

If anyone could have kept that development mum, though, it’s BiomeLabs’ CEO, Eleanor Davies. We’re not denying she’s a brilliant scientist, but that woman’s got less emotion than an AI chatbot. One of the most competitive founders in Silicon Valley, everyone knows that if Eleanor Davies sets her scope on you, you are well and truly fucked—and you won’t even see the missile coming.

Now, you may be asking, did BiomeLabs violate SEC disclosure rules by not revealing their nanobot tech earlier?

Dear silly reader, how could you think that Davies could be so… unstrategic?

Here’s the timeline and details we uncovered that kept BiomeLabs within SEC reporting requirements but still allowed them to surprise everyone:

In BiomeLabs’ last quarterly earnings call—two months and twenty days ago—their head of research and development mentioned “molecular-scale engineering” without specifying applications.

This was possible because:

(1) Davies had previously created a separately funded “moonshot” division not subject to the same disclosure requirements as BiomeLabs, and

(2) regardless of corporate structure, she made sure the “molecular-scale engineering” fell under strategic intellectual property protections that limited how much BiomeLabs needed to share.

Then, just a few days after that quarterly earnings call, Davies quietly hired all the scientists from a small private research firm and licensed key technology from them. Because this wasn’t an actual acquisition—it was a perfectly legal “acqui-hire” that got around government scrutiny—BiomeLabs didn’t have to announce anything, while also securing the necessary brainpower and tech to compress a three- to five-year timeline on their secret nanobots to “right now.”

And voila.

Perhaps Davies really is a highly tuned humanoid robot with killer business instincts.