Chick Flick Page 3

  “Hello, Ms. Peters,” I croaked.

  “Caroline,” she said, and I reached to find the warmth in her tone. It felt like it was there somewhere, maybe just lost in translation over the phone lines. As she spoke more, a kindness began to emerge. “I’m here with Nikola Podgursky, my principal research-and-development gal. I don’t take any calls on potential products without her blessing.”

  “Totally understand,” said Todd. “Scarlet is my right hand here. And honestly, probably my left.”

  I listened in rapt attention at how Todd manipulated the situation: talking me up, knowing I’d be the one doing most of the explaining.

  “As you’re probably aware,” Caroline said, “We’ve been developing our own sexing application using hormones. Nikola and her team have been hard at work on that project for some time now. But Todd’s pitch was interesting, and we wanted to hear more about the proprietary technology you guys have cooking. ‘Spells,’ is it?”

  “That’s right, Caroline,” Todd said. “Spelled like it sounds.”

  I groaned inside, and tossed the teething toy back at Todd. He smiled at me in the rearview mirror, already more at ease.

  I cleared my throat, trying to rid it of the nervous croak I’d taken on before.

  “Nice to meet you both,” I began. “We’re developing a proprietary assay for chick sexing by extracting DNA from the egg and examining it outside of the egg on a platform. This aligns with your intent with the hormone solution, but this is a more reliable and novel approach because genetics does not lie.”

  I hoped that I wasn’t insulting Nikola, a fellow scientist. I didn’t doubt she’d put in many hours working on her application.

  “We’ve already developed a framework for the tests,” said Nikola, a firmness in her voice, but obliging nonetheless. “We’ve made a fair amount of progress designing custom plates that will fit into a reading machine retrofitted to the injection machine. The robotic arm should swing seamlessly back and forth between inoculation and the reading plate.”

  “Well,” said Todd, “I think this still sounds like it could be a wonderful partnership. Seamless, as you say. Scarlet can explain now.”

  “Nikola, what we’re hoping is that we can provide the biological reaction that performs the identification of the sex, and that RICPCom can provide the logistical technology for extracting the sample from the egg and placing it onto the reading platform for examination. So in this respect, we would like to integrate our product into your production line, and that is why we initiated contact.”

  There was a brief silence before Caroline responded. I assumed they were speaking to one another out of range of the handset.

  “I see what you’re after,” said Caroline.

  “I do have a few questions, though, if you wouldn’t mind indulging me,” I ventured.

  “Go ahead,” said Nikola.

  “I’m wondering if it’s possible to extract a drop of blood while the needle goes in for vaccination without hurting the chick.”

  Nikola responded immediately, and I could feel the pride in her creation.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “When the needle is inserted, the angle is set to inject the chick on the shoulder. That region has many blood vessels, so there is usually a tiny drop of blood when the needle exits the egg. This can be placed on the test plate for processing.”

  Caroline chimed in. “I believe it also has residual scrapes of skin material. Would that help serve your purpose?”

  With every minute, I was becoming braver. I could tell that they were taking us seriously. My pipe dream seemed so much more real, so much more within reach.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Can I ask, what have been your challenges to getting the sample from the egg onto the reading platform?”

  “It’s an issue of scale. Can you hear me rolling my eyes over here?” said Caroline, and Todd and I laughed. We could relate to the frustration. “Imagine an egg tray of a certain size, set to hold a certain amount of eggs. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, one hundred eggs. Now, think of each needle over each egg transferring the sample from the egg to a correlating place on a reading plate. The current state-of-the-art reading equipment is manufactured for small plates, not the size of large egg trays, so there is a difference-of-dimensions problem.”

  “Got it,” Todd and I said in unison.

  “In order to transfer the sample from the egg to the fluorescent reader, you need to either solve the transfer problem of the robotic arms or build a new detection machine, made specifically for this purpose. Which costs money, of course,” explained Nikola. “On top of that, we also have different-sized egg trays because of variable requirements from the different hatcheries. There’s no standard egg-size tray, so this is all hard to translate.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I thought I had a problem with designing the reaction to work under the hatchery restrictions. I wasn’t even thinking about equipment details.”

  “Well, that, and of course, the time limit and cost requirements,” said Caroline. “We need to get all the costs down in order to be efficient and profitable. But that’s a discussion for another time.”

  I blushed on the other end of the line. Of course I was getting ahead of myself.

  “You’re right, obviously,” I conceded. “We do need to finish our proof of concept.”

  “But we simply couldn’t wait to talk to you,” said Todd. “You are absolutely the leader in this field, and we needed to introduce ourselves, even at this early stage. We hope to reach our first milestone within the year, and we wanted to give RICPCom first shot at what we come up with.”

  Todd gave a cursory glance in the rearview mirror to make sure that I was OK with what he was spinning, but I had become distracted by the cars driving down the street. It had started to rain, and the water traced calming, organic patterns down the windows, erased by the occasional splash from a passing motorcycle.

  “Understood,” said Caroline. “We’re always on the lookout for good ideas, especially if those ideas integrate with us directly.”

  We chatted for a while longer, Nikola and I throwing theories back and forth of what could be accomplished. What if, she suggested, we could somehow distinguish eggs with male DNA with a luminescent green color viewable through the shell. Our assay was currently intended for external examination only, so it didn’t hurt to think about this pie-in-the-sky kind of stuff. I was in awe of Nikola; I want to be like her when I grow up, I thought to myself with a smile.

  Todd broke in on the nerdy reverie we’d spun around ourselves.

  “Caroline, what have you heard about this company out in France, NavoLogic?”

  Caroline was taken aback; you could tell that wasn’t something that happened to her often.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know much about them, but I do know they’re working on an application that can be used internally. They might not be too far off from those green eggs. I’m not sure,” Todd said.

  I was worried that Caroline and Nikola would take this as us trying to make a power play, trying to knock them down a peg. But it quickly became clear that they knew that wasn’t the case. It was as though they trusted us already, even though we hadn’t entered into any agreement, informal or otherwise.

  “Impossible,” Nikola said.

  “Well, you’re right about that,” I jumped in. I had spent some time scouring the literature in my last cram session before the call. There were hints here and there, nothing too formed, but there was something that couldn’t be ignored happening across the Atlantic. “It’s actually an ultrasound technology,” I said. “They want to be able to listen to the heartbeat of the chick and determine the sex from that. Apparently the male chicks’ hearts beat faster.” It’s ironic, I thought. Almost like they’re nervous about their grisly future.

  Caroline had composed herself while I’d continued.

  “I know NavoLogic, but I had no idea they were working on this,” she said.

 
Later that night, I kept turning over in my mind the end of our conversation. It had been a success, and we had arranged for a follow-up meeting with Caroline and Nikola once we were a little further along. But the fact that Caroline, CTO of such an influential company in the business, didn’t know what NavoLogic was up to felt wrong to me. Either she was keeping secrets from us—which didn’t seem likely—or NavoLogic and its investors were working very, very hard to keep secrets from her. The questions hung in the air with the moon outside my window.

  After business hours for most people were over, I got a call from Todd asking me to meet him at a nearby pub. He wanted to go over the conference call with RICPCom and talk strategy. We usually met for lunch, in the staid light of day, but I had spent so long cooped up in the lab that I had to admit, a nice, relaxing beverage with my business talk would suit me quite nicely.

  “I could use a drink,” I admitted. “I’m so relieved to be done with that call, and the fact that they didn’t ridicule us for being so early on in the research phase. We should celebrate.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Todd, and he gave me the address for the Flying Cow. It was in a part of town I hadn’t been to before, deep downtown where the streets were usually buzzing with bankers. Except for people like us, on their way to grab a happy-hour special, it was quiet.

  I walked into the Flying Cow, appraising its warm, worn wood and the pleasantly yeasty smell of the beer. Oh, how I needed a beer! I sat down at the bar and ordered a tall, cool glass of Carlsberg while I waited for Todd. The bartender sat a small plate of nuts down in front of me, and I munched while people-watching. There were couples on dates, lone construction foremen nursing pints and pitchers, even a young family spoon-feeding mashed potatoes to a round little cherub.

  It had been so long since I’d been to a bar; I couldn’t even remember the last time I had a drink, let alone a night out. I let myself exhale in a deep sigh and slump into the bar a little, the beer warming my belly. How different this place was from my usual haunt, the lab, where I would stay late into the night taking advantage of the quiet after all my lab mates had gone home to their families. I could always hear myself think best at night. Sometimes, even if I’m not working on anything in particular, just sitting on my bench and staring at a blank wall for an hour would ignite a chain of thought and I could see things as clear as day.

  But tonight was different. Other than talking strategy with Todd, I didn’t want to do much thinking. I wanted simply to have a drink, relax a little, and feel a part of the world. I didn’t even think I would shoulder too much of the strategic burden in our conversation, knowing that I’d leave most of the heavy lifting in that area to Todd. I am the brains of the operation, I thought with a smile. I don’t need to be the business mind.

  More important to our partnership, I was willing to be a good listener. When Todd and I formed our partnership, he let me know that his one condition was that he wouldn’t have to be a yes-man. I agreed with him immediately, of course, and always made an effort to hear his opinion, even if I didn’t necessarily agree at first. I let him know his opinion mattered to me, and that he mattered to me, and he extended me the exact same courtesy.

  I could start to feel a pleasant buzz from the beer, and I began to gently ruminate on the nature of success in business. It wasn’t something I’d put much thought into before this venture, and it could be stressful for me at times—most times, if I was being honest with myself. Our conference call with RICPCom definitely constituted success, I thought. Whereas I would have ordinarily thought of success only in terms of sales, Todd taught me that salesmanship was about more than just the sale itself. It was about following the idea every step of the way, watching every fork in the road and carefully mapping which turn to take.

  Start-ups were particularly tricky, at least from what I could tell. There were so many people we had to put our trust in: the lawyer, VCs, other industry partners. When I thought about it too much, sometimes I got a little paranoid, thinking that there wasn’t much of a point to my work if all that was going to happen in the end was that other people were going to profit big and sell my ideas. But this was something that I believed in, and furthermore, I had put my trust in Todd to drive us down the right path. And tonight, we weren’t in the lab, so I’d be relying on him to take the wheel.

  I was zoning out and watching the misspelled closed-captions on the newscast roll across the screen of the muted TV when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Todd’s hair was windblown, and he loosened his tie a bit as he sat down, sighing.

  “Man, I’m beat. I am officially done with meetings!” he said.

  “It’s a good thing we’re not having a meeting,” I said, smiling.

  “Darn right.”

  He flagged over the bartender.

  “I’ll have what she’s having. It looks delicious.” Then, as if to show that he meant it quite ravenously, he scooped up the last of my salted nuts and tossed them back into his mouth. “And another bowl of these guys, please. Oh, and if you have those green olives, I will have a bowl of those as well. Thanks.”

  “Busy day?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I try to keep focused on the job when I’m at the office. I wish I could be with you in the lab, watching you work!”

  “It’s better this way,” I said. “Besides, you have a family to provide for. Until we find a major investor, looks like you’ll need to keep your day job.”

  “If you say so, Scar,” he said, sighing dramatically.

  After Todd’s beer arrived and his blood sugar leveled out a little bit from the nuts, we segued into talking about the conference call.

  “I didn’t know you knew so much about what NavoLogic was up to,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I really went on a deep dive into the literature the night before the call. I was so nervous, I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Where’d you find that info?”

  “It’s hidden, but it’s there. And people in biotech talk. I was surprised she didn’t know about it, though. Weren’t you?”

  “I was. It seems like she’s an influencer in the industry.”

  “So something’s definitely up with keeping that siloed.”

  “I mean, if NavoLogic get their hands on that kind of separation technology, they will own this market,” I said. “They’ve got everything you need for the broiler, layer, and turkey hatcheries, and if they get their hands on chick sexing too, they will have nailed it!”

  Todd nodded. “I’m glad we told her then. It’s a strategic advantage almost.”

  “I didn’t intend it that way, but I see that it is. She likes us for trading that information. Right now, RICPCom is a one-product company: their injection machine, which can inject vaccinations into the egg. It’s their main source of revenue, and the patents are about to expire on that technology! They desperately need a new product to run through that machine and that’s where the sexing application comes in,” I said. “NavoLogic, on the other hand, sells hatchery equipment, so they are not dependent on the chick sexing because no one will bite into their profits if they don’t produce it. But RICPCom’s competitors are waiting on the sidelines to dig into their inoculation profits once the patents expire. If they want to hold on to their customer base and maintain exclusiveness in the field, they need us. We can deliver on the sexing application where they have failed.”

  I could see the wheels spinning in Todd’s brain.

  “We can use this to our advantage,” he responded.

  “More than we already are?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking, we contact NavoLogic. If we get more than one offer for our technology, we can start a bidding war,” he said.

  I started to bristle at the idea, draining the rest of my beer down to the suds. I didn’t want to feel like I was betraying Caroline’s confidence. She agreed to share technology information with us freely. But in reality, I knew what Todd would say: We’re not here to make friends.

  “I’m not talking about anyth
ing nefarious,” Todd said. “We’re just going to make it clear to them that we have access to important information. We’re not going to talk about the content.”

  As I promised Todd, I listened. But I wasn’t done digesting what he’d said, and I wasn’t totally sure that I agreed.

  “Just think about it, Scarlet,” he said. “This could be big for us.”

  “OK. I’m going to keep my promise.”

  “That’s right. No yes-men here,” he said.

  “Or yes-women,” I pointed out.

  “Right. No yes-people. Only possibility-people,” he said.

  “I like that.”

  Todd thought out loud for a little while, walking through the possibilities. He thought it would be great if there was a way to leak through the grapevine the notion that we had important information. I was more interested in getting back into the hatchery to learn more about the process. My mind was traveling in a different direction, back to the order and test tubes of the lab, the environment that I knew best and loved. Todd was still on the path to parlaying information to our advantage.

  “NavoLogic doesn’t have an injection device,” he pointed out. “So they might be more flexible. Then again, it’s a disadvantage, because it would take time for them to develop their own technology.”

  Back in the recesses of my brain, something pinged in the dark. I remembered some gossip I had heard in the industry.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. Todd’s eyes glinted, and he leaned closer. “There’s another company in the mix. They’re small, but they have already developed a prototype for a competing injection machine. They’re even poking fun at them about the name; they call their machine InjectEgg, a slight variation on RICPCom’s machine.”

  “Aha, good Watson,” said Todd with a smirk. “So that’s why whichever company gets their hands on a chick-sexing application first will be the winner. Because there are already two types of injection machines.”

  “Yes, Todd, the expiration of RICPCom’s patents is their Achilles’ heel. The sexing application is the only way to add value to RICPCom’s injection technology,” I said, raising my glass to Todd’s. The bartender had come and swapped out a full beer for my empty glass.