Chapter 3

3.

I finally confronted him about it once.

"Julian, when you send out press releases, could you mention that I'm the CTO?"

He was tying his tie, getting ready for a tech summit. He glanced at me.

"Elena, you're my wife. Why would I mention you? It makes us look like a mom-and-pop shop. It's unprofessional."

"I'm the technical co-founder."

"You're my wife," he repeated, his voice firm. "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is yours. Why do we need to draw lines?"

I fell silent.

I thought he was right. I thought it didn't make a difference.

The company grew from two people to twenty, then moved from twenty people into a standalone office in SoMa, with eighty employees.

Julian hired a VP of Sales, a Director of Operations, a CFO, and even a Chief Culture Officer.

But he never hired a senior engineer.

It wasn't for lack of trying. He hired three. They all quit.

They couldn't handle it.

The core code was brutally complex. It was a low-level framework I had written myself to save on server costs. Only I could understand it. Only I could maintain it.

"Babe, you'll have to keep handling it for now," Julian said. "You know it best anyway."

I said okay.

I carried that weight alone for five years.

Over eighteen hundred days.

Over fifty thousand hours.

My commit history on the code repository looked like a dense, green forest.

Even when we went to Napa Valley for a weekend getaway, I had my laptop with me, always on call.

The only time I ever took a day off was when I was rushed to the Stanford ER with acute appendicitis.

Julian visited me on the first day in the hospital.

He brought a smoothie and stayed for three minutes.

Then he asked me: "What's the root password for our AWS account?"

I was lying in the hospital bed, still dizzy from the anesthesia.

I gave him the password.

He said thanks, kissed my forehead, and left.

He didn't come the next day.

Or the day after that.

On the fourth day, I took an Uber home from the hospital.

In the car, I texted him, asking what was wrong with the server.

He replied that it was nothing, just a minor bug. He'd hired a contractor to fix it.

A tiny alarm bell went off in my head, but I chose to ignore it.

I should have listened to that alarm.

In our third year, the company raised its Series A, at a thirty-million-dollar valuation.

Julian posted on LinkedIn again.

"Hard work finally paying off. Thanks to my team and everyone who believed in me."

The picture was of him on stage at a tech conference, with his entire sales team in the background.

The comments were flooded with "Congrats!" and "You're killing it!"

I left a comment too. Three words: "Congratulations to you."

Julian replied with a laughing emoji.