I suited the tale by telling her about my father, once a rig foreman in the oil patch out around Midland, Texas. I was still a kid when he started tinkering around weekends with drill bits out in his shop, and I was no more than about ten when he came up with a new kind of tip. Turned out it could double the life expectancy of a bit, not to mention the life expectancy of a lot of roughnecks who had to change them every few hours. He patented the thing, and next thing you knew, he was "president" of Permian Basin Petroleum.
"Your father was a successful inventor?" She'd set her Tab down on the living room table and perked up. Here was some "color" for her profile.
"More than that. The man was a believing capitalist." Was she really going to understand the significance of what happened? "You see, since no banker would risk loaning out venture capital back in those days, he had to take PBP public. He needed money so badly he sold off sixty percent of the company."
"Like those entrepreneurs who created home computers in their garage?" She brushed at her carefully groomed auburn hair. Maybe here was her hook, the grabber.
"Close. He took the money, several million, and started production. And guess what? The bit he'd invented was too good. Next thing you know, another outfit that will remain nameless here came along and infringed on the patent, saying 'sue us'—which he began trying to do. But since they were already tooled up to manufacture, they undercut his prices and drove PBP's stock down to zip. Then came the kill. They staged a hostile takeover and—since PBP now owned the patents, not him—axed the lawsuit. Bye, bye, company."
"How does this story relate to what you do today?" She was checking her watch, no longer overly engaged.
"Well, by the time all this happened, I was off studying engineering at the University of Texas. But when I graduated, I decided to do something else. I headed for Yale Law."
"If you can't lick 'em, join 'em? Something like that, Mr. Walton?"
"Not exactly, Ms. Austen. I wanted to find out if the Bible's right: that guys who live by the sword better be ready to die by the sword. After the sheepskin, I shopped around and found the Manhattan law firm that handled the biggest oil-field-service outfit in the country, then applied to that firm's corporate department. A couple of years and a lot of memos later, our oil-field client somehow got the idea they ought to go vertical, acquire their own source of equipment. Next I ran some numbers and showed them how profitable it would be to acquire a certain tool company that now owned the patent on a terrific drill bit. Of course, it would require a hostile buyout, but with a little restructuring they could swing it financially."
"And?"