As he approached Jack, Noah reached out to shake hands, his mouth opening to offer congratulations. Yet when he was just a few feet away from his friend, Biz swooped in and placed his arm around Jack as he spun them both around and in another direction to post for a photo. Noah was left standing there in a room full of people, his arm at a forty-five degree angle, as if he were shaking hands with an invisible man. Jack, Biz and Ev then slipped off into a side room as more people asked to take their photos. Noah, devastated by what had just happened, left the party.

"We should really take the deal," Jack said sarcastically as they all laughed.

The comical tone was interrupted as Ev told them what Bradley had said on the phone: that he believed Yahoo! could easily build the technology behind Twitter, that it was "simply just a messaging service" and "a few engineers could do the same thing in a week." He had concluded that if Twitter didn't sell, Yahoo! planned to build and release a competitor.

It was a typical relationship offering in the Valley: Either you fuck us, or we'll fuck you.

Although Jack really wanted to learn how to manage, how to run a company, and how to be a good CEO, he often found himself at a loss for what to do next. Although he would never admit it, pretending that he knew exactly what he was doing and that his actions were all part of a bigger, more resolute plan, he was so far out of his league that he was often speechless. When things grew frustrating, rather than confront the problem with his employees, Jack would walk out the front door of the office and then spend an hour or more walking in circles around South Park, a petulant look on his face.

Ev immediately dropped the gauntlet.

"You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter," Ev said. "But you can't be both."

Although Jack worked hard, coming into the office well before anyone else arrived, he often left at around 6:00 P.M. to attend to one of his extracurricular activities. For a while he had taken drawing classes, sketching nudes in his notepad. He attended hot yoga classes, rushing off after work to contort his body into downward dog and sweat out the stresses of the day. He had also been taking classes at a local fashion school to learn how to sew, still contemplating a future career in fashion. He loved sewing and enthusiastically set out to learn how to make an A-line skirt for his first class assignment. The eventual goal was to make his own pair of dark jeans, maybe even end up working for his favorite jeans maker one day, Earnest Sewn in New York City.

The sale had been relatively painless. The initial negotiation between Fred and John Borthwick, an investor who was on Summize's board, occurred while the two were standing next to each other at a bathroom urinal. "Why don't we just join these companies and call it a day?" John said as he peered over at Fred, a tinkling sound emanating from their respective urinals.

First thing in the morning, his coffee cup still full next to his computer, and weary from a night without much sleep, Bijan accidentally pressed the "reply to all" button on his computer instead of replying just to Fred.

"I believe Jack would take a 'passive' chairman role," Bijan wrote. "It would then really be up to Ev to decide if he could live with Jack's new title." He hit "send" before he realized what he had done.

Seconds later, he looked up at the exchange and uttered a word he was about to write eighteen times in an e-mail that he then sent to Fred:

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck."

He then quickly rattled off the e-mail to Jack: "Please call me when you get this message. Out of context this could be really confusing."

But it was too late. Jack knew what was about to happen.