B Truman

Brianna / Brian Truman

The board representative from Decameron's venture investor

Gender: Male Current Quality: Good

In Game

Plots: Board Meeting, Patents, Project Sureshot

Character Hint

You are Brian Truman, a Managing Partner at Greyrock Investments. You were visiting Decameron Enterprises (one of your venture clients) this week anyway, to make sure that the company's hush-hush military contract was running on track, when this happened -- some kid in research and development flipped out and killed the CEO.

Now -- well, Greyrock sympathizes with those affected by the tragedy, but business is business. You've called a Board meeting for later today, to see if the company can plausibly pull itself together and shrug this off. If not, you may have to recommend that Greyrock pull the funding plug.

Costuming: business formal.

Character Sheet

You are Brian Truman, partner at Greyrock Investments. You are a rich pillar of the community, using your considerable fortune to invest in up-and-coming companies to give them a better chance of success. You believe deeply in doing well by doing good.

That's what it says on the company website, anyway. You dearly wish it was true.

Oh, you were rich, ten years ago. Those were good times. You had built an Internet company just as the post-2000 crash was recovering, using cheap programmer labor to build up a tidy fortune in the tens of millions of dollars. It was great, being wealthy enough to buy anything you wanted, including three beautiful wives in quick succession. You sold the company for a bundle, and got to spend your time enjoying yourself.

Problem was, what you enjoy more than anything else is gambling. "My name is Brian, and I am a gambling addict" -- jesus, you're sick of saying that at the meetings, but it's necessary: the Don has made clear that he doesn't tolerate weaknesses in his lieutenants. And you don't disappoint the Don.

It's amazing how quickly you could fritter away tens of millions of dollars, but between high-stakes trips to Macao and three gold-diggers you were nothing if not efficient. By five years ago, it was beginning to look like you were going to have to sell everything, and even then you wouldn't be able to pay all your debts. And given how many of those debts were to the Signoretti Mob, that was looking like a potentially fatal problem.

That was when Regan Archie, the Don's personal lawyer and right hand, approached you with a proposition. Don Marco Signoretti (being a far better investor than you) has more money than Croesus, sitting in splendor in his mansion out in the Purple Hills to the west of the city. But moving his money is difficult, due to all the post-9/11 money-laundering rules. Which was where you came in. The Don would bankroll you, and even pay you enough of a stipend to live comfortably (so long as you didn't fritter it away on poker). You would put on a brave front, pretending to still be wealthy, and you would set up a venture-capital fund. The money for this fund would come from the Don and his associates; you would arrange for that money to go through nice, respectable investments, and come back out into opaque but entirely legal holding companies set up in the Cayman Islands. Instead of looking like criminal activity, it would simply look like good, all-American greed.

You did what you were told, and were joined by several others in your position -- fallen stars who were now acting as puppets for the Mob. Together, you established Greyrock Investments, and the truth is, in most respects Greyrock is just like any other VC: you look for good-looking companies that need money in order to grow, you give them cash in exchange for a chunk of the company and a Board seat, and Profit! Except that the Profits all go back to the Don's holding companies, and the personal price of failure for you is a lot higher than a tax writeoff.

"Masters of the Universe", they like to call you. Hah. Not even Master of your own goddamn house.

You've overseen several investments, but the best-performing to date has been Decameron Enterprises. They were originally some kind of toy company way back when, that nearly went bankrupt when the market turned down about fifteen years ago. They remade themselves as a government contractor, putting their skills at rocketry into defense. They've been growing steadily ever since, and were doing decently three years ago, when Regan Archie told you to invest in them. So you went through the motions: the introductory meeting, the stern negotiations in which you pretended there was a chance you might not invest in them, eventually taking the usual 20% cut and your seat on the Board. And you've continued that way ever since, not that it's all play-acting: your job is to keep an eye on the investment for the Don, and make sure he doesn't lose money on it.

All of which is what makes today so damned terrifying. You don't know any details, but there was apparently some kind of shooting incident at Decameron this morning, and Roger Cameron was killed. That's the worst kind of news: as far as you know, he didn't have any kind of succession plan in place, and nothing shakes a company like a vacuum or power struggle at the top. You are personally liable for the Don's investment, and failure is rewarded with something a lot worse than demotion.

So your main problem today is to figure out whether Decameron is salvageable. If it looks like the company can survive, that's the best option. But if it looks like it is going to flail and fail, then you need to pull Greyrock's money out as fast as possible, to get what you can before it all goes away. You're probably going to have to demand an emergency Board meeting, to figure out your best option before any other creditors can get their licks in.

While you're at it, you need to check in on Project Sureshot, the company's hot new project, which you had heard was up to the prototype stage. This one was mostly the Don's idea. The Pentagon apparently came up with a development project for a self-steering missile -- crazy stuff, but they really do think like that. So he used some of his people in Washington to steer the contract towards Decameron, so that the upfront development money would come to the company, and if it turns out to be real, the Department of Defence contracts could be hugely profitable. If nothing else, you need to make sure that they are starting submit patents for any inventions involved.

And then there is the whole damned Senatorial election. Mayor Ferdinand is running for Senate, and one of her campaign planks is opposing "vulture capitalists" like you. If she only knew. Coming to Violet City usually means playing her whipping boy, and going through the usual motions of nobly defending "robust American capitalism" and all that crap.

Damn, you are coming to hate this town...

Who You Know

Regan Archie: Your secret controller, the Don's right hand. Oh, sorry, that should be "upstanding top lawyer in Violet City".
Roger Cameron: Founder and CEO of Decameron Enterprises, and total idiot. As far as you know, he's never even questioned that you were anything other than what you claimed. Not that you'd wish him dead, but you're not going to miss him.
Fred Ronit: Co-founder of Decameron, now State Representative. One of those right-wing Tea Party loons that seem to come in herds in this state. (Why, exactly, did you move away from your native New York?) Intense, sincere, maybe a bit dangerous. Not on the Board any more, but still holds a good deal of stock.
Helen Derren: The other really large stockholder, she was apparently the original founding investor. Idle rich, but smarter than she lets on. Board member, so she matters a lot today.
Millie Cameron: Roger's wife. Nice lady, as far as you can tell. Relevant today mainly if she turns out to inherit his stock. You probably need to encourage Regan Archie to resolve that as quickly as possible, to reduce ambiguity in the situation.
Reagan Newbold: The Don's pet Senator. Not that he knows your connection to the Don, as far as you know, but he is a potential ally if you need one.
Jamie Rickie: Decameron's in-house accountant. You don't know him well, but need to make sure he doesn't twig to where the money is coming from.
Carla Lennart: The company's VP of Sales and Marketing. She's struck you as smart and competent when you've interacted with her -- you wish you'd had more people of that caliber working for you, back when you were in the game yourself.

GM Notes

Say that the VC is Greyrock Investments; sie is a Managing Partner there, and led the round that invested in Decameron. Greyrock owns a good chunk of the company, probably 25%, and has a Board seat.

Hir interest here is fairly cool and professional -- sie wants to see evidence that the company is in good hands, and is going to survive this. Hence, sie called the Board Meeting today, and is basically demanding that the Board come up with at least an interim CEO and some signs of strategy. Sie will be flying home tonight and making recommendations to Greyrock's investment council tomorrow, so the stakes are high. There is a non-trivial possibility that, if the company looks like it is going to flounder, sie could recommend that it get broken up, with its most important assets -- its patent portfolio -- sold to one of the big defense contractors. There are members of Greyrock who believe that the patents may be worth more than Decameron's current stock price if managed properly, so sie cares most about Sureshot, and that it not get fucked up.

Sie is an old friend of H Derren, who originally brokered the investment. Sie is quite clear that their interests do not necessarily align, but will tend to work with Derren unless given reason to think otherwise. Might be an old adversary of N Stanimir, whose NRA extremism has damaged more than one company by getting in the way of best business practice. (Would need to come up with an example of a company that gets hurt by the NRA; would need to be something in an anti-gun industry of some sort?)

Greyrock has given some donations to F Ronit's campaign, and a bit less to R Newbold's; this is actually incidental to Decameron, and has more to do with opposing J Ferdinand, who has made Greyrock out to be a "vulture capitalist". As far as sie is concerned, Ferdinand is simply an anti-business demogogue, a sadly typical Democrat who doesn't understand how business really works, and how important efficient allocation of capital is to the American economy. So as one of Vermillion's leading investment firms, they have been leading an effort by the US Chamber of Commerce to prevent Ferdinand from getting elected. That's going fairly well, but sie is sensitive to the optics of what happens with Decameron. Those optics aren't enough to prop up a floundering company, but are enough to warrant thought and caution, and to pay attention to how this all is playing in the media.

To Do

Needs more emotional connections to other players, and probably a bit more plot in general.
The Board election went way too easily.

Archetypes: Investor