Hostile Takeover

Chapter Originals

Simone Adeyemi founded Anansi at twenty-two out of a flat in Peckham because her mother did agency shifts for nine years and was paid three weeks in arrears every single time. Six years later it pays four hundred thousand shift workers on the day they work, it employs three hundred and eleven people, and it has never once turned a profit. Aleksy Novak is thirty-three and runs Halborn, which is eleven times the size, which does the same thing badly, and which has spent four years trying and failing to build what she built in a bedroom. On a Monday in October he tables an offer for her company. On the Tuesday they are in a room together for the first time in two years — and neither of them says the thing they both know, which is that in a hotel bar in Frankfurt in the March of 2023 two people who did not ask each other's surnames spent one night together and then got on separate planes. She has a board who want the money. He has a board who want the technology and intend to switch the rest off. And there are eleven days of diligence, four lawyers, one room, and one sentence neither of them can afford to say out loud.