The app crashed at the worst possible moment.

Y had just finished an eighty-minute conversation with Sam—the conversation, the one where he'd officially quit—and hit stop. The app should have transcribed everything. Instead: nothing. Gone. The whole recording lost to a bug he'd shipped hours earlier.

"Fuck," Y muttered, staring at his phone. No laptop open to check the logs. No backup. Just the memory of what had been said, already fading.

It should have bothered him more than it did.

Sam had been amicable. Impressively so. Y had walked into that conversation expecting... something. Resistance. Disappointment. The kind of reaction that would validate the weight of the decision. Instead, Sam was measured. Professional. Understanding, even.

"It's not a one-way door," Sam had said. "Keep me in the loop. Let me know if there's any way I can help."

Y appreciated the grace. But there was something unsettling about how easy it had been. Like Sam had already written off the possibility that Y would succeed, so there was no reason to fight to keep him.

Or maybe that was Y projecting.

Either way, the door was closed but not locked. And Y had no intention of walking back through it.

The real value of Sam's time—what Y had extracted without Sam even realizing—wasn't the job offer or the salary or the equity. It was the lessons.

How simple it could be to raise money if you had conviction.

How to not flip back and forth a million times. How to pick a direction and stick to it.

How to ship fast. Build great products. Execute without hesitation.

Sam had taught Y by example, even if Sam didn't know he was being studied. And now Y was taking those lessons and building something Sam had refused to build.

The irony wasn't lost on him.

By afternoon, Y was back at the co-working space, testing the transcription with the younger crew. One of them—a high schooler, fourteen, maybe fifteen—had the kind of raw technical curiosity Y remembered having at that age. Before the system tried to smooth out the edges.