“I happily signed Crawford’s document for one simple reason,” I said into the microphone. “I have never needed a dollar from the Whitlock family.” Then I turned toward him. Five months earlier, the infrastructure company behind several of Whitlock Holdings’ largest projects had begun licensing terrain-analysis software from Archer Geospatial Systems—the company I had founded eight years earlier. Crawford had apparently never bothered to learn the owner’s name. His own executives had valued my company at more than his family trust was worth while negotiating a long-term technology agreement.
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