Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 36: The Presentation I

Ryan woke up at 7:54 AM and lay there for a moment doing nothing.

The balcony. The wine. The city below. Zara’s hand on his lapel.

He let it sit for a few seconds, then got up.

Today wasn’t for that.

He checked his phone. No new messages from the unknown number. The system however had processed a small return overnight from the poker wager — pleasure spending, the system had classified it, which made enough sense.

He looked at the balance – It was six figures.

He showered, made coffee, and looked at his apartment.

The team was coming at eleven. Six people in a studio apartment that will be functioning as a makeshift office for as long as it needed to — it was going to be tight, but he’d made it work before.

He moved the couch back, set up the chairs in the same rough configuration as the first meeting, and made sure the whiteboard was clean and positioned where everyone could see it.

He stood back and looked at the setup.

This was it, he thought. Whatever they’d built over the past week, whatever direction they’d landed on — today was the moment it either became something or revealed itself as not ready. He’d given them one week, no interference, just the original ideas from Danny and Sophie as a starting point and five people smart enough to do something with them.

He trusted the team.

That trust had a specific quality to it this morning — it was far from blind or performed, instead straightforward confidence, someone who had watched five people work and paid attention to what he saw.

He poured a second coffee and waited.

---

Danny arrived first, at 10:43, laptop bag over one shoulder and a notebook under his arm — the paper one, which Ryan had learned meant he’d been doing serious thinking. He came in, looked at the setup, nodded once, and sat down without ceremony.

"How are you feeling about it?" Ryan asked.

Danny looked at the whiteboard. "Ask me after."

Mike arrived eleven minutes later in a cab he’d apparently shared with Liam, which Ryan found slightly unlikely given that they lived on opposite sides of the city but didn’t question.

Mike came in talking — something about the cab driver having unusually strong opinions about the designated hitter rule — and Liam came in behind him with the expression of a man that had spent thirty minutes in a confined space with Mike and was processing it.

Sophie arrived at two minutes past eleven with her laptop already open, answering something on her phone with one thumb while navigating the door with the rest of her.

She sat at the kitchen counter, the spot she’d claimed as hers over the past two weeks, and kept typing.

Iralis was last. She knocked, which nobody else had done. She came in with a canvas tote and a coffee she’d brought herself, found the remaining chair, sat down, and took out her laptop with the quietness Ryan had come to understand meant she was ready and had been ready for some time.

He looked at all five of them.

"Alright," he said. "Let’s see what we’ve got."

They’d decided among themselves — Ryan gathered this hadn’t been a simple decision — that Danny would present the technical framework, Sophie would present the design and user experience vision, and Liam would handle the market case.

Mike would fill in where needed. Iralis had apparently stress-tested every component of the presentation and her notes were incorporated throughout, which Ryan only learned mid-presentation when Danny referenced her analysis three times in the first ten minutes.

Danny went first.

He stood at the whiteboard with a marker and talked, and Ryan listened.

The idea was a platform — not a new concept in itself, platforms existed everywhere, but the specific problem this one solved was one Ryan recognized immediately from his years at Meridian.

Enterprise software communication. The gap between the tools companies used and the way people actually worked inside those companies.

The graveyard of project management software that got adopted enthusiastically and abandoned within six months because it added process without removing friction.

Danny’s framework addressed that differently. Not by building another tool, but by building a layer that sat between the tools companies already used — connecting them, translating between them, learning how a specific team actually worked and adapting to that rather than requiring the team to adapt to it.

"The problem with every existing solution," Danny said, drawing a diagram on the board, "is they assume the company will change its behavior to fit the software. We build software that changes its behavior to fit the company."

Ryan looked at the diagram.

"How long to build an MVP?" he asked.

"Three months if we’re focused. Four if we’re being careful about it."

"We’re being careful about it," Ryan said. "What does careful look like in terms of the team?"

"Danny and I handle the core architecture," Iralis said from her seat, not standing, just contributing the information directly. "We need one more backend engineer in the next thirty days. The infrastructure decisions in the first month determine everything that comes after — if we cut corners there we’ll be rebuilding in six months."

Ryan nodded. "Noted. Keep going."

Sophie took the whiteboard next.

She’d built out what the product actually looked like — more than wireframes, full mockups, the kind of work that Ryan knew from watching her operate over the past two weeks represented a significant number of hours.

She walked through them on her laptop, connected to the small projector Mike had brought from somewhere without being asked.

The design was clean.

Genuinely clean, it wasn’t just empty space pretending to be minimalism, it had been through multiple versions and arrived at something that looked effortless because the effort had already been spent.

"The interface learns," Sophie said. "That’s the visual language we’re building around. It’s not static. It shifts based on what the team is doing, what time of day it is, what phase of a project they’re in. The user opens it and it already looks like where they are, not where the software wants them to be."

"How does that hold up on mobile?" Ryan asked.

Sophie pulled up the mobile mockups.

They held up.

Ryan looked at them for a moment. "This is good, Sophie."

"I know," she said, which was the right answer.

Liam went last.