Chapter 78: The Deal
The Softbank term sheet arrived on a Friday in November, and it contained a number that made Park Eunhye—the most unflappable CFO Daniel had ever met, a woman who communicated in spreadsheets and expressed emotion in basis points—set down her coffee and say, “Well.”
“Well?” Daniel asked.
“Well, as in: I need a moment.” She pushed the term sheet across the table with the careful deliberation of someone handling radioactive material. “100 billion won. At a 1.5 trillion won post-money valuation.”
One point five trillion won. Approximately 1.3 billion dollars. The number existed in a category that Daniel’s brain could process but his body couldn’t—the category of quantities so large that they stopped being numbers and became abstractions, like the distance to a star or the age of the universe.
“That’s—” Marcus started.
“That’s the largest single investment in a Korean-founded technology company by a non-Korean investor,” Soyeon finished. She was already reading the term sheet, her pen moving along the lines with the speed and precision of a woman who had been preparing for this document since the day she started working for Nexus for free. “The valuation is aggressive but defensible given the Softbank partnership, the AI platform metrics, and the Zhonghua cross-border story.”
“The terms?” Daniel asked.
“Standard Vision Fund structure. They take a 6.7% equity stake. One board seat, non-voting on operational matters, voting on major strategic decisions defined as acquisitions above 50 billion won, new market entries, and changes to the cap table.” She flipped to page seven. “The interesting clause is the geographic expansion commitment. Softbank wants us operational in Japan within eighteen months and in at least two additional Asian markets within thirty-six.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“That’s Softbank. They invest in ambition and penalize caution.” She looked up from the term sheet. “I have twelve amendments I want to negotiate. Seven are standard protective provisions. Three are modifications to the governance structure. Two are—” She paused. Tapped three times. “Creative.”
“Creative how?”
“Creative in the sense that they don’t exist in any standard venture capital term sheet I’ve ever seen, but they should.” She pulled out a separate document—her own, drafted in parallel with the Softbank negotiations, because Soyeon didn’t wait for term sheets to arrive before preparing her response. “First: an AI ethics clause. Every market that Nexus enters under the Softbank partnership must adopt the Korean AI Alliance safety framework. Not as a suggestion—as a contractual obligation.”
“Softbank will push back on that.”
“Softbank will push back, and then they’ll agree, because Son-san’s public statements about responsible AI investment make it impossible for him to reject an ethics clause without contradicting his own brand.” She moved to the second document. “Second: an employee equity pool expansion. The current pool is 8%. I want to raise it to 12% before the Softbank money enters, so the dilution from the new investment doesn’t reduce our team’s ownership below a meaningful level.”
“That dilutes our existing shareholders.”
“That retains our existing team. Which is worth more than any shareholder’s marginal percentage.” She closed the documents. “The team built this company. The team should benefit proportionally. If Soomin can’t afford a house because her father’s CTO got diluted below motivation threshold, the company has failed in a way that no stock price can compensate for.”
The room was quiet. Soyeon’s arguments were always quiet—delivered without drama, without emotion, with the clean precision of a scalpel. But the logic beneath them was unanswerable.
“Draft the amendments,” Daniel said. “We negotiate next week.”
“Already drafted. I’ll send them to Tanaka by Monday.”
“Of course you already drafted them.”
“I draft everything in advance. It’s my defining characteristic.” The two-millimeter smile. “Along with being right.”
The negotiations took three weeks. Soyeon handled them personally, flying to Tokyo twice and conducting fourteen video calls with Softbank’s legal team—a team of seven lawyers who, by the end of the process, had developed a specific form of professional respect for the Korean woman who was younger than most of them, more prepared than all of them, and more persistent than anything they’d encountered outside of Japanese regulatory proceedings.
“She’s extraordinary,” Tanaka told Daniel during a side conversation at the second Tokyo meeting. “Our legal team has never been outmaneuvered on protective provisions before. She identified a clause in our standard template that even our internal counsel had missed—a conversion right that, under certain conditions, would have given Softbank effective veto power over board composition. She found it on page forty-seven of a ninety-page document.”
“She reads everything.”
“She reads everything and understands it better than the people who wrote it. How old is she?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Remarkable. We’d hire her if she weren’t on the other side of the table.”
“She’s not on the other side. She’s on her own side. Which happens to be aligned with ours.”
The AI ethics clause was approved—after Son personally reviewed it and declared it “consistent with our fund’s values.” The employee equity pool expansion was approved after a two-day negotiation that Soyeon later described as “the most intellectually stimulating argument I’ve had since the SNU Law moot court finals.”
The deal closed on December 15th, 2016. One hundred billion won wired into the Nexus Technologies corporate account. The press conference was held at the Nexus headquarters in Gangnam—a deliberate choice, because Daniel wanted the announcement to come from Seoul, not Tokyo, to signal that this was a Korean company inviting global capital, not a global fund acquiring a Korean company.
The headline in the Chosun Ilbo: “NEXUS TECHNOLOGIES SECURES 100 BILLION WON FROM SOFTBANK VISION FUND—LARGEST FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN KOREAN TECH STARTUP HISTORY.”
Marcus framed it. Next to the Forbes article. Next to the TechCrunch article. The wall of frames in the Nexus lobby was becoming a timeline of milestones—a visual history of a company that had started in a studio apartment with four people and a dream and had become, in six years, a billion-dollar platform with global ambitions.
Sarah didn’t attend the press conference. She was in the engineering lab, hiring two Japanese NLP specialists she’d recruited from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. When Marcus asked why she wasn’t celebrating, she said, “The money is Marcus’s celebration. The technology is mine. I’ll celebrate when the Japanese language model works.”
“When will that be?”
“When it works.”
“That’s not a date.”
“Correct.”
Daniel called his parents that evening. His mother answered on the first ring, which meant she’d been waiting, which meant Minji had texted her the news before the press conference was even finished.
“One hundred billion won,” his mother said. Not as a question—as a fact she was trying to integrate into her understanding of the world. “From a Japanese company.”
“From a Japanese investment fund. They believe in what we’re building.”
“One hundred billion.” A pause. “Daniel-ah, when you were seventeen, you had forty-three thousand won. I remember because you counted it at the kitchen table.”
“I remember too.”
“From forty-three thousand to one hundred billion. In eight years.” Another pause. “Your father is listening. He’s pretending to read the newspaper but the newspaper is upside down. Again.”
“It’s not upside down,” his father’s voice protested from the background. “The printing is unusual today.”
“Byungsoo, the headline is at the bottom of the page.”
“Artistic choice by the editor.”
“Give me the phone.” The sound of a phone being transferred between hands that had been married for thirty-three years and had developed their own negotiation protocol for mobile device custody. “Daniel.”
“Dad.”
“One hundred billion won.”
“Yes.”
“Is the jade tree watered?”
“I… what?”
“The jade tree. In the garden. Is it watered? December is dry. Jade trees need moisture even in dormancy.”
“Dad, I just raised a hundred billion won and you’re asking about the jade tree?”
“The hundred billion won takes care of itself. The jade tree needs someone to care about it.” A beat. “Water the tree. Come fishing on Sunday. Bring Wang Lei—he’s getting better. He almost caught something last week.”
“Almost caught something?”
“His technique is improving. His patience is not. He reels too fast. Like all businessmen.” The sound of a newspaper being turned right-side up. “I’m proud of you, Daniel. Now water the tree.”
The line went dead. Daniel stood in his office, phone in hand, one hundred billion won in the corporate account, and felt the specific, Cho-family version of love: understated, indirect, expressed through jade trees and fishing trips and the quiet assumption that the important things—family, patience, water—would always matter more than the big things.
He went to the garden. Watered the jade tree. Stood in the December cold and watched the water soak into the soil around roots that had been growing, slowly and persistently, for four years.
Two point five meters now. The tree had grown twenty centimeters since his father last measured it. Growing in the dark. Growing in the cold. Growing because growing was what living things did when the conditions were right and someone remembered to water them.
One hundred billion won.
But the tree mattered more.
Some things always would.