Alex stands up, surveys the apartment. It's not impressive - the same cramped space he's lived in since sophomore year, now slightly less chaotic thanks to his recent habits. But it's clean. Organized. The whiteboard on the wall is covered in equations and business model canvases, a strange marriage of his two obsessions.
The knock comes at exactly 7:03. Jian is never late, never early. Maddy bounces in behind him, carrying a bag of what smells like Korean fried chicken.
"Okay," she says, dropping the bag on his kitchen counter. "Let's make history."
They spread the deck across Alex's coffee table, printed pages overlapping like a collage of ambition. Jian walks through the financial model, his voice tight with something Alex has never heard before - excitement, carefully contained but unmistakable.
"The TAM is conservative," Jian says, pointing to a graph. "I used Google's internal benchmarks for AI infrastructure. The numbers are real."
"And the technical moat?" Alex asks.
"Defensible," Jian says. "Your information-geometric framework, combined with the entropy reduction approach. No one else is thinking about intelligence this way."
Maddy bounces on her heels. "Guys, this is going to work. I can feel it."
Alex looks at them - Jian, who has never expressed optimism about anything, nodding with cautious certainty. Maddy, who believes in them with the force of someone who has never learned that dreams usually die.