Wait — it's the morning I bring on my college friend as co-founder.

By the following spring, exactly two years after the morning I walked into that stuffy co-working space and looked across the table at Marcus Vance, AetherTech was ready for the ultimate milestone.

An Initial Public Offering.

The transition from a private seed-stage startup to a publicly traded enterprise was a grueling gauntlet of roadshows, institutional investor presentations, financial audits, and regulatory filings with the SEC.

For two months, I flew between Austin, New York, and San Francisco, presenting our neural-protocol architecture to institutional giants like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity. I stood in sleek, glass-walled boardrooms on Wall Street, flanked by investment bankers in bespoke suits, answering tough technical and financial questions with absolute, unflinching confidence.

Unlike my first life—where I would have been a nervous, unprepared puppet reading off cue cards prepared by predatory managers—I knew every line of our code, every line of our balance sheet, and every single clause in our corporate charter.

The institutional investors loved it. There was no hidden debt, no sketchy offshore shell companies, no questionable IP assignments. AetherTech was as clean, transparent, and solid as a concrete foundation.

On a crisp Thursday morning in late May, our private charter landed at Teterboro Airport just outside New York City.

Sarah Jenkins and I checked into a hotel near Wall Street, reviewing the final pricing schedule for our debut on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

"Ticker symbol AETH," Sarah said, tapping her tablet screen with a proud smile as we sat in the hotel suite overlooking the East River. "Opening price projected at forty-two dollars per share. Market capitalization sitting right at 1.8 billion dollars."

I walked over to the window, looking out over the glittering skyline of Manhattan as the morning sun broke through the clouds.

"1.8 billion," I murmured, feeling a profound, unshakeable sense of peace settle over my chest.

"You okay, Leo?" Sarah asked, noticing the quiet intensity in my voice. "You look like you're miles away."

"I'm right here, Sarah," I turned around, smiling warmly. "Just thinking about how close I came to losing it all."