Page 1 of The Sebastian Guarantee
Chapter1
PHOEBE
“Phoebe Gale, I’m cutting you off.”
Oh, hell no!Phoebe pushed up her glasses, adjusted her beret, and gathered her resolve. Today was not the day for moderation. For the moment, she was the toast of the techies, and this was the day she’d learn if she was on the cusp of digital greatness or a breath away from being another one-and-done in the breakneck-paced tech world.
She glanced at her overalls and spied a dried glop of mustard. This stain didn’t help her plead her case, but she couldn’t allow it to deter her either. She swished the tail of her braid over her shoulder and let her chestnut-brown locks cover the crusty evidence.
She lifted her chin. “No, Hank, you can’t cut me off. Not now. Not when I need it the most.”
The grizzled Hank crossed his muscled arms, swirled with ink, and eyed her closely through the food truck’s order window. “This would be your sixth today. Don’t think I haven’t kept track.” The guy checked his watch. “And it’s not even five o’clock.”
Those were factual statements. Nevertheless, a gal needed what a gal needed. She inhaled the heavenly scents wafting from the truck. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. And my desperate measure consists of a six-inch Hank Dog with ketchup, mustard, and a healthy sprinkling of shredded lettuce . . . for luck.” She pressed her hands into a prayer position and gave the man her best puppy-dog eyes. This was not her first hot dog emergency, and Hank was no stranger to this expression. The man often parked his food truck near her Denver apartment, which also served as her home office.
A year ago, she’d left her position at her uncle’s tech company to start her own business. She would have quit sooner had she known there was a hot dog food truck in her neighborhood.
Hold up!That wasn’t exactly true.
She’d loved working at the company her uncle and late father had started. But she wanted to make a name for herself on her own terms and forge her own path—a path that, so far, had been blessedly dotted with a plethora of food trucks.
In the last three hundred and sixty-five days, she’d hit up Hank’s mobile kitchen three or four times a week, and the pair had become fast friends. But she couldn’t allow the gourmet hot dog chef’s concern over her daily intake of processed meat to cloud his ability to sell her what she needed.
Since she was a little girl, hot dogs had always been her go-to comfort food. Scratch that. Hot dogs were heranytimego-to food, but today, her nerves had her ready to jump out of her skin.
She glanced at her cell phone. No new emails. The nervous energy pulsing through her kicked into overdrive as it mingled with the nitrates from her five previous hot dogs.
She ignored her frazzled disposition and flashed Hank her most endearing smile. “Pretty, pretty please, hook me up with a little hot dog perfection.”
Luckily, she was pretty, pretty sure Hank understood that she possessed a dogged determination when it came to getting her frankfurter fix.
The food truck vendor sighed dramatically, shook his head, then picked up a pair of tongs.
Sweet victory!
“Yes,” she whispered and pumped her fist.
“What’s with the lettuce today, Phoebe? It’s not your usual order,” Hank asked as he plucked a hot dog from the grill, nestled it into a toasted bun, then dressed her delicious dog.
“It’s something for work. You’re familiar with Zinger, right?”
“Who isn’t?” Hank remarked. “It’s the top internet search engine. I would’ve loved to have bought stock in that company thirty years ago. I’d be a gazillionaire.”
“Yeah, they’re huge,” Phoebe agreed. “And that’s why I’m so amped up. They sponsor an event, and it’s a big deal if you get invited,” she explained, trying to play it cool. And no, she wasn’t losing her mind. The lettuce that had driven her to hoover hot dogs all day long wasn’t the green vegetable.
SpelledL-E-T-I-S, theLETISthat had her popping and fizzing like a shaken-up can of soda, stood for Lifestyle Entertainment Technology and Innovation Symposium. You couldn’t simply sign up for it. LETIS was an invitation-only conference. It brought together up-and-coming creators in the lifestyle, tech, and entertainment fields and eagle-eyed investors looking to fund the next big thing. The event was set to take place, starting tomorrow, at a mountain lodge in Colorado. Due to the exclusivity of the conference, that was all the information they’d provided. The invitations went out in waves, and the LETIS website reported that the final batch of invites were set to go out today.
And why did she think she had a chance of being invited?
Because of a match—a Munch Match app.
Eleven months ago, Hank had the audacity to park his truck across town. This wasn’t a huge inconvenience. Most food trucks posted their location on their website, and it wasn’t hard to track him down. But as she noshed on her lunch, an idea popped into her head. What if she had been in the mood for noodles or street tacos? What if she’d been jonesing for food truck falafel? What if she didn’t even know what she wanted, but she wanted it from a food truck? Her need to know the location of every food truck in the Denver Metro Area and her desire to craft an application that matched a person to precisely what they didn’t know they wanted had morphed into the Munch Match app.
She’d put her tech skills to work and created an algorithm that, after answering a series of questions, directed the user to the closest food truck to meet their specific craving. She’d done it for Denver, then decided to expand it exponentially. Why not? People needed to eat across the globe, and the code that strategically scraped location data and menu selections worked anywhere.
But that wasn’t everything it did—and this was the part that had plucked her one-woman tech company, Foot Tap Studio, out of obscurity and splashed it across the internet’s tech sites.
A month after she’d released the app, an influx of emails had clogged her inbox. Emails withthank you so muchandyour app changed our liveswritten in the subject line. Munch Match didn’t only connect people with exactly which food truck they should visit. It had facilitated a significant number of love matches.
