The division grew. Priya became her closest collaborator, a partnership built on the specific mutual respect of two people who are not afraid to tell each other when they are wrong. The three deals from the third month closed, and one of them—a logistics technology company whose founder had spent twelve years driving trucks before building a platform to solve the problems he had encountered—became the first significant success, returning value to the portfolio ahead of schedule and attracting attention from others in the market who had not previously been aware of what Reed Financial’s new technology division was doing.
She hired carefully—slowly, some said too slowly, but she was not interested in building quickly at the expense of building right, and the people she hired were people who brought genuine knowledge and genuine honesty and were willing to say what they actually thought in the room where it would matter.
She was, by every external measure, successful.