Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 16: Welcome Aboard

Two weeks.

Ryan stood at the window of his apartment and tried to reconcile the person standing there with the one who’d sat on a park bench with two hundred bucks and nowhere to be.

It didn’t quite compute. Not because things had changed – they had, drastically – but because of the speed of it. Two weeks felt like the wrong unit of measurement for how much ground had been covered.

Rebuild Tech LLC was registered and active, the EIN sitting in a folder Sophie had created and labeled with the kind of organizational precision that made Ryan feel slightly embarrassed about every filing cabinet he’d ever owned. Business bank account opened. Operating agreement drafted and signed. Employment contracts sent out and countersigned by all five.

All five.

That part still caught him sometimes.

---

Getting Sophie had been the easiest. She’d signed the contract the same night he sent it, at 11:47 PM, with a voice note attached that just said ’done, goodnight boss’ in a tone that suggested she found the word boss privately amusing.

Mike Benter had been almost as straightforward.

He and Ryan had been friends since freshman orientation – Mike was the kind of person who filled a room without trying, loud in the way that was more energy than volume, the guy who remembered everyone’s name and their drink order and their girlfriend’s birthday.

He’d been working sales at a mid-sized software firm that he described as "spiritually crushing" and had said yes before Ryan had finished explaining the salary.

"Wait, say the number again," Mike had said over the phone.

Ryan said it again.

"Just making sure I heard that right." A pause. "When do I start?"

Liam Ofscore had required slightly more convincing – not because he was reluctant but because he was careful, the kind of person who read contracts fully before signing and asked questions that required real answers.

He and Ryan had taken two elective classes together junior year, bonded over a shared contempt for a particular professor, and stayed loosely in touch. He was sharp and methodical and currently doing marketing strategy at a company he was quietly overqualified for.

They’d met for coffee. Ryan had laid it out plainly – what the company was, what the role was, what it paid, what the risk was. He didn’t oversell it.

Liam had asked three specific questions, thought about it for a day, and then sent a text that said: I’m in.

Iralis Davids had been the hardest.

Ryan had known of her more than known her, back in college – she was in his and Danny’s program, always near the top of every class ranking, the kind of student professors referenced when explaining what the assignment was supposed to look like.

She hadn’t been unfriendly exactly, just contained.

Quiet in a way that wasn’t shyness so much as selectivity – she didn’t talk much because she was particular about what was worth saying.

She’d warmed up to Ryan slightly by their final year, enough for actual conversations, enough that he remembered her as someone whose opinion meant something when she gave it.

She already had a good job. That was the problem.

Ryan had reached out through Danny, who still had her number. She’d agreed to a call, and perhaps with the skepticism of someone expecting to be wasting their time. Ryan had made his case – the role, the salary, the creative latitude, the ground floor opportunity.

She’d listened without interrupting, which he was learning meant she was taking it seriously.

Then she’d said: "I need to think about it."

She’d called back two days later. "I have conditions."

"Tell me."

She had three. All reasonable. Ryan had agreed to all of them without argument because she was right about all of them, which he suspected she already knew.

She’d signed the contract four days ago.

---

Ryan had moved the living room furniture back against the walls and set up five chairs in a rough semicircle facing the wall where he’d mounted a secondhand whiteboard that Sophie had found online and Mike had helped him carry up three flights of stairs while complaining the entire way.

They arrived within ten minutes of each other.

Sophie first, laptop bag over her shoulder, coffee already in hand. Danny next, looking more awake than Ryan had seen him in the two weeks since the bar, like something had been switched back on.

Mike came in talking – he’d apparently already made friends with the neighbor in the hallway. Liam arrived exactly on time, nodded at the room, found a chair.

Iralis was last.

She came in quietly, dark-framed glasses, hair pulled back, a canvas tote over one shoulder. She took the remaining seat, looked around the room once, and then looked at Ryan with an expression that said she was ready when he was.

Ryan stood in front of the whiteboard and looked at them.

Five people who’d said yes. Five people sitting in his living room waiting for him to say something worth the decision they’d made.

He took a breath.

"You know how when you’re a kid," he started, "you have all this – ambition, and creativity, and these enormous ideas about what you’re going to do and who you’re going to be?" He looked across their faces. "And then you get older. And you watch the world just – systematically dismantle all of it. Piece by piece. Until one day you look up and realize you’re somewhere you never planned to be, doing something you never wanted to do, for someone who doesn’t particularly care that you exist."

He paused.

"That ends today."

The room was quiet.

"We’re here because our lives weren’t working."

Mike tilted his head. "I mean. If you want to be blunt about it."

"I wouldn’t frame it exactly that way," Sophie said.

"Because we were jobless and close to being thrown on the streets to beg for cents in a cup."

Mike raised a hand. "That was definitely just you."

"Yeah I was having it bad," Danny said, "but not that bad."

Ryan waved them down with both hands. "The point is – we all wanted something different. Something better." His eyes moved across the room again, landing briefly on each of them. "And if I’m being completely honest – "

He held the pause a second longer than necessary.

" – it’s also because I’m offering the highest paying job any of you could land right now."

They looked at each other. Mike pointed finger guns at Ryan. Liam nodded once with the expression of a man who appreciated honesty. Iralis said nothing but something shifted slightly at the corner of her mouth.

Danny just shrugged like yeah, fair enough.

Ryan uncapped the marker.

"Either way. Our job is to build something revolutionary." He turned to the whiteboard. "And what does that look like?"

He drew a large circle in the center of the board. Inside it, he wrote a question mark.

He stepped back and looked at it.

"Brilliant start," he said.

Mike stared at it. "Hold on. You don’t know what you hired us to build?"

Ryan turned and threw the marker at him with calm, accurate precision. It hit him square in the forehead.

"Ow – "

"I don’t pay you people six figures to ask questions," Ryan said. "I pay you to answer them." He pulled a second marker from his pocket. "Danny and Sophie have already been putting ideas together. So here’s the first agenda."

He wrote ONE WEEK on the board in large letters.

"For the rest of this week you are all going to work through what they’ve put together, tear it apart, rebuild it, combine it, whatever – I want every idea stress-tested by people who’ll tell each other the truth about whether it’s good or not." He looked at them. "One week from today, I want a presentation. Best idea. Built out properly – not a concept, an actual direction we can start moving in."

"Remote for now?" Liam asked.

"Remote for now. We meet in person a few times a week, otherwise you work where you work. When we have an office – " Ryan said it like it was already scheduled, " – that changes."

"What stack are we working with?" Danny asked.

"That’s part of what I want the presentation to answer."

"Budget for tools and infrastructure?"

"Send me a list of what you need. I’ll sort it."

Iralis, who had not said a single word since arriving, raised her hand slightly. "What’s the success metric for the presentation? Are we pitching you on vision, technical feasibility, or market opportunity?"

The room went quiet for a half second. Ryan looked at her.

"All three," he said. "If it can’t answer all three it’s not ready."

She nodded and wrote something down.

Mike looked at her, then at Ryan, then back at her with an expression of mild awe. "She’s still intimidating huh."

"That’s why she’s here," Ryan said.

He looked at the five of them one more time – Danny with his notebook already open, Sophie scrolling through something on her laptop, Mike leaning back with the easy confidence of someone who’d already decided this was going to work, Liam reading through a document with a pen in hand, Iralis writing in neat careful lines.

"Any other questions?"

A few more came – practical ones, about communication channels, about NDAs, about how formal the presentation format needed to be.

Ryan answered them straight.

Then the room settled.

Ryan looked at the whiteboard. The circle. The question mark.

"Well then." He capped the marker. "Welcome aboard. Let’s get to work."