This is Planet Money from NPR.

One day in late 2019, longtime friends Desiree Rogers and Cheryl Maybury McKissick found

themselves in a room waiting.

They were waiting to see if they'd want an auction to buy a company.

And so as you can imagine, extremely nerve-wracking, where you have to just put in your best bid,

sealed envelope kind of a thing.

This wasn't the frenzied auction you've seen in the movies.

There were no people raising their paddles, bidding against each other as the price goes

up and up and up.

Here, you don't know who you're bidding against and you have no clue what their motive might

be.

It was a blind bid and so it's lawyers in a room opening envelopes.

Cheryl Maybury McKissick says the quiet made it feel intense.

You're in basically a conference room with your attorneys and you know you put your bid

in and the top two bids actually get an opportunity to bid against each other.

And if you don't win those top two bids, you're kind of out of there pretty quickly.

It had taken a lot for these two women to get here.

They'd raised millions of dollars.

It's all private information and you put your bid in and then they take a two whoever

the other bidder is and you go back and forth, back and forth.

And then you get silence and you're like, okay, what happened?

And every time a new envelope came back, it just ratcheted up the anxiety level a little

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