One Saturday afternoon, Adora's Vitoch and her friend were driving around Berkeley, California, just hanging out and running errands.

And it was a beautiful day, blue skies, birds chirping, dandelion fluff floating in the air with the rays of the sun.

Adora and her friend had both graduated from Berkeley recently.

She had entered the nonprofit world, and he got a job as a software engineer. Adora was looking outside the window

when her friend turned to her. And he said, as we were going up this hill, that he had some

news to share. And this is really rare because he's the kind of person

where usually you have to ask, how are you, how is your day?

Really prod to get more detailed.

Okay.

And he said, I found out that I have basically these kind of shares

are like a valuation in this company.

He said the company was offering him a buyout for the shares, you know, classic Silicon Valley stuff.

And I was like, that's awesome, you know, and I kind of, I didn't want to ask directly how much, because I thought that would be in poor form.

But he volunteered out in the range of $400,000.

So I said, shit.

I was like, dude, oh my God, you can't buy a house in the Bay Area, but you can like,

buy a condo.

She couldn't believe how casually he had dropped that news.

Like, oh, just close to half a million dollar windfall.

No big deal. What was going through your head when he said that? I felt like, okay, I'm being

left behind, which is not a great gut reaction to somebody else's achievement. She started doing

all these calculations in her head.

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