Before ABD: The Friday Call

Chapter 1 — The Friday Call August 2024. The company was struggling, and Ernesto could see where things were headed. Then the crisis became personal. Laurie wasn’t just another employee. Years earlier, she had been the standout student in Ernesto’s biotech class at Johns Hopkins. He believed in her enough to hire her out of graduate school, and he had watched her grow into a talented young professional. Now he knew she was going to lose her job. During a tense Friday Zoom call with company leadership and HR, Ernesto barely spoke. While everyone else discussed the situation as a business decision, he was confronting something much harder: what leadership feels like when you care deeply about the person on the other side of the screen. Eventually, the others left the call, leaving Ernesto and Laurie alone. He couldn’t save her job. But he could make her a promise. He would help her figure out what came next. At the time, Ernesto didn’t know that his own career was beginning to unravel too. ABD didn’t exist. There was no business plan, no logo, no company waiting in the wings. There was only the growing realization that something had to change. And sometimes, the beginning of a new company doesn’t look like ambition. Sometimes, it looks like a Friday call you wish you never had to make.