The WiFi would not connect. We had set the meeting on the rooftop of her steakhouse, the only quiet space, and the router could not reach us. My laptop fell back to two bars of 4G.
Then the owner had a last-minute commitment come up that delayed her by an hour. I used the time less to rehearse the deck than to map the order I would pull from it. The deck was already elegant. The work that afternoon was to be ready to put it away.
When she arrived, we flicked through it for ten minutes. Then she asked a question that was not on the slide. I answered, and instead of returning to the slide, I asked her where in the day that question came from. She told me. The deck stayed open in a tab somewhere; we did not go back to it.
The next two hours were a conversation. I let her name the problem in her own words, and used those words back. When she got skeptical about an integration, I named the trade-off before she did. When she asked something I did not know, I did not pretend to. We agreed on the unanswered question and moved.
The connection stayed choppy throughout. Not one screen failed. Plate opened, Edible Factor logged in clean, the menu rendered, the order flow completed. The "boring" engineering, Cloudflare Workers, Vite SPA, no realtime fragility, did the thing software is meant to do in a sales meeting: stay out of the way so the conversation can be the conversation.
She told me, in her own words, that she was excited and astonished. By the idea, and by the execution plan. I told her she should be. I had only just realized it myself.