Hold On for Dear LIfe

She called it "not actionable."Her feelings for him. Filed away. For three years. Because she decided - very deliberately - that what they already had was worth more than the risk of saying it out loud.New York City, 2017. Charlie, Jack, and Nik are three MIT graduates who have just raised thirty million dollars in a single night from thousands of strangers who read their whitepaper and decided to trust them with something real. Their mission is genuine: financial systems should serve people, not the other way around.What follows is the story of what that trust costs.As the cryptocurrency bull run lifts everything - including people who shouldn't be lifted - the three friends begin to drift from the versions of themselves that started this. Charlie trades discipline for visibility. A secret trade placed at 3AM costs the company four million dollars. And Jack holds. She always holds.When the market crashes, a hack hits, and Charlie is taken off a Brooklyn street in a van, what remains is not a company. It is three people who have to decide what they were actually building - and whether it is worth rebuilding from what is left.They scatter. They find themselves. They come back.The answer to everything arrives in a four-minute phone call from Manila.Hold On for Dear Life is a propulsive debut novel about ambition, friendship, and what survives when everything else burns. Written by a capital markets executive who spent years inside the rooms the novel describes - the ICO launches, the treasury meetings, the 3AM decisions - it is the first novel to get this world exactly right.For readers of Accidental Billionaire (Social Network), Bad Blood, Daisy Jones & The Six, and Fleishman Is in Trouble.