They Mistook Me For An Assistant And Humiliated Me During A Live Meeting. They Didn’t Realize I Controlled The $2.5 Billion Deal. Did I Go Too Far By Pulling The Funding?

The Handshake and the Ghost Investor

I held my hand out, ready to greet the new CEO. And that was all it took for the chairman to decide I didn’t belong at his table.

He didn’t even look at my face first. He looked at my hand, then at the folder under my arm, then at the flowers I was carrying—white lilies and eucalyptus.

The kind someone’s assistant orders when they want the room to look welcoming for a big announcement. The cameras were already rolling.

Red light on. Three angles. One for the internal stream, one for the external investors, and one for the archive no one thinks about until there’s a scandal.

I stepped up beside his chair, extended my hand toward the incoming CEO, and said, “Welcome to Northbridge.”

Before the new CEO could react, the chairman turned his head, took in my gesture, and gave a small practice scoff into his lapel mic. “I don’t shake hands with low-level employees,” he said, loud enough to be crystal clear in the room and on every live feed.

The reaction was immediate. A couple of board members smirked.

Someone halfway down the table did that nervous laugh people do when they know something’s wrong but don’t want to be the first to admit it. One of the communication staff at the back covered his grin with a folder like that would somehow hide the expression from the cameras trained directly on us.

The new CEO, Ethan Marsh, shifted in his seat and glanced down at the table instead of at my hand. He didn’t shake it.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t correct the chairman. He just looked away.

I didn’t pull my hand back, not yet. For a brief second, the chairman seemed bothered by that.

His smile faltered a hair. His eyes flicked from my hand to my face as if he was checking whether I had misunderstood the hierarchy he just announced to the entire world.

The flowers felt heavier in my arm. “I’m here as instructed,” I said, keeping my voice even.

He leaned back in his chair without hiding the contempt. “Then stand where you’re told,” he replied. “This meeting is for executives.”

Someone near the end of the table muttered, “Awkward,” just loud enough for his neighbor to hear and for the nearest mic to catch.

I lowered my hand, but on my terms, not his, and placed the flowers on the table just at the edge of his eye line. Then I walked to the empty seat at the far end of the board table and sat down.

The laughter lingered a second longer, thinner now, stretched over the silence that followed. “Let’s begin,” the chairman said, already turning toward the main screen at the front.

The first slide appeared. Logo, date, Northbridge Holdings leadership transition, and capital structure update.

I waited. Let them get through the title. “Before you go further,” I said, “there’s one thing you should know.”

The chairman’s head turned back toward me slowly, like I just interrupted a sermon. “We’re not taking commentary from staff during this session,” he said. His tone carried that same amused cruelty.

I met his eyes. “If you’re refusing to shake my hand,” I said, still calm, still level, “then by tomorrow morning $2.5 billion will no longer be part of this deal.”

The silence hit harder than the laughter had. It wasn’t disbelief; it was a vacuum.

Then, predictably, someone laughed a little too loudly. “Okay,” a board member said. “That’s enough.”

Another chimed in, almost relieved. “All right, let’s keep this professional.”

The chairman’s smile came back, brittle. “Sit down,” he said. “We’re behind schedule.”

“I already am,” I replied.

They had no idea yet. They would, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me back up and explain how a guy they thought was a low-level errand runner ended up being the one person in that room who could make or break the largest funding round in the company’s history. If you’ve ever had someone write you off in public because they decided you were beneath them, hit subscribe.

Because this story isn’t really about a handshake. It’s about what that handshake represented and what it cost them to treat it like a joke.

My name is Aaron Price. I’m 41 years old and until three weeks ago, I was the managing partner of a private capital firm called Pelian Ridge.

If you’ve never heard of us, that’s deliberate. We don’t advertise.

We don’t sponsor conferences. We don’t slap our name on stadiums.

We move quietly, write large checks, and expect two things in return: discipline with our money and respect for the conditions under which we give it. Northbridge Holdings was supposed to be our flagship deal.

It was 2.5 billion in committed capital, structured over multiple tranches tied to a high-profile acquisition and a leadership transition they wanted to turn into a PR event. To them, this was about a headline.

To us, it was about risk. Pelian Ridge didn’t start as “we”; it started as me and a laptop on a secondhand desk in a two-room office above a dentist in a strip mall.

Before that, I was on the other side of the table. For 10 years, I worked in corporate treasury and capital markets for a mid-tier industrial group.

My job was simple on paper and miserable in practice. Keep us funded. Keep us compliant.

Keep the rating agencies from turning us into a case study in what not to do. I saw up close what happens when capital is treated like an entitlement instead of a responsibility.

I saw bankers smile in your face and quietly shift your risk rating two notches down because your CEO couldn’t stop running his mouth on earnings calls. I watched deals fall apart because someone in a position of power decided humility was beneath them.

My father used to say something that stuck with me long after he was gone. Money doesn’t change people; it just makes it easier to see who they already were.

After one too many strategic refinancings that were really just emergency life support, I walked away. I took what I knew about capital structures, risk covenants, and how executives think—or don’t think—under pressure and started Pelian Ridge.

The pitch was straightforward. We write big checks.

We stay out of your day-to-day operations, but the cost of that freedom is very specific behavior when it matters. We wrote our first fund from a handful of institutional backers who were tired of seeing their investments wrecked by management teams whose egos outpaced their ethics.

On paper, we were about IRRs, covenants, and exit multiples. In reality, we were about something more basic: don’t be stupid with other people’s money.

Don’t be cruel with the people who keep your company alive. Don’t treat accountability like an optional feature.

The Conduct Provision and the Boardroom Trap

Northbridge entered our orbit during their transformation phase, which is a nice way of saying they’d grown too fast, layered on too much debt, and now needed cash and a story. They were a conglomerate of mid-market businesses stitched together under one holding company—logistics, industrial services, and a tech platform they couldn’t describe clearly even in their own materials.

They had reach. They had brand recognition. They had decent assets.

What they didn’t have was liquidity. Their outgoing CEO had spent five years chasing acquisitions like souvenirs.

He’d leveraged the balance sheet, cut operational muscle instead of fat, and smoothed over problems with phrases like “short-term volatility” and “entrenching headwinds.” The market stopped believing him.

Vendors started tightening terms. Banks stopped returning calls as quickly.

By the time Pelian Ridge got involved, Northbridge needed a capital injection and a leadership reset. They got both on paper.

We structured a deal. Pelian Ridge would commit $2.5 billion in private capital.

Northbridge would appoint a new CEO with a mandate to clean house and stabilize operations. The board would adopt a set of governance reforms to prevent another souvenir acquisition spree.

And then there was the clause, the one everyone skimmed past at first because it looked like legal wallpaper. I’d insisted on it. Our counsel had drafted it.

We called it, politely, the conduct integrity provision. In simple terms, it said if during negotiations or closing any documented conduct by senior leadership materially harmed the reputational standing of the company or its incoming leadership, Pelian Ridge could withdraw its capital commitment immediately.

No penalty, no delay, no renegotiation rights. Capital off the table.

It wasn’t theoretical for me. It came from experience.

Two years earlier, we’d committed to a smaller deal, a $600 million injection into a regional infrastructure firm. I trusted their chairman.

I delegated more than I should have to my second in command. Then, three days before closing, a video went public.

The chairman was berating a line worker in front of an entire town hall, calling him replaceable trash, laughing while others laughed. We still closed.

We shouldn’t have. Within six months, that clip was in every union negotiation, in every regulator’s back pocket, and in every journalist’s file.

We got our return eventually, but the cost in time, energy, and endless reputational triage wasn’t worth the IRR on paper. I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again.

If I was going to put billions behind a company, I needed more than clean numbers. I needed to see how the people in charge behaved when they thought they weren’t being watched closely.

That’s why the clause went in. And that’s why I insisted on attending the Northbridge transition board meeting in person.