if you are going through a corporate retreat, keep going
Aurora is a top tech company valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. CEO and co-founder John Shiller works his C-suite hard, but there are perks. The salaries are high, he’s generous with company shares, and then there is the corporate retreat. Once a year, he gets all his top executives together at a luxury hotel for several days and gets them to engage in activities designed to be fun and to develop relationships. But every one of those corporate execs brings baggage with them to the retreat.
Caitlin was just hired as Head of Events, and while she hasn’t officially started yet, she was invited to join everyone on the retreat. Not everyone is happy to have her join the team, as Aurora isn’t even a company that has events. They work in advertising, disrupting and updating the way traditional advertising works. But she’s walking into a situation where everyone else has a secret. One woman is pregnant a one-night stand and hasn’t told anyone yet. Two of them are having an affair. One has been looking for another job. And those are the smaller secrets. There is far more going on.
As the execs party in Miami, spending their time playing pickleball and parasailing, racing on jet skis and playing tug-of-war, there is a big deal bubbling in the tech world. A large company is looking to buy Aurora for $800 million. When the deal goes through, it will make all of them very rich. But there is still due diligence going on, as well as a tech reporter on the scene sniffing for a story, so John and his execs need to be careful. But their first night of clubbing leaves one exec missing, opening them up to extra scrutiny.
As the days go by and the alcohol flows, more secrets come to light. The Aurora execs fight to keep the darkest secrets in the closet, so the deal goes through, but it’s a struggle, especially when the missing exec turns up dead from an overdose. The women think that someone may have made it look like an accident to cover a murder, and they start to investigate. But what they uncover may not just unmask a murderer. What they find may bring the entire company down.
Very Bad Company is part thriller, part satire of tech company culture. Author Emma Rosenblum brings her personal experience with tech companies to this wild ride of a corporate retreat. And while not every bad person in this book gets what they ultimately deserve, that does ring true of modern tech culture. But readers get the intrigue, the secrets, the lies, the relationship gossip, and the investigation into Aurora, from its current predicament all the way back to its beginnings.
I listened to the audio book of Very Bad Company, narrated beautifully by actress January LaVoy. Ironically, she made her Broadway debut in the play Enron, which may have informed her reading of these bad company people. I thought she did an amazing job with this material, but the material is a little confusing when you only have the audio to refer to. There is a large cast, which gets difficult to keep straight, especially with the homogeneity of much of tech culture. I also struggled with the timeline a little, as there were flashbacks, and I didn’t always know for sure if we were still in the past or were back to the present. I think reading the book would make keeping track of such things easier.
For the most part, I enjoyed Very Bad Company. I love a good satire, and this does poke at tech culture in fun ways. But it was hard to find anyone to root for, especially since they all just kept moving forward with the retreat despite the death of a coworker, just to make sure their lucrative deal went through. Also, the CEO has a truly unnatural obsession with Winston Churchill, which I found tedious, and I really wanted the characters to find it as tiresome as I did and complain about it to the others. Even that would have made these characters a little more likeable in my eyes.
An early copy of the audio book for Very Bad Company was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
