Down Round

Suits meets Ocean’s 11 in Down Round where a brilliant start-up CEO gets shut out of his own business by his chief investor, leading him down a twisted path of revenge, working a long con enabled heist with his best friend.

Amid the Silicon Valley start-up backdrop, beneath “big tech,” where emerging CEOs and venture capital investors dance billion-dollar tangoes, power dynamics reveal how innovation can go very right or terribly wrong—and how some investor intentions can range from passively lazy to downright evil.

Down Round draws a searing depiction of the boardrooms and the labs—and the smart, at times ruthless people who inhabit Silicon Valley. Venture investors can be filthy—and brilliant. And the hero start-up executives have to be incredibly creative and competent to exact their vengeance, which here is about gain and loss of status. And lots of money. When a clever investor promises Brian Bernard the world, he has no idea that science will not save him from the sharks.

Our hero changes his entire identity to return to where he’d been—at the top of an innovative nuclear energy start-up, looking for funding…and this time he is the one setting the trap. His best friend abandons his unsatisfying career as a Silicon Valley corporate attorney, and together, they embark on a morally ambiguous heist for redemption and find much more along the way, including genuine love. They discover that the path to revenge is not a straight line, nor a fixed destination. Life, like nature, and the energy science capturing their imagination, regenerates in powerful and often unexpected ways.

A page-turner set in the hotbed of American invention and market payouts, Armsby’s debut novel takes on high-stakes deception, revenge, and is a mash-up of technology, business drama, and a life-and-science thriller.