effort to be nicer to her in deference to her friendship with Elizabeth.
She didn’t understand what her friend saw in this man, who was
nearly two decades older than she was and lacking in the most basic
grace and manners. All her instincts told her Sunny was bad news, but
Elizabeth seemed to have the utmost confidence in him.
—
SUNNY HAD BEEN a presence in Elizabeth’s life since the summer
before she went to college. They’d met in Beijing in her third year
attending Stanford’s Mandarin program. Elizabeth had struggled to
make friends that summer and gotten bullied by some of the students
on the trip. Sunny, the lone adult among a group of college kids, had
stepped in and come to her aid. That’s how Elizabeth’s mother, Noel,
described the genesis of their relationship to Lorraine Fuisz.
Born and raised in Mumbai, Sunny first came to the United States in
1986 for his undergraduate studies. Afterward, he worked as a
software engineer for a decade at Lotus and Microsoft. In 1999, he
joined an Israeli entrepreneur named Liron Petrushka at a Santa
Clara, California, startup called CommerceBid.com. Petrushka was
developing a software program that would enable companies to pit
their suppliers against one another in live online auctions to secure
economies of scale and lower prices.
When Sunny joined CommerceBid, the dot-com frenzy was at its
peak and the niche Petrushka’s company was in, known as business-
to-business e-commerce, had become red-hot. Analysts were
breathlessly predicting that $6 trillion of commerce between
corporations would soon be handled via the internet.
The sector’s leader, Commerce One, had just gone public and seen
its stock price triple on its first day of trading. It finished the year up
more than 1,000 percent. That November, just a few months after
Sunny was named CommerceBid’s president and chief technology
officer, Commerce One acquired the startup for $232 million in cash
and stock. It was a breathtaking price for a company that had just
three clients testing its software and barely any revenues. As the