Chapter 4 - ALISTAIRAlistair Sanders and I met two years earlier at a procurement conference in Chicago.
He was forty-one.
Founder of Sanders Infrastructure Group.
Data centers.
Hospital logistics networks.
Cold-chain facilities.
Construction technology.
A private company large enough that business magazines estimated his net worth above a billion dollars.
I knew the articles.
I disliked him before we met.
Then he asked a panelist a brutally specific question about hospital supply resilience that nobody else in the room understood.
I did.
We argued for twenty minutes afterward.
He bought me coffee.
I told him his company overcharged for systems integration.
He told me Whitaker Medical built beautiful equipment with software from 2009.
I hated him slightly less.
Our relationship began nine months later.
Quietly.
Not because I was ashamed.
Because Sanders Infrastructure was considering a strategic distribution partnership with Whitaker.
Dating him while negotiations existed would have been a governance problem.
So we disclosed to the two independent directors who needed to know.
We recused ourselves where appropriate.
Then the partnership negotiations collapsed for unrelated reasons.
Our relationship continued.
Privately.
Alistair wanted public.
I did not.
That became our first serious conflict.
He thought secrecy made us vulnerable.
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I thought publicity would let my parents turn us into a transaction.
We were both right.
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