I should have been home asleep. Instead, I was sitting in my truck in the parking garage of Pinnacle Defense Technologies, staring at a concrete pillar, wondering how a man can spend three decades building something extraordinary and still end up feeling obsolete. My name is Nathan Cole. Thirty-one years ago, I walked into a small company in Marietta, Georgia—maybe sixty employees—and a founder named Arthur Specter who believed that private-sector defense software could outpace the federal contractors.
Back then, Philip Okafor was the CFO. He was older, quiet, always thinking three moves ahead. In 2008, after I’d turned down a third competing offer, he sat me down and said, “Nathan, you keep staying. I want to make sure you’re protected.
” That was the year we drafted the clause. And I never thought I’d need it.