Breaking Change

Pondlife Software has done the impossible: it fixed itself. The corruption is gone, the culture is honest, and the awards keep arriving for a company that never enters them. Then success sends the bill.

Forty new hires arrive who learned the culture from a slide deck. The OEM partner demands a generative-AI feature that has already been sold to twenty customers and cannot be built truthfully in the time given. A competitor ships the flashy version first and calls it "honest." And a warm, well-dressed investor offers to help the company "scale its culture without diluting it", an offer that is not quite what it seems.

Sharp, warm and very funny, Breaking Change is a novel about what it costs to stay yourself once everyone wants a piece of you, and about the difference between a culture you can preserve and one that is actually alive.