I had a $400 Wagyu ribeye for lunch today. I didn't pay for it. An enterprise account executive from a tier 1 cybersecurity firm paid for it. He's been trying to sell me a cloud-native endpoint detection platform for 8 months. We don't need a cloud-native endpoint detection platform. We don't even have endpoints. Half of our workforce is using refurbished laptops from 2014 that are physically incapable of running his software. But I told him we're "evaluating" That phrase means absolutely nothing. But in B2B sales, it's the equivalent of ringing a dinner bell. He's bought me 8 lunches this year. He asks about our migration timeline. I stare out the window, sigh deeply, and whisper about decentralized integration bottlenecks. He furiously takes notes and orders another bottle of sparkling water. My total compensation package is $200K. But my caloric ROI is incalculable. Next week I have a pitch meeting with an AI analytics startup. I checked their Series B funding round before agreeing to the meeting. They have $40M in venture capital burning a hole in their pocket. I'm going to let them buy me omakase. Then I'm going to tell them our legacy infrastructure is experiencing packet loss and we can't deploy until 2029. Corporate America is just a vast ecosystem of free meals if you know how to string along desperate account managers.