Override your own teams stated intent to delete the RL 8.6 source tree, and apologize to Google directly rather than defend the position

Situation

Tissa Senevirathne emailed Kelly Hall on Jul 30 saying CIQ had informed Google it wanted to delete the RL 8.6 OS and kernel source tree, and asked that it be preserved for contractual traceability and auditability. Peter replied to Tissa the next morning without consulting his team first: I do not know why my team informed you they wanted to delete that tree. I apologize. There is little cost associated with us keeping it live. I hope it was presented as a discussion, not as CIQ is doing this. I will dig in with them to understand what was motivating that, but your request is more than reasonable. In parallel he told Nathan in DM: we cannot shut this down right now, it does not cost us to leave it up except for a few dollars, and pressed for the reason - but why would we need to delete it? I do not want to do anything at all to rock the boat with them right now unless we need to. He named the underlying stake: I want to make sure we have the actual contracts completely signed in blood, and pushed back on the suspected motive - I do not want to do anything that they are nervous about right now, especially if the reason is that its existence makes our metrics look bad.

Reasoning

The asymmetry decided it. Keeping the tree costs a few dollars; a customer discovering that CIQ unilaterally destroyed an auditability artifact during an unsigned expansion costs the deal. Two other things are doing work here. First, he took the apology himself rather than routing it - the customer heard a CTO say I do not know why my team told you that, which restores the relationship immediately and moves the internal question offline where it belongs. Second, he specifically flagged the possibility that the deletion was motivated by internal metrics optics rather than engineering need, and treated that as the wrong reason to touch anything a customer can see. The line about presented as a discussion, not as CIQ is doing this is the actual correction to his team: the problem was not the proposal, it was that it reached the customer as a decision.

Additional Context

The Google GCE deal is a 1.2M / 60-month line in the top-deals list, and Peter set up a direct Google/CIQ sync with Tissa for Aug 7 off the back of this exchange. It is the same Tissa relationship that on Aug 10 produced the live-kernel-patching quote request, so the preserved goodwill compounded within ten days.

Observed Evidence

Full sent-email body plus three DM messages to Nathan across Jul 31 and Aug 4. Tissa original request quoted in the thread.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis