Anna Dopico’s book, To Make Riders Faster, on the history of Cervelo and its founders is not only an honest, previously-unknown-fact-filled look at that company’s 17-year run under its founding partners’ ownership, the tale she tells is downright Shakespearean. She should know. As Cervelo co-founder Phil White’s wife – and an executive inside the company – Anna knows where all the MacBeths and Hamlets are buried.

Cervelo was, at various places along the way, a start-up, a fledgling, then an $11 million company (in revenues) an “almost-$50 million” company. Anna and her readers take a breath at these waypoints throughout the narrative, only to dive back into the attendant problems with Asian frame factories, suppliers, banks, private lenders. It was painful to read, because these were then, and are now, my friends, and because it conjures memories of my own bike-manufacturer-PTSD.

Cervelo is now owned by Dutch industrial conglomerate PON Holdings. Anna’s book mechanically progresses through the stages of Cervelo’s battering on rocky financial shoals, and reveals how breathtakingly close the company was to insolvency.