Yo! I need cash too!

Ethics are a funny thing, especially in a startup. Its not unusual for a founder to take money out during a round of funding. The basic theory is that they have been paying themselves almost nothing to get the company going and have been putting their hearts and souls into it, company first themselves second. They get funding for the company, they get some cash in their pockets. Not a big problem.

So lets say hypothetically that you get a round of funding. You take out a nice phat pile of cash. Who knows what you spend it on, but that tan sure suits you and that's one sweet ride you have now.

Then lets say 6 month later you have to let a whole bunch of people go because you have over extended yourself. Not a problem, these things happen right. Economic meltdown-blah-blah-blah.

Then lest say your cash position gets tight again, its only been 9 months but you spent too much. So you get another round of funding. During that negotiation you manage to take some more money out again. Its just over a year since you last took money out, but you have such an elegant and extravagant lifestyle that you really need that sort of cash. Oh, you have to cut staff in this round as well. No problem.

You run the numbers just before you fire your CFO and then find that there is not enough headroom for you to take more cash out. So what do you do? Give up on your cash? No, what you do is give your managers a cash figure that they need to cut in addition, covering the cash you want to take out. How do they do that? Well cut the thing that eats the cash... staff.

The moral dilemma. You have to raise funding twice in 18 months. You have two rounds of rifts. You cut extra deep on the second. You take cash out twice.

Is that great leadership? Probably not. Can you claim the morale high ground? Probably not. Have you been managing your cash position well? Probably not. Do you put your staff first? Probably not.

Henry would never do that sort of thing, if he did there would be a riot and everybody would start leaving. His new Aston Martin is rather nice though, kind of a baby blue.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 9 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we still don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 193 lbs

Oh shit we are dead - part deux!

I'm not sure I believe Henry any more. I came on board and genuinely thought we were going to change the world. And to some extent I think we did. Just after I join we landed a bunch of cash. Sweet, that should see us past the finishing post. In the interview it was all about IPO and killing the market. More money, carefully managed made sense to reach that goal.

Turns out that Henry has been acting all Bernie Madoff. I'm not sure quite how he did it, but he convinced our investors to give him more cash, its some round of funding that nobody has ever heard off, "H", "J" who the f**k knows. Its at the end of the alphabet that only Sesame Street knows about.

Apparently Henry had to give up stock to make the deal happen. Means that we burnt, literally, though all that cash in less than a year. Betcha our income did not balance this out.

Henry's pitch at the company meeting (he was on the phone from New York) was that this is all we need to make the company cash flow positive and make a pile of cash. He's brought Henry on-board, his brother from another father (really, his mother liked the name so much she used it twice) to become Chief something, Cash Operations I think. It confusing with so many Henry's but this one is from American City Bank. Perhaps he has the balls to keep Henry's expense account under control.

So why don't I believe in Henry? I don't know. Its the same old story, the next feature, the next customer is suddenly going to turn the corner for us. That customer or feature, the one we don't have, is going to make the difference. I have heard this all for 18 months and its wearing thin. You know, you read these stories or watch interviews with people who have been abused. Its the same story, you love them so much that you think they will change and tomorrow will be better. In reality each day is ever so slightly worse than the next. Its also tough to make friends and build relationships with people when they are gone in a few months, either because we have another round of lay-offs or they leave for a better place. You start to loose interest in building relationships or product for that matter.

And our investors did not give all the cash we needed, so we had to fire a bunch more people. I survived, at least this round. Another cut in pay and some more worthless options. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir was all gung-ho after. He got the team together to "motivate" them, in his normal fashion he missed the point and instead of listening to our concerns he just talked about himself and Henry and spent no time to understand us. He makes me puke.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 23 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 189 lbs

The land that time forgot!

I love our Ops team, they sure know how to get things done and most of all preserve cash. During the first bubble burst they were buying and selling hardware on uBid for profit for the company, but I hear these days they are ensuring that we stay on biblically old products. Take for instance our Databases. 11g. Nope far, far too modern. 10g anybody, 9i or even 8i. Nope. We run 7.3.4 because, well I don't really know why. Apparently DJ is super friendly with the Sales Rep and he gets great dinners in return for us running on something that pre-dates the internet. There is some sort of uplift on the license for running something that old!

Then our O/S. Well RedHat 5, the defacto choice for a web company, we don't have that either. CentOs. Too good for us. We have some hand built Redhat 3 from the sources no less, because we are that cool.

Then our storage. WooHoo. Sun was way too expensive. EMC, super safe choice and they have a great executive incentive package, otherwise know as DJ gets a few rounds of gold at Pebble Beach. So we brought Kodak , Fuji or some other camera makers dusted off disks. They had a special that week for buy one get one free and a weekend in Vegas thrown in.

It gets better. Our servers. Dell would be nice. SuperMicro cool, Rackable even better. We have HP! Who on this Earth deploys HP? Oh I forgot, they have an incredible package that includes strippers at the Gold Club in San Francisco.

Awesome. Its not what you buy, its what the sales rep is willing to "throw in" that counts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

QA has vanished!

Well, saying that all of QA were marched away Nazi style, taken to a field, shot and then their bodies placed in a deep hole and then covered up would not be a real reflection of what went down. That would not have captured the whole Tony Soprano "whacking" thing, in that Italian mobster "Iz far da family".

The reality is that the layoffs are brutal. QA lost 70% of their staff. And that's not just my team that across the whole company. The VP was taken out (it took some days to find him) and all the teams folded back under Engineering. The justification seems to be that they had completed all their automation and so were excess baggage, given the economic downturn were a drag on our cash position Henry said.

Now a bunch, if not all of them, were on Visas so they are totally f**ked. Sun, Cisco and every other man and his dog on Techcrunch are slimming down right now. A few old timers said it would be great, the commute times of the 101 would come down and life will be easier.

I'm not sure that computes. If we don't have QA and we are still adding features how on earth will be maintain our exemplary customer satisfaction record? We are going to be that moth heading towards the bug zapper without QA!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (same as last week)
Shots : 10 (down 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 187 lbs

Dinners are gone!

Disaster. At the company meeting this week Henry said that we needed to "preserve cash". Its not clear to him what is going to happen in the financial meltdown that appears to be looming.

He left it at that. Later in the week, Javier who runs finance sends an email around, no more dinners. Pass me a hail-mary! How the hell I am supposed to do that debugging marathons on an empty stomach? How crazy is that!

I know that a bunch of those South Bay types basically come in late, have a long lunch, go for coffee, stay for dinner and then leave. I get that. Why pay a bunch of cash for people who are lazy? I thought that was what management were paid to do, find the weakest links and dispose of them. So you take the strongest players, like me, and then starve them. How does that help us be the next big internet story?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 (same as last week)
Shots : 4 (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Awesome, lets all get electric staplers!

I totally get why I can't order Eclipse. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir sent me over to the IT and Ops guys. I think he wanted to have a fun and watch them beat me down. I'm sure he's bi-polar or something else weird.

So the long and short of it, I get dressed down for asking to spend money to improve my productivity. Not only that, DJ the VP of Site Ops at the company meeting then gave this long horsewhipping about spending money. How we need to stop using Microsoft Office and buy Electric Staplers on Ebay. I was confused until somebody said it was a joke. It was something about how one of those costs the same of Microsoft Office and why would anybody want either. So, I dig it. I never got Microsoft Office, I got OpenOffice (which is cool) but all I wanted for Christmas was IntelliJ.

I got so busted in the company meeting on a different front. Could not help myself, but got caught casting an eye over "her". I think Henry has me down as a marked man. I avoided talking to him at the beer bash afterwards.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (up three from last week)
Shots : 0 x Bourbon (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x pizza, 1 x Una Mass)
Weight : 168 lbs

Eclipse is totally bogus!

I try so hard, every hour of every day of every week of every month. Startups can be tough, something like counting your pennies or something.

But, Eclipse is totally bogus. I mean, I get the whole open source, its free, just use it "as is". But dude, its like my time is totally not free. Where's the refund on my hours when I spend 30 minutes figuring out that I don't get that feature or the feature works different if I change my perspective.

I've heard Henry's rally call and it totally makes sense. Don't spend money we don't need to, we have to preserve cash in order that Henry can wine and dine the movers and shakers in New York and Charlotte, NC. But Eclipse? I've got to say, I'm tempted to get out my credit card and just buy IntelliJ myself. It makes my blood boil each time I see the friggin' oh-so-1997 splash screen.... grrrrr. I think I need to go to the gym just to cool off. And just how friggin' bogus is that?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequilla (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (1 x pizza, 1 x Indian, 3 x Una Mass)
Weight : 166 lbs