Poor old Ed. I keep finding the most pitiable entries in his diary. Ed is a serial CEO who kept a diary which fell into my hands. In these published extracts I have given him the name Edward Rushbridger to protect his real identity. Ed seems to be having a rough old time of it after being parachuted into his latest company by the venture capitalist backers. Previous entries here, here, here and here document the trail of Ed's woes.
'Sometimes I feel that the only people who appreciate me here are the venture capitalists who made me CEO', writes Ed, 'they must have seen my qualities. Everyone else seems to think I'm a lightweight.'
'But today I wondered if even the VCs appreciate me. Half way through the morning my CFO calls me to say: "The Brats are on the phone".'
'The Brats is what we call the guys employed by the VCs to monitor our progress. They are incredibly young, unbelievably clever and totally remorseless.'
'"The ROI on your storage products is 0.4% down on last quarter", says a Brat, "please explain why".'
'Tricky quarter Q2, historically it's nearly always down on Q1, it's an adjustment quarter for OEMs when they assess inventories . . . .".
At this point I am interrupted by the Brat.
'"You appear to be floundering, Ed, do you want to talk to Jim about this?" asked the Brat. Jim Clark is our General Manager for storage products.
"OK", I tell the Brat.
'Jim tells me that, in order to hang onto a good customer, we had to bid low on a big design-in which came into production last quarter. That explained the lower return.'
'When I phoned this through to the Brat he replied: "Do try and keep on top of things Ed, it makes the monitoring process so much quicker. We have a lot of companies to look after".'
'Little Sod.
Maybe even the VCs are losing faith in me.'
'Still, there are only 396 days until the IPO and then I'm out of here with loads of lovely fuck-you wonga.'
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