Ed is having a hellish time at his new company where he was parachuted into the CEO position by VCs. His diary, which fell into my hands recently, shows him lurching from humiliation to humiliation. In this entry, Ed goes out to meet a customer.
'Today I went to meet our best customer', writes Ed, 'I asked Pat Cook, one of the company co-founders, now CTO, to come along and introduce me.'
'All went well until the customer told me that he was worried about the security of delivery of one of our parts - a sole-sourced proprietary IC developed by our analogue design team.'
"ADI do a part which would perform the function quite well", said the customer, "but we'd prefer to stick with your part - if only you could license an alternate source for it."
I noticed Pat stiffen. He looked over at me intently, mouthing; 'No'.
'Now's the time to put the techies in their place', I thought, 'they don't own our products. I'll give them a lesson in customer service and business nous.'
'"If you give us a three year supply deal we'll license a second source", I told the customer.'
'As we left the customer's premises, Pat exploded: "Fuck you Ed, you just blew the margin on our most profitable part, you fucking idiot."'
'Only 382 days until we IPO, and then I'm out of here with a load of loot.'
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