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The Walking Dead of Silicon Valley
Frisky070802 writes "CNN has a column about a liquidator who refers to thousands of Silicon Valley startups as the walking dead. It states: 'Pichinson, a self-described "doctor of reality" who helps liquidate companies, says he wouldn't have moved from Los Angeles to Palo Alto a few months ago had he not smelled more high-tech trouble looming.... "There's still another 6,500 to 7,500 companies out there who are among the walking dead."'"
This is possibly an idle curiosity, but how is having hostage negotiating skills going to help out management? Or are these tech firms even worse off than we thought?
The anti-salmon
With other industries starting up? What percentage of restaurants fail? Bookstores? Coffee shops? Are these number way out of whack with business as a whole?
Recently, I was inspired to look up an old company I use to work for. They employed about 12 people total.
They had three sales people, three support people, on tester, one secretary, three programmers. One of the programmers doubled as their sysadmin. The support staff had to work on bugs for Q&A in their time between calls. They literally had clients that were some of the biggest lawfirms around.
They made a product. They sold a product. They made money.
The guys who started the thing took out personal loans to keep it going for awhile. He passed out profits back to the employees when times were good. Honestly, if there was a place to be promoted to or a position open when I was ready to go on I probably would have never left.
Small companies can survive in the IT world. They just have to have half a clue in their heads to do it.
Fill a niche, concetrate and expand along the niche not outside it, keep employee and overhead costs low (their building was nothing grand but I had my own office).
This is basic business stuff that many companies still have no concept of.
This is more like an advert for his company... I wonder what this will have done to his stock price.
With so many IT call centre roles being outsourced to India, why not utilize India's Walking Dead. Specifically, there's an army - pun intended - of people who are considered legally dead in India due to corrupt officials declaring them dead so their relatives could get their hands on their land. I'm not making this up.. see this story
This guy has an interest in tech companies going out of business. What is the difference between what he says and what the dot-commers were saying 3 years ago when they were constantly bragging about huge internet growth predictions?
[FromTheMorning]
Have you ever had to negotiate salary and benefits with management? I imagine that many of these companies will try to get of their obligations. These hostage negotiators can convince you that you're getting everything you are demanding... right before they slap the cuffs on you.
Sounds like a perfect skills match to me. ;)
The guy in the article has at least saved a decent proportion of his client firms; it's pretty rare here unless you get a management buyout (e.g. Rover Cars - not exactly a roaring success). Most of the time the firm just shuts down and gets asset stripped. Oh well, we've never had anything *quite* as big as Enron.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
This story was painfull to think about. I am 23 years old, I have been laid off 5 times, 3 of those companies don't exsist any longer.
- Directv BroadBand
- Transport Logic (Bought by Firstworld, who is no longer around I believe)
- Encompass Telesystems (Didn't even make it to having a web presence)
5 layoffs in 5 years. I live in fear, but have become bitter and jaded. I expect a layoff to come at any time. Especially since I work at Intel now.Pretty Pictures!
However, that said, it would interesting to see some reliable figures. Funny how it's run full circle - 'dot-com' started out as a pejorative, was the latest rage, and is now a pejorative again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Oh how I use to love that site lol...
I would get a 20 dollar check every month just for running that ad banner thing at night.
I cant believe there are any of those paid to surf companies still around.
Anyone who uses them are the people that can break the rules, or they are just the massive pyramid scheemer guys that host websites for the sole purpose of refering people to such site so they get x percentages of whatever their referers do.
The software biz is just beginning to enter a phase of massive consolidation and commoditization just as these firms need to show strong revenues. I must agree with Larry Ellison's self-serving comments that 80% of the software firms have no future.
This will impact Silicon Valley, which contrary to reports has not really generated much in the way of new industry in the last few years...the area is in fact turning more and more to the large firms (Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, Applied Materials etc) to shore up the local economy.
But, for anyone who wants to start a new business, I can't imagine a city with more commercial real estate on the market. Take your pick!
Then you get the OTHER extreme. One summer I got a temp job closing a plant, and moving the contents to another building. After the move, because I knew something about HVAC (Dad was a mechanic for, oh 35 years at the time, and I used to help him) they kept me on as an HVAC grunt
This place maintianed their HVAC stuff like no other place I've ever seen. My Dad came in to visit, and he was impressed. 5 Machine rooms - year room had at least ONE spare "hot" compressor - piped in, but off, and idle. Open the valves for the water, and turn it on, and you were good to go. Tested at least once/month
Each room had 2 towers - each could handle 75% of the hottest anticipated day. Most days, you could shut one tower with no problems. The company wanted the air clean and good in their building - we ran 50% fresh air - aka, we dumped half our air. ALL the air was filtered, and THEN electrostatic precipitated - even the warehouse!! No dust. due to the 50% fresh air, the building was at a fairly high positive pressue - we basically worked in a clean room! (Not a very clean one - but..). Every morning, after taking the basic readings, and bringing them to my boss, I grabbed a stack of towels, and clean all the machines - no oil drips, no dust - this was done 2x/day!!! The TILE (not concrete) floors in each machine room were swept daily, and stripped and waxed once/week! Spare parts were in bins, parts labeled, inventoried and the like. PM was done constantly. I swear, they used to keep the "Plant" cleaner than the public parts of most food stores or fast food places I've seen. The place was spotless
I wonder why nothing ever broke down? (duh....)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
- MCI-WorldCom: in Chapter 11
- McLeodUSA: in Chapter 11
- Exemplary Technologies: Chapter 7, CEO did time in Club Fed
- Network Associates: the division I was at got annihilated
... I'm currently in graduate school because I've come to the belief that the Industry is just not worth it. Whenever I hear HR reps talking about how they're irked that young engineers have no company loyalty and will abandon ship for the next good offer to come along, I want to shake them vigorously and shout that we've got no loyalty to employers because it's been proven the employer has no loyalty to us.I'm 29, and I want out.
Silicon Valley has many non-public companies that are quietly dying. Often it's not their fault; they were support companies for the semiconductor industry, which has moved elsewhere.
I've been reading "The End of Detroit", on how the US auto industry blew their market share. I see many parallels to Silicon Valley. Auto manufacturing hasn't been centered in Detroit for years now. Detroit, as a city, is a ghost town. The population is half of what it was at peak. See The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. That could happen here.