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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
Up a little... you know... Redmond? Had to be said.
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.
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]
Hostage negotiation is getting people to listen and talk when they are feeling hostile towards you.
Quite a useful skill if you have it.
I used to work for a rather large and well known national (US) retailer in their store operations division. One of my responsibilities was to deal with stores that were slated to close for any number of reasons, perhaps up to 30 a year. If a facility is due to close or upper management is thinking about this (ignore what they tell you - trust me), the one thing they will inevitably do is try to save money on something that won't be around. Executives simply can't resist the allure of saving these costs when they can "get away with it".
The first place to save said money for a closing or may be closing facility is operational maintenence. These are the kinds of things that can function for a while before their lack of maintenence can be noticed. On a routine basis, it makes economic sense to do certain preventative and aesthetic work on a schedule. Maintenence and building engineers know this, and they know what tends to be put off in the event a building will be closing. While they may not get the official word first, they will almost always know that a facility is closing before someone like the executive secretary.
Here is what to look for, even if you know your company is in healthy financial shape and that your facility is not about to close. Pay attention to these because the good times are not always so good.
Parking lots striping, is the parking lot badly in need of painting those lines that tell everyone where to park? Parking lot potholes, are the only potholes that are fixed the massive ones?
Paint on the walls, most businesses will paint their walls every x number of years, it saves money on electricity (brighter walls allows less light ergo less electric), and this is one of those subconcsious things that can reduce or enhance worker productivity.
Electrician, does your facility have a dedicated electrian, and if it does, has he been deemed unneccasary? This is a big one, electricians aren't cheap, but their vital to maintaining a smooth facility.
Light bulbs, most businesses don't wait for those overhead lights to burn out to change them. It costs too much in terms of time when you have thousands of them. It's cheaper to change them all at once over the holidays or the like before they burn out. This is done on a schedule, learn what this schedule is, for this is also a big one that is easily overlooked.
HVAC, heating ventilation air conditioning. Preventative maintenence like coil cleaning can be put off for a while if you know the facility will be closing, but would never be put off otherwise. Coils are typicaly cleaned at least once a year in the spring, and you can seem them from the outside. HVAC equipment is extremely expensive to service and even more expensive to fix. This is a big one, pay attention to if units are working properly (not if your hot or cold).
Carpet, this is less obvious since it can last longer, and sometimes a really cheap company is perfectly content to let 15 year old carpet remain in place regardless. This can be a red herring, but it bears watching.
It is not uncommon for maintenence and building engineering people to feel that the people in their building are stuck up and pretentious, and as a result they will probably feel no need to warn the occupants of the coming closure. While the facilities people probably want nothing to do with you, your security and janitorial staff aren't so biased. They work with facility maintenence on a daily basis and they can often also get wind of what is coming up.
Funny you should mention it, but it's pretty spooky around here now. Driving around, I see all around me empty buildings and "For Lease" signs everywhere. Go by the old 3Com/Palm building and the parking lot is just empty, (well, almost empty). Run over to AMD (Spansion, it's called now)and most of the buildings have been vacated, once again, "For Lease" sign proliferate everywhere. While we're in the neighborhood, we can stop by Fry's and find the store mostly empty, where we used to be able to find all the tech-heads here during lunch hour. D2 (Intel) seems to be ok, meaning it's still hard to find a parking space during the day. Many other companies such as LSI Logic, HMT, HP, Read-Rite, and others have been bought out by another company and liquidated, gone by the wayside and closed up shop, or just relocated and combined operations elsewhere.
The traffic also shows a dramatic change as well. What used to take me about 2 hours to get home to the Central Valley, I can usually make it in just over an hour, oddly enough, the worst is when I get to Tracy, wjere everyone seems to have moved (It's become a bustling little city, which I woulda never imagined growing up near there back in the 70's.
Back from the minor digression, It seems sad to me that the whole valley has become fairly lifeless and droll, considering this was where the whole technological revolution began. Thinking optimistically, this may only be a temporary condition until the next great advancement. Or things have just settled down from the great boom of the 90's and are back to normal. I guess we'll see.
Posted AC because, well, it doesn't matter.
I didn't notice the warning signs. During the job interview they asked me "Where do you see yourself in five weeks?"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.