excerpt from "Burn Rate"
Ross, Doctor Bob, and Peter waited in the reception area for their contact to show up. He was twenty minutes late and Peter had already asked the receptionist twice to make sure the guy knew they had arrived. They were in Building 7, Level 3: a single cell of the huge organism called Business Systems, Inc. It was hard to crack a place like BS, but once you were in, you were pretty much set.
Peter had set up a meeting to introduce the company, talk about a trial deployment, maybe get some services revenue. Peter would be the pitch man. Doctor Bob was there for technical credibility. Ross came along to keep an eye on Peter. They were dressed in full corporate regalia: dark suits, cream shirts, navy ties bearing innocuous, forgettable patterns. Peter looked like he’d stepped off a GQ cover. Doctor Bob looked like he’d stepped off a fourteen-hour plane flight. Ross had spent a couple of years on Wall Street after getting his MBA where the basic, daily uniform was suit and tie, so he was comfortable and figured he probably looked okay.
Peter scored this prospect as a 6 out of 7 on his pipeline report. Ross thought he was smoking crack, but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for awhile.
A sweaty balding man in his late twenties wearing a Marine World t-shirt pushed through the frosted glass door. Behind him, in a room the size of an airplane hangar, a sea of cubicles awash in bright fluorescent light, their perfect geometry like an Escher painting.
“Are you the guys from Tesseract?”
Peter stepped forward.
“You must be Fritz – we spoke on the phone. Peter Magdalen.” He gestured in the direction of his colleagues. “Ross Williamson, our CEO. Dr. Robert Sanskrit, CTO.”
Hands where shaken, business cards exchanged. Fritz led them into the giant room. The opposite wall was impossibly far away. They made their way along the side of the cube farm, past copy rooms, break rooms, the occasional glass-walled private office.
Finally, Fritz punched a code into a keypad next to a door and let them into a conference room with a long, fake wood table and a PC projector hanging from the ceiling.
“I’ll let you get set up,” Fritz said, and backed out of the room.
Doctor Bob positioned himself strategically near a whiteboard. Peter stood with his hands at his sides, wearing a deer-in-headlights expression.
“Peter. How’s it going?” Ross asked.
Peter blinked, looked at Ross.
“Fine.” He began setting up his laptop. The team from BS began shuffling in. Not a gray head among them, Ross noted. He’d have to have a talk with Peter about qualifying prospects.
More introductions. The business card conga line. Someone came in with an armful of Evians. Peter fired up the projector and stood up.
“T-t-tesseract T-t-technologies is th-th-th-the lead-leading p-p-p-provider of ---“
It was painful to watch. His ivy-league features crumpled like paper; his eyes bulged, a beached fish gasping for air. Explosive gasp and fine spray of spittle when he finally managed to eject a syllable.
Fritz looked like he watching a traffic accident unfold in slow motion. The rest of the BS guys were trying not to look at each other.
Ross slipped his cell phone out of its holster, held it under the table, tapped out KILL ME, and sent the message to Doctor Bob.
Doctor Bob’s phone beeped. He flipped it open, looked at it and coughed into his fist, muffling a laugh.
Ross wanted to step in and shut Peter up, at least get in a few complete sentences before the BS guys told them to fuck off and bark at the moon. But there was no way to do it without pulling the rug completely out from under him and making them all look like chumps.
Peter’s third slide was a ducky-horsy architecture diagram: the Tesseract component model in a typical deployment scenario. Doctor Bob saw an opening, stood up, and began an impromptu whiteboard talk. Peter looked annoyed. Everyone else in the room seemed to sigh as one with relief.
Doctor Bob gave great whiteboard. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard (in Philosophy, but everybody assumed it was in something technical) and had been crawling around the Valley, building software for one company after another, since the Visicalc days. He’d dropped two fortunes betting on technology trends that suffered from poor timing: pen computing and “push.” Tesseract was the second company Ross had been in with him, and Ross trusted him completely.
Doctor Bob lobbed a softball to Ross about business models, and they riffed back and forth for a bit. Peter stood at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets, squinting in the projector’s glare.
Finally, it was over. More handshakes. The obligatory “next steps” bullshit that nobody believed.
Fritz walked them back to the reception area. His pudgy face held an unmistakable expression of relief as he badged himself back into the big room.
They rode back to the East Bay in silence. Halfway across the San Mateo Bridge, Ross couldn’t stand it any more and put on a Morphine CD.
He pulled in front of a Starbucks near the office.
“Post mortem,” he said, and they all filed out.
They got themselves coffee and carbs and took a table in the back. The ambient music was vintage Leo Kottke, which Ross thought was pretty cool until he realized that it was a cut from a Starbucks-brand compilation CD called Groovy Guitar Sounds on display next to the register.
Doctor Bob sat back, sipping his latte. Ross looked at Peter, waiting.
“I thought that went pretty well,” Peter said.
Ross grimaced. “I don’t know, Peter, I thought we pretty much got our asses kicked.”
Doctor Bob leaned forward. “Man, that’s some stutter you’ve got there, dude.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ross and Doctor Bob looked at each other. Doctor Bob shrugged.
“Well,” Ross said. “You – I’ve never noticed it before, maybe it’s just a public speaking thing. You definitely have this, well, it’s a stutter.”
Peter looked at Doctor Bob, who nodded. Peter shook his head.
“Bullshit. I don’t stutter. Am I stuttering now?”
“No,” Ross said. “You’re not. But –“
“Well, how bad is it?”
“It’s bad, man,” Doctor Bob said.
Peter raised his voice. “Bad? What do you mean, bad?”
Several of the other patrons looked up from their coffee drinks.
“T-t-t-tesseract T-t-technologies t-t-tops th-the ch-ch-charts,” Doctor Bob said, in a fairly passable imitation.
“You son of a bitch,” Peter said. He stood up, pushed his chair in with a loud crash, and stalked out.
Ross and Doctor Bob stared at the door for about thirty seconds.
“You’re fired,” Ross said, finally.
“B-b-b-bummer,” Doctor Bob said.
Ross unclipped his phone, said “Gina” into the handset, and held it to his ear.
“Gina, Ross. Listen, cancel Peter’s badge, okay? Yeah … Well, he kind of quit and I kind of fired him. Yeah … Oh, and listen … if he calls and you see it’s him from caller i.d., answer with a stutter … Yeah, you know … T-t-t-tesseract T-t-t-technologies, c-c-can I help you? … Right, he’ll think it’s really funny. Oh, and tell him if he wants his last paycheck he’d better return his fucking laptop … Right, thanks.”
Doctor Bob looked at him, one eyebrow slightly raised.
“What? She can handle it.”
“So,” Doctor Bob said. “Who hired that asshole?”
“Don’t start with me. Four years at Oracle, Wharton MBA -- his references checked out.” He took a sip of coffee. “Although … the last guy I talked to, I kind of wondered why it sounded like he couldn’t stop laughing.”
“So we need a sales guy,” Bob said.
“Well, what we need is a sale.”
“How much runway do we have?”
“Our burn rate’s about seventy K a month, we’ve got maybe twenty K a month coming in, and we’ve got maybe a hundred in the bank. Do the math, man – it’s not looking good. Two months. I finally heard from my guy at Sierra. Not the schmuck -- his partner, Tryggvason. Turns out he skied off a mountain in Switzerland and he’s been laid up in a clinic getting wired back together. He e-mailed me, said he’s still interested. I know that game, though – he’s gonna circle around like a fucking vulture until we’re up against the wall so he can ratchet down the valuation. Then, just when we’re about to miss payroll, a term sheet magically appears. Fucking bloodsucking cocksuckers.”
“Don’t hold back, man. Tell me what you really think.”
Ross bit his lip, took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t think we can go back to Heaven for a bridge without at least a letter of intent from a marquee customer. I’m gonna try, but I don’t think they’ll bite.” Heaven was the angel investor fund that had provided Tesseract’s seed round, along with a hundred K from Ross and fifty from Doctor Bob. “It’s just timing, man – sales cycles are so fucking long these days. Lori’ll kill me, but I can probably pull a couple hundred K out of the house, buy us a few months, maybe more if we cut the Posse back.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
Ross shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“You lose your house, your wife comes to her senses and dumps you, and we lose the company.”
“Hmm. Yeah, that would pretty much suck. I don’t see a lot of options, though.”
