Wednesday January 03, 2007

Diary of a startup - Week 1

A long time buddy of mine, Monty (not his real name, but close), left his position as a high-level architect with a big money manager at the end of the year to join a startup as CIO. The startup, which I will call Nimble Financial, is planned as a wholesale mortgage bank. The CEO, Marian (not her real name), is a well-regarded figure in the financial services industry with strong contacts on Wall Street. The company has obtained significant funding from the Street, and intends to be funding loans by the middle of the year.

 They have started operations in a warehouse in Southern California, and are looking for a deal on ten or so servers and accompanying software. With their permission, I will be documenting their progress through this blog, focusing on their IT efforts. All names will be changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

Week 1: Hoping to help Monty out, and garner some business for Sun, I decide to see if I can help them score some hardware. I am somewhat stunned to realize that, even though I am a Sun employee, I have no idea how to refer hardware business to Sun. I check the Sun employee web site, and can find no page devoted to referrals. I know a lot of software sales guys through my work, but no hardware people. I decide to call another friend, a popular blogger who is a Sun sales engineer, for advice. I have seen in his blog, and Jonathan's, reference to the new Startup Essentials program, but I feel that the startup may require more Sun advice than that program provides.  He refers me to the Sun account executive for the area, "Sally". I call her around closing time, and she is quite friendly and helpful. She warns me that the account may be too small for Sun to handle directly, and that it may wind up being passed to a partner, but promises to contact Monty and see what Sun can do to help him.

True to her word, she emails Monty that night. They exchange emails, and set up a conference call with the two of them and Marian for the end of this week.