October 7, 2006
An overheard conversation...
(c) copyright View from Silicon Valley, 2006. All rights
reserved.
I was killing time sitting in a noisy, well-known Los Gatos establishment
last week waiting for some colleagues to arrive for dinner. Sitting in the bar was a great excuse to catch the
ball game on the tube while I waited. It turns out there was a side benefit in the form of the conversation I overheard
at the next table.
The table had four guys, seemingly mid-thirties to early-forties,
drinking beer, ordering appetizers and comparing notes on their jobs and careers. I found the discussion quite
interesting and decided to pass along what was said. (Yes, it's rude and none of my business but the insights are interesting
nonetheless...)
It started out with a guy bragging he had done virtually zero
work for going on three months. He had recently left Cypress Semiconductor due to a chain of events that started with
a phone call from a headhunter. The headhunter got him an interview for a VP Marketing job at a company whose name I
didn't catch. He was eventually found out as too junior for the position but the process gave him the bug to see what
else was out there.
In between these points, all four of them seemed to agree Cypress
was a terrible place to work. They had fun rattling of a long list of co-workers who had left the company
for other tech jobs in the valley. It seemed not to matter where they went as long as the "escaped" from Cypress.
(Which more less matches some other comments I have heard over the years about the culture at Cypress.)
Apparently, he strung out his time at Cypress while looking, took
some vacation, used paid time off after he quit, then took some more time off before starting the new gig. He landed
at Sipex where he expected to "teach" them how to run a semiconductor business and "run" marketing for their analog products.
It was interesting to hear an established, publicly-traded company (SIPX, $47M sales run-rate, $122M market cap) described
as lacking in such basic skills. Particularly by someone who just took a job working for them. (It would
be even more interesting to learn six or nine months from now if the company was really so bad or the guy was just too full
of himself.)
Even more interesting was his dilemma about exercising his
$6.00 Cypress stock options and then holding them or selling them off. (FYI, CY last hit $6.00 circa January,
2003.) He thought Cypress might spin off their SunPower holdings as a dividend, in which case he thought it would
make sense to hold the stock.
Is this insider info? Was he sharing it with his buddies?
I have no idea...
(We will soon re-visit the solar power mania with some numbers
and new, so stay tuned...)
A second guy at the table works at Xilinx. He expressed
his frustration with a company where, "It's OK to be average." He felt Xilinx operations were massively "screwed
up" and it was a miracle when things got done right. He seemed resigned to working within the structure.
(Or at least if he was actively looking for a new job, I didn't hear it mentioned during the 30 minutes or so I
was waiting there.)
Again, this feels like inside info. Who would invest in
a company after hearing such comments from an employee?
The third guy was from Actel and sounded pretty senior. (Or at
least he casually dropped John East's name (Actel's CEO).) The only insight for Actel was he admitted
to being out playing golf all day --on a Tuesday (although just after quarter-end, which is often a good time to
sneak in some time off around here).
The most interesting comments were from the fourth guy who is
working for a pre-IPO start-up. I did not pick up the name but the he said they were composed of "a lot ex-Cisco
and ex-Intel people" whom he described as very smart. (What's the technology overlap between Cisco and Intel?)
In response to questions from his buddies, he gradually revealed they had $60M ("six oh, right?") in VC funding,
were running $75M to $85M in sales and they were profitable. ( I doubt his bosses want any of those details to be widely
available to the public.)
From my perspective, the "interesting" part was when the
guy said he made a conscious decision to hold himself to "only" ~60 hours per week. He figured it would eventually
limit his upside in the company, but he wasn't willing to work weekends. He figured his bosses would notice this over
time but it was a "sacrifice" he was willing to make.
His buddies consoled him that his bosses probably had a much higher
stake in the company then he did. They suggested his bosses were likely to "walk away with $10M." (They seemed
to assume it would be via IPO.)
Conclusion:
So what can we draw from these gossipy bits of news? My
own take is there are more bad companies to work for around here than good ones. My direct experience is the "bad" ones sometimes
pay better than the good ones, which can be construed as a sign of capitalism at work.
Oh, and by the way, employees at Cypress, SunPower, Xilinx and
maybe Actel all seem to be willing to share more info with friends than is available to the general
public. That seems to just be how things are done around here...
* * * *
The above is not intended as advice to buy, sell or
hold any stock, bond, real estate nor any other financial product or service. Buy and sell at your own risk (just like we
do.)
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