re: Headcount: The Party's OverIt is not a rumor (as far as Nortel is concerned), look at the following article that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen today.
re: Headcount: The Party's Over"but Calient's management team still let a HECK of a lot of cash get burned away to God knows where"
They blew some $100M "on whores", so to speak. And to the minds of Bowers and Corbalis, the whores are the guys at Kionix. Calient got valued at about $750M in their last round and they raised some $200M. They bought Kionix for about $200M because they thought the world would soon run out of wafer fabs, of which about $100M was cash. Now that the party is nearly over at Calient, Bowers has to go back to UC Santa Barbara and face a fellow faculty member in the same department on a daily basis who got really fat from the Kionix acquisition and who reportedly bought a $1M beachfront house with some of the money. And this guy was a major instigator in the Kionix acquisition who stood to benefit from it. How ironic is this that the acquirer went home empty-handed and acquiree went home rich and happy. Insiders please correct me if some of the above are inaccurate.
It is foolish for a private company to acquire another company. Look at Bandwidth9. But there are always exceptions, for example the recent acquisition of Tellium by Zhone.
re: Headcount: The Party's OverI know John and can say he is one of the most honest and staight-shooting "gurus" I have ever met. I think he has learned the blunt way that honesty and top notch technical knowledge are no match against hard ball businessmen.
re: Headcount: The Party's OverThe rumor about Alcatel is that all manufacturing will be closed in Ottawa. The buildings along Terry Fox Dirve will become empty.
These are just rumors so so take them for what they are worth.
However if Terry Fox Drive becomes a ghost town then that will be 'all she wrote' for Ottawa high tech.
re: Headcount: The Party's OverI agree with crapshooter, to a certain degree. But many/most of the high tech VCs are presumably -very- knowledgeable about the industry in which they invest. They become active participants in the incubation and development of these businesses. The VCs serve as directors and routinely hand pick the management team. Moreover, most term sheets empower VCs to subordinate (or fire) inexperienced or incompetent founders.
So with that much control, one finds it difficult to exhonerate the VCs.
re: Headcount: The Party's OverIt doesn't matter whether the VCs are at fault, or whether the founders are at fault, or inexperienced CEOs. There's plenty of blame to go around.
What I have seen time and time again is that startups implode because one of those three (CEO, VC, founder) can't play in the sandbox with others. When they don't get their way, they want to take their toys and go home. Or they get distracted developing, then managing a complex agenda whereby they can get their way. That agenda development process can gobble up lots of time and energy that could otherwise be spent on the constructive development of a company.
Some attractive startups that had everything they needed to succeed are headed out of business, some have already shut down, due to this basic fact: too many people are in it for themselves, not recognizing that the continuation of the enterprise will get them their just reward in the end. They let their personal agendas and self interest drive their decision processes and overlook what's important: do right by the company. Stay focused on doing what's right for the company. Repeat after me...
Oh yeah, and you can also blame Cisco, Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia, et al, for: buying the really lame ass startups (only to shut most of them down) and overlooking the quality ones. That list is very long. For holding the IETF and IEEE hostage. For playing games, dangling carrots in front of muzzled donkeys, leading them on and distracting them long enough to kill them.
re: Headcount: The Party's Over For holding the IETF and IEEE hostage
What do you mean by holding these organizations hostage. The IETF is a Cisco puppet, is that what you mean? I don's see how it could be otherwise given Cisco's dominating position in being the de facto arbitrator of netowrk protocols.
Zarlink annonuces its results. Losses as expected with flat sales but 5% of workforce to be laid off. The layoffs will apparently be concentrated in the networking division which has seen a significant drop in revenue.
re: Headcount: The Party's OverI have a new job, outside of fiber-optics and need to profile the EMS industry (electronic contract manufacturing industry). Is there a good website like lightreading that is insightful for that field? Thanks.
http://www.canada.com/ottawa/o...
"Mach"