An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists

IEEE Spectrum ^ | August 2001 | Nick Tredennick, with Brion Shimamoto, Dynamic Silicon

[XBob]

35-funny, but true in some respects. Because the guy who he was facing was someone like me, and my job was to have things by 'yesterday', and at the cheapest possible price, while delivering good quality. In order to satisfy my bosses, I sometimes had to literally tear his 'book' to shreds and pay extra and get him to work 25/7.

These big industrial projects, which often involve MHE (Materials Handling Equipment) are also big revenue producers once they are up and running, so slipping schedule by even one day may effectively cost millions of dollars.

[Dick Bachert]

Bob,

I think I met you. Did you ever work for Dow Chemical in Freeport, Tx. :-))

[XBob]

No, I never did any work there. The closest I got was at Bechtel, starting to build the linear low plastics plant for Cities Service at Bay City, in the early 80's. Then right as we were getting started getting in the long lead items, reactors, pellitizers, etc. they decided to go out of the pastics business, so we shut the project down. Was a big secret and a big loss - always seemed dumb to me - cost us $450 million to shut it down, and for $475 million they could have had a complete plant to shut down and sell.

But, I got around a lot, and perhaps we have crossed paths, however, I always worked for the E&C companies Bechtel, Fluor, BrownRoot, JohnBrown, etc., not the clients like DOW, Mobile, Chevron, Bayer, etc.

[SlickWillard]

Anyone have any suggestions on how I could go about finding a “Conservative” Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Consulting Practice business partner?

Thomas Siebel, CEO of Siebel, Inc., is a well-known conservative in Silicon Valley. His company makes CRM products.