Here’s how it is. Spend enough time as a top-level engineer in the startup world and sooner or later you end up on the receiving end of a due diligence. In theory it’s straightforward. People with money send in people they trust to find out whether you’re blowing smoke up their ass, technically speaking.
Some of those calls are a genuine pleasure. You get to talk tech with smart people. I love explaining things I’ve designed and built, so for me those calls are a good time.
And then there are the others.
There’s a certain type of engineer you run into eventually. Let’s give them all one name: Captain Big Dick. Captain Big Dick is there for a measuring contest. The call stops being about whether your software works and turns into a game where he shows you how much smarter than you he is. Depending on how persistent he is and how much of a know-it-all, it runs anywhere from “oh, please” to “dear god, make it stop.” Forty-five minutes of someone trying to one-up you gets old in a hurry.
Back in the Wallaroo days I did a lot of due diligence calls. This is the story of the most interesting one.
I was on a call with Admiral Big Dick. He was the big bad boss of every Captain Big Dick I’d run into before him, and he would not put that damn ruler away. Apparently his time at some impressive-sounding startup that made mostly boring software, vaguely in the streaming space, had emboldened him and his massive ego. The whole call was a battle. He was hunting for any sign of weakness.
And I had one.
My cat, Izzy, was in a mood that day. She wanted something from me, and she wanted it right then. I was on the couch presenting, and she kept shoving up against me and the laptop. I didn’t want to break the wall. I didn’t want to acknowledge that anything was happening at all. The vibe of the call was such that even a tiny break would hand the Admiral something he could turn into a reason to tell the VCs to keep their money. So I kept going. Izzy kept harassing me, and I kept pretending nothing was going on.
I was deep into the demo by then, showing off the UI and walking him through what the streaming engine was doing to produce metrics that good. The Admiral was locked on the UI. He never saw Izzy climb up into the frame of the camera, where she expressed her full disdain for my lack of attention by pissing all over me.
This was not an irritated little stream. This was full-on, I’m-fucking-angry, you-belong-to-me-human, pay-attention-to-me-right-now piss.
“Excuse me, I need to take a break, my cat just pissed all over me” is not a sentence I was going to say to the Admiral. So I kept going. I kept my legs together so none of it would run off me and onto the couch. No break. Nothing. I blocked it out and presented like I wasn’t sitting there soaked and reeking of cat piss.
In the end it was worth it. The Admiral couldn’t break me, and he couldn’t find a single reason to tell the VCs not to invest.
