Hot Seat

Chapter 40. Of Course This Company’s for Sale

There was a rumor floating around my startup. By “my startup” I mean the startup at which I was a 26-year-old employee. In fact, Wildseed wasn’t really my startup in any sense of the term. But I thought of the company as mine in some strange way, so I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. I took a deep breath and stepped up to the porthole of Eric’s office.

Eric Engstrom was our CEO and Wildseed was his startup, in every sense of the term. You could tell just walking up to his office. It was big but it was in an inner corner of the building, without much of a view. Eric’s seat was a mechanical achievement sprouting levers, springs, and knobs. It was his seat of power, like Kirk’s chair on the Enterprise, and it was the only one like it in the building. His guests, on the other hand, had bouncy stools. He told me once that he bought them so visitors would get annoyed and not stay long. He was dismayed when a few of his VPs found them comfortable and ordered them for their desks.

Eric was (and is) a mad genius. I could fill a book with Eric anecdotes:¹ the UFO that nearly got him fired from Microsoft; the $40K bet that I could find an entire sealed barrel of St. Magdalene scotch two decades after the distillery closed; the manufacturing facility he built in his garage.

He’s now a good friend, but at the time my feelings toward him were a blend of admiration and fear. On that day, more fear than admiration. ...