IP: Sillicon Valley Talk..

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>


Wall Street Journal Manager's Journal
How Valley Guys Talk


By PO BRONSON


Recently, a friend came back from a scratch-and-sniff session with a potential
acquirer--an established Internet search engine company that's hunting for
ways
to keep its heavy Web traffic from clicking off to some other site too
soon. My
friend is in this year's piquant category, streaming Internet radio, which
seems a likely solution to the search site's needs. The average stay on its
Web
site is seven minutes, vs. 35 minutes on his site.


"They hated me," he sighed. "I've never been so antagonized in my life."


I immediately suspected otherwise. He has a background in the financial
side of
the music industry, so he's a little new to the customs of the technology
sector. I asked him to elucidate how he had been "antagonized."


Wasn't it true, they had asked, that over a 28K modem the sound hiccuped when
the system was overloaded? Wasn't it true that record labels still weren't
providing complimentary compact disks for his programming? Wasn't it true that
search engines were focused on deals with on-line retailers, which would earn
commissions as well as advertising revenue? On and on the inquisition went. A
second group of staffers wandered into the room and fired another round of
questions at him. Was his software scalable? With the transition to 56K
modems,
wouldn't his revenues stay the same but his server costs significantly
increase?


Shook His Head


Describing these questions, he just shook his head with regret. "Boy, it
seemed
like not only were they combing for every conceivable reason not to buy me,
they actually seemed to be trying to talk me into quitting my own business."


I assured him he was in good shape. He thought I was just trying to cheer him
up.


"They loved you," I insisted. "You'll hear from them tomorrow."


Their interrogation style was just how people talk out here. People love
Socratic interplay, improving ideas through active conflict. Arguing is fun.
Arguing is the whetstone that sharpens the high-tech brain. Playing devil's
advocate and trying to talk someone out of his idea is a role-playing form of
friendship. Interrogating my friend was their way of showing keen interest.


I gave him a quick lesson on Silicon Valley conversational techniques that he
might encounter as he works towards a deal.


1. There's no agreeing to disagree. Having trained themselves to debug
programs, these rational minds feel an obligation to correct even the
slightest
inaccuracies in any comment voiced in their direction. Two engineers who might
agree on 98% of their analysis of (for instance) a new Oliver Stone movie
might
nevertheless cause a tumultuous incident in a restaurant discussing the film.


This makes dangerous the pledge that your team will "iron out the details
later." Sometimes it's hard even to agree on what words mean.


Frustrated project manager: "Can we just try to develop some consensus around
here?"


Engineer: "Define 'consensus.' "


2. The hunt for protocol. Also known as the "Are you for real?" conversation.
When two companies agree on the strategic value of some cooperative deal, it's
conditioned on having "my engineers talk to your engineers." The purpose of
this discussion is to ensure that neither side's product is jerry-rigged hype.


Similarly, when two tech workers meet, they go through a sort of cascade of
language syntax, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most
efficient
level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the dueling
banjo
scene from "Deliverance."


Programmer: "Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, that's a sweet access router over
there. Wow, both Ethernet and asynchronous ports?"


Webmaster: "Yeah, check this baby out--the Ethernet port has AUI, BNC, and
RJ-45 connectors."


Programmer: "So for packet filtering you went with TCP, UDP, and ICMP."


Webmaster: "Of course. To support dial-up SLIP and PPP."


Programmer: "Set use User_Name ifilter Filter_Name."


Webmaster: "Set filter s!.out 8 permit 192.9.200.2/32 0.0.0.0/0 tcp src eq
20."


Programmer: "001011011000101110010011101100001."


Webmaster: ". .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .. .. .... .. .. . .. . .. ...
... .
...."


Programmer: "Wait, you lost me there."


3. Soap bubblers. At some point in the negotiations, a crisis of faith will
occur, and both sides will want to retreat to their corners to seek advice
from
their favorite guru, asking "Am I doing the right thing?"


The rate of gurus per capita is higher in high-tech than any other industry.
Because of Silicon Valley's attack-dog atmosphere, gurus have discovered the
only way for their catch phrases and utopian visions to avoid persecution
is to
set every prediction in the far off future, where nothing can be disproved.
They don't talk about the real world of megabytes and baud rates. Their minds
are occupied with neural nets and terabytes. (A terabyte is 1,000 stegabytes,
and a stegabyte is 1,000 tricerabytes, and somewhere in there is gigabytes.
You
get my point--it's hard to argue when you can't pin down the facts.)


When caught in conversation with one of these gurus, a good way to respond is,
"Hmmm . . . I've been rethinking Toffler. Perhaps, a thousand years from now,
we will see that the Industrial Age and the Information Age were really just
the trough and crest of the same wave, not separate waves."


4. Blowing smoke is safe as long as you don't inhale. Since one's command of
technical jargon is a status proxy, less technically-inclined personnel
attempt
to mimic the computerese syntax of the hardcore. A company's sales force, for
example, will create its own terminology to impress clients. (As soon as the
clients pick up on the lingo, the sales terminology will upgrade, to ensure
continued confusion).


Atlanta Rep: "Set battery recharge zero minus 10 for link upload?"


Chicago Rep: "Approve conditional route switch for No. 1 download."


Translation: "I'm hungry, want to get a hot dog in 10 minutes?" "OK, but I
have
to go to the rest room."


What this means for a merger or acquisition is that the new combined sales
force won't be able to converse for awhile. Give it time, be patient. They may
have to speak standard English for a few hours, but within a day a new
terminology will emerge.


5. When to ask for help. Never. Never ask for help. Just kidding. There are
actually a few cases where it's not inappropriate. For instance, since asking
for help is a good way to acknowledge someone else's superiority, do so only
when your actual intent is to pay someone a compliment.


Disguise Your Voice


If you actually happen to need help, ask for it over the phone, and disguise
your voice.


6. Safe bases. If all this scares you, don't worry. There are a few topics you
can always talk about with anyone you meet, the way Minnesotans talk about the
weather. In the early days, the universal conversation gambit was rather
pathetic: "Are you a Mac person or a PC person?" This has evolved only
slightly
over the years. Today's equivalents are: "So, do you think Apple will survive
on its own?," and "So, you think the government has a case against Microsoft?"


The good news was, my friend got a call from the search-engine people the next
day. The bad news was, they expressed their interest.




------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Bronson is author of "The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest: A
Silicon Valley Novel" (Random House, 1997).