Not Fooled, Staying Grounded in Reality

My employer Plexxi had some funding news today.  I am sitting at my desk in Cambridge letting the tweets, the blog postings, the news articles and the emails wash over me.  Truth be told the attention feels pretty good.  I know how hard my co-workers have been working and some recognition makes the day before the weekend feel good.  I enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes, but now it is back to reality.  All the funding coverage has resulted in a number of inquires from people looking to join Plexxi and recruiters seeking to help us expand the team.

I am bit humbled by the inquires because what we have to offer is not for the faint of heart.  I posted that a few months back.  We do not have teams of people to send on sales calls.  We do not have admins and support teams.  Selling Plexxi is really cool, but it is not for the faint of heart.  What we sell is the new f’ing network for the next twenty years of networking.  We fly on red eyes.  We are away from home.  We do not have fancy marketing presentations and we do not fly in product specialists from headquarters.  We are scrappy as our CEO says.  We make the sales calls in person.  Most of sales calls are on the white board.  We get to the point.  What we sell is cool, but it has never been done before.  It is hard.  It is really hard.  It is very interesting to clients, but it not easy.  Some mornings I have to listen to The Fighter by GCH to get amped up for the day.

I am very aware of our competition.  They are far bigger, they have billions in capital and every account we sell into is already occupied by their teams and equipment.  We have to be better, cheaper, faster and innovative.  We play in the big league under the lights, in prime time.  We are not selling miscellaneous things.  We sell technology into the core function of our customer’s business.   Yes, we are looking for players on the team, but you better know what you are getting into.  It is not easy.  I am not fooled by the immensity of the challenge.  I am also not daunted by the challenge.  Game on.

/wrk