Time to face the music, Violin Memory: Upstart's asset auction is over

The Sheriff

This seems like a good time to reminisce on Cory Sindelar's time at Violin. After all, this is the CFO who was present all the way thru from the Don Basile era to Violin's death and current dismemberment.

I remember the sales kick off in the Sheraton Redwood City when Cory was first introduced to us. He arrived onstage wearing a full fancy dress sheriff's outfit, complete with toy gun in its holster. I think it was intended to be a message, but I'm not sure I took the same thing from it that he intended.

A year later, at sales kick off again, his contribution was to bring a big wooden desk onto the stage which he claimed belonged to Dixon Doll, the COO. He then told us that he'd recently had an argument with Dixon - at which point he produced a chainsaw. The moment was slightly ruined by his inability to start the chainsaw for the first five attempts, but eventually he was able to saw the desk in half and we all stood there blinking in a mixture of confusion and disbelief.

If memory serves, they didn't allocate him any presentation time at subsequent sales kick offs.

And of course, as CFO, Cory resided over the IPO. The multiple news sites running stories of how it was one of the worst IPOs in history all contain the same picture of Don Basile grinning like a madman while Cory stands behind him looking up at the screens showing the price of Violin's initial offering. A price that would never be that high again.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/09/27/violin-memorys-price-craters-after-162-million-ipo/

And now here we are at the bitter end. Everybody else has either left or been fired (except poor old Dennis in support - hi Dennis!) and Cory is still somehow getting paid. You gotta hand it to him - he knows how to flog a dead horse.

little guys got stomped on

The big iron guys out sell these little guys 1000:1. It takes a lot of cash to do HW development.. Pure and Nimble will be next .. unless they get picked up HP/Dell/Oracle as entry level FSA.

No thanks to rags like the Register perpetual banging on for years predicting doom and gloom for the Flash storage minion.

Well done Register, you got what you desperately wanted, hope you are all proud of yourselves. That'll teach them for not advertising with you.

Chris Mellor loves to stick the boot into failing companies, purely clickbait I presume.

I remember so many near daily articles on the floundering Xyratex with Mellor sticking the boot in at every single opportunity until it was bought up by Seagate.

Honestly this site, or at least his articles, has become less about tech news and more about who can we kick while they're down now.