Jayashree and Raj sipped tea in the Internet Café waiting for Shankar to meet them.  “I see him.”  Raj had been scanning the sidewalk.  “Remember Jayashree, we need to be clear with Shankar on our priorities.  He can talk tech, but he doesn’t have the experience to understand what’s important.”

“Gotcha Raj.”  Jayashree shifted the chairs to better seat the 3 of them.

Shankar saw them through the window and nodded his head.  Upon walking inside he greeted them individually.  “Jayashree, good morning.”  He shook her hand as they weren’t very close yet.  He sat down before acknowledging Raj as they were childhood friends.  “Raj, you look tired man.  Been moonlighting?”

“Yeah, on this little project.  Here, we printed out our funding priorities for you.  It’s paramount that you communicate this clearly to our investors.  Feel free to show it to them.”  Raj handed Shankar a sheet of paper with 5 bullets on it.

Shankar was about to ask for soft copy when Jayashree took over the conversation.  “Let me summarize for you what we need with this next round of funding Shankar.  We can’t go prod with the present state of our code.  I know it passed all our test cases, but you have to trust me when I tell you that in prod, stuff breaks.  We need audit logs.  Especially on the ETL processes.  Then we need error checking on all our web services queries.  If a query fails, we need to control what the user sees.  We have to start on these things now because we won’t have the cycles to respond to all the potential issues after we go live.  But this isn’t complex stuff either, we can recruit junior programmers.  You think your investors are going to be good with us hiring?”  Jayashree stopped talking and took another sip of tea waiting for Shankar to respond.

“Absolutely.  They understood this second round of funding would be to staff up.  A couple of things you should expect though.  They are probably going to want to recruit these programmers themselves.  They have other businesses they want to support; so I’ll be surprised if they let us hire anyone directly.  Next, I expect they will want to begin funding you both fulltime.  You need to consider dropping your safety nets and committing balls-out to this.  Are you ready for that?”

Jayashree and Raj responded in unison.  “We’ve been ready.  Don’t mess this up.”