The 3 entrepreneurs walked out into the street.  The Ruby application designer, the Python content delivery specialist, and the guy with the smarts.  Jayashree began the dialogue.  “Shankar, you’re a good talker!”

“Thank you, Jayashree, but I didn’t really talk much.”  Shankar lit up a bidi.  He was the youngest of the three.

“Then you’re a good listener Shankar.  You’re good at something.  Good job in there!”

There was consensus among them that they did well and were positioned for success.  They could totally fail and they would still be making double what they could anywhere else.  Good times.

“So what did we agree to in there, Shankar?”  That came from a sobering Raj.

Shankar was on his game now.  He passed the bidi to Raj.  “We set the terms for our managerial discretion in a budget construct of 10%.  That’s juxtaposed to our ownership of 50/50, but it’s their money.  And it should be fairly easy for us to measure.  They funded us for what we both expect to last one year.  So they debit our commercial account once per month to establish the budget under our control.  We access that electronically so I’m thinking you could maybe give us some widget.  You know, like a mobile carrier gives you illustrating minutes used and remaining?  Can you do that?”

“Easily, although Jayashree would build the presentation layer.  And we’ll need people to claim their hours.”  Raj was quick to respond, thrilled at the spontaneous architectural discussion.  “I could download the balance twice a day.  We would compare that to our monthly plan budget.  Ideally it would always match but we will want to know when we’re over and under target plan.  It would be good to review that at least weekly so we would have room to stop development on either new feeds or support code based on maintaining the 90/10 split.  Yeah, this is really just more operational data.”

Shankar was just as excited.  He kept asking for more.  “Nice.  And make some headlights green, yellow and red when those programmers record their hours on time or are late.  We want to track that.  Can you provide access to this financial dashboard to our investors too?  That might demonstrate value?”