Solyndra CEO last January: Company is “on the right track”
Last January, the Merc’s Dana Hull wrote a tough but fair story about Solyndra, the solar manufacturer in Fremont that had fallen on rough times.
The company was in full denial. Just a few weeks earlier, when I was speaking at a media forum, I made reference to Solyndra’s problems. A PR rep came up to be after the event and insisted things were going well and the company had big plans.
And then, after Hull’s story ran, we received the following email from the Solyndra CEO:
“Fremont’s Solyndra is on the right track
Dana Hull’s article (Page 1E, Jan. 30) does not tell the full story of Solyndra’s potential.
The piece focused on old news, missing the facts that we cut costs in half in the past year, had record consumption in the fourth quarter, will ship our 100th megawatt within the month, and expect to be cash-flow positive this year. That sounds like a good news story to us.
Our company has had growing pains, like many Silicon Valley startups transitioning to full production. But we have moved forward, and are proud to manufacture here in Fremont. We invite the Mercury News, and anyone else interested in our future, rather than our past, to meet the Solyndra team and get the real Solyndra story.
Brian Harrison
President and CEO Solyndra, Inc.
Of course, on Wednesday, we finally got the real story: the company is shutting the doors. There’s no shame in failing. This is Silicon Valley, after all. But it’s hard to respect corporate leaders who expended so much energy spinning their problems, rather than facing up to them.
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Not much else he could say. What was the right move, to say that the company was on the verge of collapsing and cause mass panic?
@anjaru: He doesn’t have to panic. But they spent a lot of time an energy insisting all was well. They could have acknowledged that yes, the market has changed, they had to throw out their old business model, and that there were significant challenges. No shame in leveling with people.
Considering the shock and surprise evident on the faces of the laid off employees, Solyndra’s spin work was also (perhaps especially) being directed at them. The less-than-charitable view would be that Solyndra was stringing them along so they wouldn’t jump ship prematurely, i.e., until the Company was ready to dump them. So much for the thought that “green” companies are somehow more ethical and socially conscious.
As I drove down 880 and looked out at the behemoth Solyndra palace under construction, I feared that it was a sign that Solyndra would meet the same fate of many other hubristic companies that constructed palatial headquarters only to go belly up later. Sadly, the moment of reckoning came far too quickly. I don’t know the ins and outs of the solar industry, but I can assure you that the company’s leadership failed its employees and the taxpayers who backed it with enormous loan guarantees. Shame on Brian Harrison and his “leadership” team. The article above rightly highlights the incompetence at the top and the unwillingness of Solyndra executives to face strategic market challenges. This is a devastating blow to the development of green industry in the U.S.
Too bad. Solyndra was a great company, with highly devoted people producing a unique form of energy generating product. I was once one of those people, and am proud to have been part of getting Fab 2 up and running.