Late 962 ARR (38 BBY)
I blamed myself for what had happened, for having put my friends in danger.
It was nonsense of course. Captain Jestos was a veteran spacer and would never have taken us on that journey if he hadn't thought it safe and that the ship up to the task. Regardless, I wanted to be in some kind of flying fortress on any future journeys.
The captain had reported what had happened to the security forces, but there wasn't much they could do. Kalinda's own security forces had scarcely any spacecraft and weren't equipped to keep the pirates out of their system in future.
As for Naboo, Panaka told us that King Veruna had apparently ordered a significant investment into the starfighter corps early in his reign. The aim was to build a small elite force, equipped with the most cutting-edge hyperspace capable fighters in the galaxy. It was odd departure from his more pacifist predecessors, but the small numbers of personnel involved, limited public criticisms of the plan.
In theory, this force would be able to not only protect Naboo, but respond to calls for aid from nearby systems like Kalinda. This was all still a few years away, all Naboo had currently were some older model fighters that had no hyperdrives, mostly being utilised for pilot training.
The force that was supposed to be responsible for combating piracy were the Republic Judicial Forces. For nearly a thousand years the Republic had lacked a formal navy, but had something that sounded like a sort of space coastguard.
The Galactic Senate had apparently tried to strengthen the Judicial Forces for a major crackdown on piracy. This had all fallen apart after a string of recent catastrophes, like the Stark Hyperspace War and the Katana Fleet incident, leaving the force significantly reduced. Things had gotten so bad that you would have to be very lucky to spot a Judicial Forces ship outside the core.
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The whole situation had put me in another one of my moods, locking myself in my workshop for hours on end tinkering. Everyone was being terribly understanding about it of course, but I just didn't want to face people. I kept to myself as much as possible, frustated at my own reckless stupidity for putting others in danger.
Kyla and Asherré had been really shaken by the ordeal, and it had certainly sated any desire they had previously held for travel and adventure. Still, they had an easier time moving on with their lives and kept trying to find ways to cheer me up.
Ona, being a bit older than the rest of us, seemed to behave as if it were all nothing. She was a great colleague, but I didn't really know her well enough to judge to what extent it was an act for our benefit.
Meanwhile, Cota had kept the business running as if nothing were amiss, going far above and beyond her job description, but we could only go on like this for so long. A month into my sulk, she came into my workshop and told me kindly, but firmly, that I needed to dust myself off and get back to leading the company.
I took a breath, thanked her and called a senior staff meeting.
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This meeting was long overdue. We now had the parts to fulfil our order for the Security Forces, but there were several other challenges we needed to address to ensure we could meet our commitments in a good timescale.
Cota and Jaarl had been hiring anyone they could find with tech skills to help increase production, significantly raising all internal salaries to attract and retain the limited pool of technical talent available in Theed. Even our junior technicians were now earning 3,000 credits a month, double what some of them had been earning previously maintaining plasma mining equipment.
We'd also expanded our logistics team, who were being seriously overworked just packaging and sending out the orders that were coming in. We had no marketing department or retail partners; we had depended entirely on word of mouth. Our existing users would pass along our contact information and they would place orders with us by holomessage. We would then send orders out through a third-party droid courier service, sometimes within minutes of the pads coming off the production line.
We had sold more than 40,000 SuperPads now, but the order backlog never stopped growing. The main issue was the parts supply again. Given the millions of mouse droids in the galaxy, it was always possible to find the all-important Reba-5C droid-brains, but not in consistent bulk quantities. Our suppliers would find a few hundred here or there, our production line constantly stopping and starting. Even the basic data pad screens, holoemitters and transmitters were becoming occasional bottlenecks.
The supply chains for Naboo just weren't robust enough for a rapidly growing tech firm. Eventually the numerous small shipping firms would catch on to the changing demands, but only over the course of years; they are cautious and slow to adapt.
We were also a bit too dependent on second-hand repurposed junk in our production lines. Jaarl really had done his best with what we could get hold of, but anything could break at any time. Our one high-performance astromech, R2-S4 cheerfully zipped around repairing everything but there were so many ways for things to go horribly wrong.
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My first decision was to appoint Cota as the Deputy Chief Executive. She was the most experienced businessperson I had on the team. In the year Theed Tech had existed, she had stepped up many times, to fill the gaps that came with my complete lack of experience. Ultimately, I was still only 21 years old, I doubt on Earth I would have been taken as seriously as I had been here. Help from someone I had grown to trust on management side of things was essential.
Ona became Head of Logistics, which really meant, she was the person responsible for overseeing the nightmares of bringing parts in and getting our products out. She had shown an aptitude for this aspect of the job. It freed her from some of the more trivial administration she had previously had acting as my secretary.
I similarly promoted Jaarl to Head of Production, which didn't change anything but put him on the same level. There would also need to be a new Head of Sales eventually, but given the difficulty in filling even our current orders, Cota could cover this for now. We also desperately needed a Head of Finance, to keep track of all the credits moving around, and ensure we didn't fall foul of the taxman.
I gave Cota 4% of the company as part of her compensation package, and then 2% to each Ona and Jaarl. For now, these seemed like small pieces, but at the rate we were going they were instant multi-millionaires, at least on paper. Between the SuperPADs sold, and the SecuriPAD contract, Theed Tech had secured a staggering 70 million credits of revenue in our first year, with the company potentially worth far more.
They had been surprised at my willingness to give them pieces of the business, but I knew it was the best way to keep their talents for the long term. I had vaguely remembered stories from Earth about the early Facebook founders all falling out over these kinds of things and I wanted to ensure my people felt valued. Our salaries for junior staff meanwhile were almost comically generous, though this was also symptomatic of the limited talent pool available in Theed.
We would also be looking to recruit a second tier of leaders to fill some other emerging functions. The first was a Legal Officer to provide some inhouse advice, so we would only need to go to Tuls & Duss for the important things, as their fees were considerable.
The second was a Security Chief, as we knew it was only a matter of time before someone tried to break in to steal our secrets, not to mention the non-zero possibility of assassinations and the like. Given he had saved our lives previously, I approached our favourite yacht Captain, Garne Jestos about the role.
Having someone with space experience, and who had served in the Naboo Royal Security Forces, on staff made a lot of sense. With the generous pay packet we could offer, he was all too happy to accept. Apparently, most of his other yacht passengers had been insufferable, and he had been looking for a new direction. If nothing else, having an older, serious veteran in the room, made us all feel a bit safer.
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Having dealt with our personnel issues, we had other practicalities to worry about. We decided to prioritise the SecuriPAD order over everything else. Ensuring we made those deliveries in a timely manner was critical to our credibility, and would give us the cash to deal with other issues.
We also agreed to take over the neighbouring industrial unit, to give us more expansion space. Really this was just buying time. I knew that with the growth I wanted, we would need a purpose-built factory and headquarters within a couple of years.
We would be purchasing some brand-new droids to improve the reliability of the production line. I hoped Ona could find a reasonable deal through Zomir's connections, but it was likely to be a rip-off. Any new droids had to be imported in via the Trade Federation, and came at highly inflated prices.
The next step was start planning our own shipping business, to guarantee the consistent delivery of components to Naboo. Having Arakyd Industries to deliver the parts for the SecuriPAD had been a clever move, but not an approach we thought we could rely on for our wider business.
Securing the various licenses was going to take time and would be a 'fun' task for our incoming legal officer. I was keen to start buying ships to play with, but buying hanger space to keep them in Theed's small spaceport would have been prohibitively expensive. I learned that ships are surprisingly cheap to buy, but expensive to keep. Crewing, fuelling, docking space, maintenance and myriad other costs meant ships could cost more to operate in their first year than they did to purchase.
So instead, I was reluctantly persuaded that once we had the licenses in order, Ona would charter a handful of independent freighter captains with their own ships. We would at least cut out the costs and delays of working through a shipping agency, but the Theed Tech branded fleet of my dreams would have to wait. It occurred to me that our word-of-mouth business didn't really have any branding per say, we had just been engraving our company name on our products' casings.