We had trimmed back, and our board of directors was well on its way completing the search for a new CEO. Along with the new CEO, it was decided that we could use a new round of funding. So, they were looking not only for a new CEO, but also one that would attract additional venture funding. One of the requirements of the new CEO was that they needed to be someone that not only started a company, but also was able to see it through until the company went public. We, at DecisionPoint, weren’t necessarily looking to go public, but we were looking to some sort of outcome whether it be going public, being acquired, or another positive outcome. The board of directors did let us interview the final candidate, but it was more of a formality than anything else. They would end up making the final decision unless there was something concerning about the CEO. There weren’t any major concerns so we moved forward hiring the person.
The first assignment of the new CEO, as stated above was to find additional financing from venture capitalists. Through this process, I did get to the new CEO quite well. He was driving the process, and I was the main technical resource that could explain what we were doing and how we were doing it. The new CEO was based in the Bay Area as were the venture capitalists we were talking to, and the rest of us were in Portland. So, there were a lot of trips between Portland and the Bay Area for me as we had the meetings with each venture capitalist. The meetings were the typical meetings where the venture capitalists are most interested in how you’re going to make them money in the fastest amount of time you can. Technology is typically a sidebar conversation that happens after the money discussions. As a technologist, it was frustrating as you wish the people investing in your company would take a bit of time to understand what you do and how you do it. However, that’s not the way “the game” works, so you just have to go with it.
At the end of the process, we were able to get an additional $5 million in venture funding, which was a good amount of money. We continued to do what we do in all areas until the new CEO had formulated a plan for how he wanted to move DecisionPoint forward. This is where things got a bit complicated, which I will mention here briefly, but cover in a lot more detail in another chapter called “Regimes”. With each new CEO that took over DecisionPoint, they would always bring in some of their “trusted staff” from previous companies they have worked with. Sometimes this works, but in a lot of cases, it causes a lot of friction. The friction is that the new people have the CEO’s ear, and may have a much different perspective on things than existing employees. Resolving disagreements between the two groups of employees is absolutely critical. You can’t let things fester. Unfortunately, our new CEO let things fester in a lot of different areas hoping that things would resolve themselves. That just never happened.
One approach that the new CEO had was to bring in executive level “trusted staff”, and then let them build out the organizations the way they felt would be best. There were some individuals already in these positions, such as myself, but there were a lot of new faces also. This created quite a bit of chaos within the organization as there was a lot of confusion amongst DecisionPoint employees about why we were becoming so top heavy with management. Also, many of them were worried whether they would fit in with the plans of the new management team. Generally speaking, everything was resolved fairly quickly, but there were some employees that did end up leaving DecisionPoint as they discovered they weren’t in the long range plans of the new management team. For me, it was sad as there were quite a few people that I had worked with for a couple of years, and it was tough to see them go. Like always, I soldiered on even with the changes.
There was one radical change in product direction that would come about as the result of a combination of events. Traditionally, DecisionPoint had focused on simplifying complex data so that end users could use it to analyze the business. We were always focused on what could commonly be called “plumbing”, which was the process of getting data out of source systems and into a useable format. There was another part of the equation that we dabbled in, but never made a serious effort at participating in. This area involved providing tools for end users that made it very easy to access the data that we had simplified. We always stuck to our “plumbing”, and left it to other software companies to provide the access tools.
Our CEO had come from a company that he had started, and his specialty along with the other members of the management team that he brought on board was creating the access tools. Additionally, DecisionPoint had a couple of talented engineers that were interested in doing something new. They were growing tired of continuing to work on making our “plumbing” better. So, with the new CEO and his staff along with a group of engineers wanting to do something new, a decision was made that DecisionPoint would go full force into the market of access tools by building our own.
In hindsight, this probably wasn’t a good choice for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of other companies already in that space of the market and we were roughly starting from scratch. It would take a Herculean effort for us to build a product that could adequately compete in that market. Probably more importantly was that this direction caused chaos and confusion in our customer base. Our existing customers weren’t necessarily interested in buying an access tool from us as they already had one they were using. So, they were naturally concerned whether this new direction would significantly hamper our ability to improve the “plumbing” products that they bought from us and were so dependent on. It wasn’t as big of a disruption as I thought it might be, but we did lose a couple of customers that decided to do something different when their maintenance had expired and was up for renewal. This also created a bit of a rift in the engineering organization as there was a clear division between those engineers working on the new direction with the access tool, and the engineers that continued to work on the base product that we had been selling for years. There were a lot of internal conflicts and a lot of undercurrent within the engineering and product management organizations as the result of this, and it was never dealt with or managed properly.
We continued to sell our existing product line with moderate, but not great success. We did close a couple of important deals with new customers, and even had some add-on business that we did with existing customers that decided to buy additional products from us. However, we never really took off like we thought we would. Part of it had to do with the confusion for customers between what we were selling (the existing product), and where we were going (the new product – access tools). Another part of it was that we were seeing more competition than we had in the past. Existing software companies and new companies were starting to creep into our space with new and different products. None of them really could do what we did as well as we did it, but they were able to confuse the market a bit and appear as they were a better option than what was available from DecisionPoint. It was fascinating and frustrating to me that these companies could appear to compete with DecisionPoint from a marketing message perspective, but did not have nearly a complete a product as we had at DecisionPoint.
As if things weren’t as chaotic and confusing enough, I had a personal event that contributed to everything else that was going on. While playing soccer as a goalkeeper, I ran out to make a save, and when I bent over to pick up the ball, my hip socket popped. It’s a very long story, but I had fractured my hip socket years prior to that, and as time went on, the hip socket would re-fracture and the fracture would fill in with scar tissue. So, even though what I was doing on the soccer field was something simple I had done over 100 times before, the hip socket finally completely gave way. I was taken to the emergency room and admitted to the hospital where they conducted several xrays, cat scans, and MRI’s. Late in the day after I was admitted, my wife Leslie and I met with a doctor we thought would be performing the surgery to repair my hip socket. He gave us the news that there was a lot of scar tissue in the fracture and he wasn’t sure what it was. There was a chance it was nothing, but there was also a chance it was bone cancer. I was being transferred to another hospital where I would be under the care of one of the top bone oncologists in the area. Leslie was devastated by the news, and I was too drugged up on pain killers to really understand the seriousness of what was going on.
Things got even more complicated as I was scheduled to be transferred to the new hospital and the doctor was waiting for me, but the new hospital didn’t have a room to put me in. So, my only option was to lay and wait and think about all of the different possible outcomes. I tried to push it out of my mind, but when you’re potentially facing something as serious as bone cancer, you have a lot to think about. It turns out that I was in the original hospital for about two days before I could finally be transferred. My kids, Andrew and Becca, were in 8th and 5th grade respectively, and they both played competitive soccer. So, Leslie had to deal with a lot on her own. Fortunately, she was working at the local elementary school part time, and they gave her the time off she needed to deal with things. We also had some fantastic friends that helped take care of our kids and get them where they need to be when they needed to be there.
In the end, I had the surgery and the scar tissue in the bone was not cancerous. I do have a 13 inch scar along with a plate and six screws behind my left hip socket as a result of a bone graft along with the repair of the hip socket. From start to finish, which when I started walking around again, it was about eight weeks of recovery. In some respects, it was like I was taking a forced sabbatical from DecisionPoint. I remained in contact with different employees within DecisionPoint to stay in touch with what was going on, but I was given a temporary break from the day to day activities. As I reflect on it, while the hip socket injury was pretty traumatic, it couldn’t have come at a better time. There were a lot of changes and associated chaos within DecisionPoint, and I had been with the company since the beginning. Having a forced break from it probably helped me keep my sanity so that I could stay with DecisionPoint.
While I was away, the engineering team working on the new end user access tool had made significant progress on the product. I returned in time to witness the completion and release of the new end user access tool. We had a couple of customers that bought the tool, and continue to use it today. Generally speaking, it was successful as a product. However, it was a very complicated product based on some brand new technology in the market, and we built a lot of different features and functionality into it. As we started to install it at different customer sites, there were several problems that we had to work through. It was a lot more complicated than anything we had built before, and therefore, required a much deeper level of implementation and customer support than we had planned for or had experienced with our other products. Additionally, there were very few engineers that understood the entire product as many of them had been working on individual pieces with only a few working across all of the pieces.
There was a big lesson learned from this experience. As I said before, we were entering a market where there was already a lot of stiff competition. So, not only did we have to build what we thought was needed, but we also had to build something that would allow us to adequately compete in the market. Additionally, our engineering team was quite small with about 10-15 people compared to our competition, who had hundreds or thousands of engineers working on their products that were equivalent to ours. We also dramatically expanded the number of users for our product at each customer site. With our “plumbing” product, we had one or two IT administration folks at a customer site that worked with our products. With the new end user access tool, we would suddenly have hundreds of users that were using our product. Both the depth and breadth of our product and types of users had greatly expanded with the release of the end user access tool. This caused quite an additional burden on our implementation and customer service staff, and they were not quite setup to handle the change in their world. However, they did the best they could and managed to maintain a high customer satisfaction level in spite of everything that was going on.
In the sales arena, we had done some additional customer business, but we were sort of at a plateau. With all of the changes in the product line and marketing messages, the sales teams had a tougher time selling and communicating to customers exacting what our product did for them. We made a technology decision to venture into a market we had not spent a lot of time in before without thinking about the repercussions on our marketing, sales force, or even our customers. This is pretty typical of what happens when you make technology decisions without thinking about the downstream or long term effects on other parts of the organization. The new product line wasn’t directly responsible for our stall in sales, but it was a contributing factor. What turned out to be a good outcome in engineering was not the case for the rest of DecisionPoint.
It was around this time that the venture capitalists that gave us the $5 million started to send in some people to “snoop around”. This is somewhat typical for struggling companies. When a company is struggling, the venture capitalists will find someone that understands the product and the market you are working in, and have them do an assessment of where things are at. This is the first warning sign that the venture capitalist is concerned about things, and may be looking to make a change. We had two guys come in to look around, and they were both very sharp and understood the market very well. A lot of different people spent time with them, but I spent the most time with them getting them up to speed on our products, what markets we were in, and what I thought we should be doing moving forward. I had several very good meetings and interactions with both individuals and came away impressed with both of them.
What I didn’t understand at the time is that the venture capitalists had pretty much already decided that our CEO was not doing a good job, and it was the job of the two individuals to help decide DecisionPoint’s fate. There was a chance we could be shut down, a chance we could be sold, or a chance that we could give it a go with a new CEO. It turns out that both individuals felt we had a viable business, and recommended to the venture capitalist that we continue to try. It also turns out that these two individuals would join DecisionPoint in prominent roles. One would become our CEO, and the other would eventually join as our VP of Marketing after a short stint at another company.
Throughout this process, there was an interesting dynamic going on. We were scheduled to have a board meeting, and the member of the venture capital firm responsible for managing their investment in DecisionPoint was flying up the night before, which was unusual. He usually flew up the day of board meetings. Something didn’t seem right. Our existing CEO was in the process of hiring a new VP of Engineering, and had finalized his decision on the person he wanted to hire. Also, sensing that something was going on with the two individuals “snooping around”, our existing CEO decided we should have a layoff to reduce expenses. So, we had the layoff the day before the board meeting, and our CEO was fired at dinner with the member of the venture capital firm later that evening. The next morning, everyone arrived at work to see the existing CEO pack up his desk to leave, and see the two individuals show up at the board meeting where one of them was introduced as our new CEO. Everyone knew that something was up, but this was a lot more dramatic than anything we had anticipated.
There was a bit of a shock within the organization, and it would take a while for all of the changes to sink in. However, after watching the management team dramatically grow and then shrink under our existing CEO, it was clear a change was needed. Our existing CEO was a nice guy, but after he was let go, we all seemed to agree it was the right decision. A lot had happened under his leadership, and so there were a lot of things we had to clean up and deal with. Fortunately, the recovery wouldn’t be as painful as we had anticipated. And, as it turns out, the person who was hired by the existing CEO as the VP of Engineering decided to stay with DecisionPoint even after the change in CEO’s.
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