![]() ![]() Greg pulled me aside and said to me “Greg, you could get a roomful of people in Alaska at 2AM on a Sunday night for a presentation on that product-but ain’t nobody is buying that stuff’. The market for automation software at this time was best described by a colleague of mine, Greg Strouse. In short, we were in trouble with this product. None months later we had under $100K in sales. Now, it was definitely a missionary sale, since salespeople would have to tae more time to sell it, versus other products they ‘had in their bag’. Our offering, after almost being killed internally for a variety of reasons, was late to market, had less features than existing competitors, and despite being priced less than the competitors-a fact that worked against as the lower price underscored that it had less functionality-the product was launched with a bang and 6 months later we had no sales. It was an emerging market at the time we released our offering, with few sales and a lot of hype around the market space. We built a software product to automate the datacenter operations. I was with a company called Duquesne Systems (later named LEGENT Corporation and sold to CA), a maker of mainframe software that improved efficiency of these expensive assets. My first recollection of one was in 1987. We may have experienced it ‘at our last company’ and want to ‘re-experience ‘ at our new one, and it just isn’t happening. Our competitors may have it, and we want it. Many of us are looking for ‘splendid insights’-that intangible spark that some companies have, and our product, services, or company doesn’t have. They too were looking for a ‘splendid insight’-somehow, someway to ‘restart’ the growth engine, and get the product, and the company, on the right track, and to growth. Like Tartan, they too had invested in a newer, emerging market for their software, but also like Tartan, it was large enough or growing fast enough to cover the revenue decline. They were once a $25M in revenues company, but revenues were declining, not rapidly, but certainly going in the wrong direction. At Approva, a software company that helped companies gain regulatory compliance (e.g.Sarbanes Oxley) with their financial systems, I was again asked by the CEO and Chairman of the Board, to help them with strategy. To do so, it needed a new strategy, or so the board/investors thought, or as lead investor David Morgenthaler stated to me ‘Greg, we are looking for a ‘splendid insight’ ‘.įast forward to the last year or so, and history repeated itself. But with $13M invested through the years, and revenues not growing –despite trying its hand at a new non defense business that was in the emerging stage-at a rapid rate, the small company, with modest profits, needed to grow more rapidly or sell-or both. It had been in business for probably ten years by the time I was retained, and had stumbled its way into making about $10M in revenues, mostly by selling to defense contractors who used the specialized chips, and required the Tartan software to program them. Tartan was a builder of software for specialized chips. Many years ago, somewhere in the mid 1990s, I was retained by the Board of Directors (mostly Venture Capitalists who had invested in the company) of Tartan Laboratories to help them with their strategy challenges.
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