Value Add

MetricStream became an industry leader in governance risk and compliance software solutions. How did you take a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy and then grow it to a leading position in its category?

Yes. Well, in 10 words or less, right?

You get 20.

There you go. There you go. So, really the number one issue for anything like that is when a company is struggling and on the verge of bankruptcy, it usually means that they don't have a value proposition that the market wants. Nobody's buying what they have to sell. So, the first step is you've got to find a value proposition. You got to find a reason why companies will depart with hard earned cash and give it to you. So, when I first joined Zaplet, it was called Zaplet at the time, first step was just trying to reduce whatever burn expense that we didn't have to have so to buy time. And then the second was going out and finding a value proposition. And how do you do that? Well, honestly, we take help. I went and the team did research, all those kinds of things, and I went and talked to some of the smartest people I knew and/or smartest people they knew to try to ask them what -- I didn't ask them what should I do? I didn't go and say, “Hey, I'm from Zaplet. Here's the problem. What should I do?” What I asked was, “What is the big, hairy problem that companies have that is costing them a lot of money?” That's what I wanted to know. What problem is out there that's costing companies a lot of money, that there aren't great solutions for today. And honestly, that's how I came across compliance. And it was Roger McNamee who actually said it first to me. He goes, you know, this whole thing about compliance with all the rules and regulations coming down, it's harder and harder. It costs a lot of money. I don't know what to do about it, but I think this is a real problem.
But what that did was it was like, okay. And then I talked to a few more about what do you think of this idea, the whole bit. And then I came back, did the work and said, okay, now, how can we address this? Leveraging the technology that we have. And that's basically what we did between Zaplet, MetricStream, put them together and then went after this whole space. And that became eventually a whole market segment in software. One of the things I talk to entrepreneurs about a lot is, especially as a founder, you have to be really careful because it's really easy for a founder to fall in love with their product. And to a certain extent that's what happened to Zaplet before I got there. And what I mean by that is, when you have a baby or somebody has a baby, you cannot tell them that their baby is not perfect. They know this baby's perfect. You must not just be seeing the baby right. You just haven't this -- or just, I mean, they're all when you talk about no, no, no. You just don't understand.

It's not cute.

Exactly. Exactly. So, what happens is whenever an entrepreneur creates a product and they fall in love with the product, you can't criticize that product. Oh no, no. You just don't understand how to use it. We just need to do more training. Or they really just don't get the total -- I mean, there's all these excuses on why it's an issue, but it's always the market's problem. It's not the product problem. What you want to do is not fall in love with your product because it kind of blinds you to the market and what the market's trying to tell you. What you want to do is to fall in love with your target market. You want to meet all their needs. You want to make sure that they have everything that's required. You want to make sure that the product you're creating is able to do all that. So, you want to focus and fall in love with the market, not with your product. If all you're doing is caring about this product and making this product as great as it can be, but in a vacuum, it doesn't work.