Category Creators

And then you later went on to merge that company with MetricStream and it went on to become a commercial success for more than a decade. I would imagine though, along the way, there were probably dozens, if not hundreds of issues that really tested your resilience. Can you tell us about some of the biggest problems you faced and how did you deal with them?

Oh, goodness. So, first was just right in the beginning. So, I knew it's a challenge. But frankly, it was even harder and worse than I thought it was. So, you're sitting there saying, okay, yay I finally got the job and oh my God, right. Look what I've got to deal with. So, in the beginning it was that it's figuring out the right strategy and therefore who are the right people. And all of those things were definitely daunting, absolutely daunting. But once we identified the right value proposition to be able to go to the market and that at least I had, fine, now I have a strategy and we can start to build things to support that overall strategy. The next big challenge came, frankly, in 2008. So you have to know, we decided to focus on compliance and risk, did a merger with MetricStream -- really started in 2004, but executed 2005 to really put the teams together and go after this marketplace, we've been evangelizing this wasn't a known space. We're out there telling people here's what we can do, working hard, all this. And then in the beginning of 2008, Gartner, big analysts from the software announces, oh, there's a brand new market category for software and it's called “governance, risk, and compliance” and MetricStream, is the leader, top right. Oh my God. You're like finally. And for the first time, our phones are ringing. Companies are now calling us and look, and we're like, great. We're going to invest in sales and marketing, implementation people. And then we're going to raise money in 2009 on the growth trajectory, which was a wonderful plan in March.

Well, in like December, not so much because we all know what happened. Housing market came crisis, right? Everybody stops buying companies are shrinking and it's like, are you kidding me? We finally get to the top. So, it became the next really resilience crisis because we entered 2009 with frankly not a lot of money because we had invested and we'd spent and then revenues instead of going up, they declined and I mean, all these things happen. So the question was, do you fight or do you fold? Because, as you may remember companies were folding all over the place. So, honestly it was sitting down with the leadership team and deciding that we're going to fight. And we literally, we literally added the term, never say die with one of them. One of the members of the leadership team coined never say die. We added it to our cultural models. So it was customer…

That’s a good model for a lot of things.

It is. And last one was never say die, which means we were going to figure out how to make it happen, whatever it happened to be. And literally it was that approach of just refusing to die. That enabled us to fight through 2009. And not only do we fight through and make it, but we grew, we actually grew and we were working on fumes. I mean, a lot of us pay cuts,

wasn't collecting salary. I mean, all those things were going on as we're trying to find our way through, but we did. We absolutely did.