• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2089 0

forgotten about us. It would be a frosty day in Hades before we'd make the mistake of buying a bargain-basement CRM solution again. No such luck. Jeske came back ready to present his proposal. He emailed us his slides and let us know we should print copies for the attendees and that we would need to set up a projector for his demo. I had to laugh at his chutzpah. I didn't really have the time for what I knew would be a dead end, but a friend of Larry's is a friend of Larry's, so I agreed to give him a half hour. What he showed us was surprisingly well thought out, but still not ready for beta testing. Many of the essential features we required were missing, and the interface lacked the polish of the others we'd seen.

I broke the news to David. "It's a good start, but I'm afraid we need something more developed."

"Not to worry," he said, taking notes on the features we wanted. "I can get these done. How about I come back next week with a new demo?"

It was more like two weeks before we met again. In that time, David and his partner, Brandon Long, had implemented more than thirty feature improvements from our list. It was impressive, but I was far from convinced. I was more worried that David seemed to think he had a shot at winning the contract—I didn't want him complaining to Larry when his hopes were dashed. I decided to head him off at the pass by talking to Larry myself.

"Actually," Larry recommended when I described the situation, "you should hire these guys. They're really smart. They'll work hard to build the product for us, and we can invest in their company."

"Larry," I explained slowly and carefully, "we just went through hell with an undeveloped product. I can't burden my team with another flaky piece of software that will just slow us down. We're close with a real CRM company and should have a proposal in a couple of days. I'll let David down gently."

"No. Really," Larry repeated. "You should hire these guys. Look, they're a small company and they'll be very responsive. We can give them space in the office and they'll live here and build their product to our specs. We'll be their most important client, and we'll benefit from their growth based on our product design ideas. Have Biz Dev negotiate the contract and make sure we get some equity."

I could say I was stunned, outraged, incredulous, but that would be an understatement. I couldn't believe Larry was going cheap again instead of buying reliability. When I informed the other vendors, they thought I was either corrupt or an idiot. One salesman sent blistering emails demanding to talk directly to Eric and our board of directors. "This decision lacks wisdom and foresight," he asserted. "If you are under the impression that you can build an email tool resembling ours in thirty days, you are mistaken. It has taken us four years and twelve hundred customers to get to where we are. To not include us in your plans does not make sense."

That guy was kind of a jerk anyway, so telling him no didn't bother me, but I'd still be cursing Larry's decision today if not for one small thing: Larry was absolutely right. Though we wasted weeks negotiating our investment in Jeske's nascent company NeoTonic (we squeezed just an extra one-tenth of one percent in equity out of them), by the end of October 2001 we had the new Trakken CRM system running in parallel with Miasma. David and Brandon lived in our office and Denise Griffin, our user-support manager, gave them a daily list of desired features and bug fixes. Unlike the big "reliable" company I had wanted to hire, NeoTonic didn't have hundreds of customers using the same product. They didn't release upgrades only twice a year. They fixed things as they came up, in priority order. Within a couple of months we had the CRM system we wanted, built to our specs, fully stable and intuitive to use. We cut our ties with Miasma and never looked back. A year and a half later, we bought the rest of NeoTonic, making its two founders full-time Googlers.

So what did I learn from all this? I learned that obvious solutions are not the