“I move onward, the only direction
Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.”
—JAY Z, “ON TO THE NEXT ONE”
Once the EDS sale was completed, I felt like the company was in good shape, but my shareholders did not agree. I had sold all of my customers, all of my revenue, and the business they understood. Every large shareholder bailed out, and the stock price fell to $0.35 per share, which represented about half of the cash we had in the bank. I realized that nobody besides me knew how bad things had become and nobody besides me believed in the future, so I decided to take the employees off-site and resell them on the opportunity.
I rented forty rooms in a low-end motel in Santa Cruz and took our remaining eighty employees there for one night of drinking and one day of explaining the Opsware opportunity. At the end of the day, I tried to be as honest as humanly possible.
“You have now heard everything that I know and think about the opportunity in front of us. Wall Street does not believe Opsware is a good idea, but I do. I can understand if you don’t. Since this is a brand-new company and a brand-new challenge, I am issuing everyone new stock grants today. All that I ask is that if you have decided to quit that you quit today. I won’t walk you out the door—I’ll help you find a job. But, we need to know where we stand. We need to know who is with us and whom we can count on. We cannot afford to slowly bleed out. You owe it to your teammates to be honest. Let us know where you stand.”
That day two employees quit. Of the other seventy-eight, all but two stayed through the sale to Hewlett-Packard five years later.
After the off-site gathering, the first thing I had to do was increase the stock price. The NASDAQ had sent me a curt letter stating that if we failed to get our stock price over a dollar, they would “delist” us from the exchange and send us to the purgatory known as penny stocks. The board debated the best way to do this—reverse-split the stock, a stock buyback, or other options—but I felt we just needed to tell our story. The story was simple. We had a great team, $60 million in the bank, a $20 million a year contract with EDS, and some serious intellectual property. Unless I was the worst CEO of all time, we should be worth more than $30 million. The story took hold, and the stock climbed above $1 a share.
Next, I had to ship a product. Opsware had been built to run Loudcloud and Loudcloud only. It was not yet ready for the world. In fact, parts of the code were hardwired to physical machines in our building. Beyond that, the user interface was far from ready for prime time. The component that managed the network was called the Jive and featured a purple pimp hat on the front page. Project Oxide gave us a running start, but our engineers were nervous. They brought me a long list of features that they felt we needed to complete prior to entering the market. They pointed to competitors with more finished products.
As I listened to their lengthy objections, it became clear to me that the features the engineers wanted to add all came from Loudcloud requirements. As painful as it might be, I knew that we had to get into the broader market in order to understand it well enough to build the right product. Paradoxically, the only way to do that was to ship and try to sell the wrong product. We would fall on our faces, but we would learn fast and do what was needed to survive.
Finally, I had to rebuild the executive team. I had a CFO who didn’t know software accounting, a head of sales who had never sold software, and a head of marketing who did not know our market. Every one of them was great at their old jobs, but not qualified for their new jobs. It was miserable, but necessary, to see them all go.
The strategy and the team came together, and the business started working. We began signing customers at a consistent pace and our stock price rose from its $0.35 low to more than $7 a share. It felt like we were finally out of the woods.
Naturally I was wrong.
SIXTY DAYS TO LIVE
A few quarters into Opsware, we received very bad news from our largest customer, EDS. “Largest customer” really understates it; EDS accounted for 90 percent of our revenue. And they were not happy. Their Opsware deployment had stalled out and not met its goals as they had run into multiple difficult technical issues. EDS wanted to cancel the deployment, end the contract, and get their money back. Giving EDS their money back would mean the end of Opsware. Getting into a big dispute with a customer that accounted for all but 10 percent of our revenue would also mean the end of Opsware. We were doomed again.
I called my top two lieutenants on the account in for a meeting.
Jason Rosenthal was the very first employee I had hired and the best manager in the company. A Stanford graduate with an impeccable memory and a genius mind for managing all the details of a complex project, Jason was in charge of the EDS deployment.
Anthony Wright grew up in the tough part of Pittsburgh, the son of legendary street fighter Joe Wright, and had earned a black belt in several martial arts himself. Self-made, super-determined, and unwilling to fail, Anthony had an uncanny ability to quickly gain deep insight into people’s character and motivations—“able to charm dogs off a meat truck,” is how another guy on the team described it. Anthony was the relationship manager for EDS.
I began with an assessment: What happened? It turned out, a lot of things. EDS’s environment was insane and chaotic. They had inherited networks and infrastructure from every customer they’d ever signed and from every era in which they had signed them. They had data centers connected by 56-kilobit links at a time when no other customer connected at speeds even twenty times that slow. EDS ran versions of operating systems that were so old that they didn’t support basic technologies like threads, which meant our software wouldn’t run on them. And the people were not our people. We’d find them sleeping in the data center at two o’clock in the afternoon; they were not motivated and generally not very happy. Beyond that, our product was far from perfect and every one of the many bugs and shortcomings was a reason to stop the deployment.
I took a long pause, rubbed my head, and then began to give instructions. I chose my words carefully:
“I appreciate the difficulties and more than that, I thank you deeply for the effort. However, I do not think that I’ve made myself clear on the situation that we’re in. This is not a scenario where an excuse will do. This is a must win. If EDS drops us, we’re fucked and it’s over. The IPO, avoiding the Loudcloud bankruptcy, all the layoffs and pain will have been for nothing—because we’re dead. So, our only option is to win. We cannot lose this one.
“Jason, the whole company is at your command. Whatever you need, I will make sure you get it. Anthony, Jason is going to work to deliver all the value that EDS expects, but he will fail. He will fail to deliver one hundred percent of expectations, so you are now in charge of finding out what they don’t expect, but want. You are in charge of finding the exciting value. When you do, we will deliver it.”
Jason and Anthony then headed to Plano, Texas, to meet with their counterparts at EDS.
They didn’t know who was making decisions, but after a bunch of meetings and dead ends, they found their way to the office of a person I will call Frank Johnson (not his real name)—a big guy who grew up in the oil fields of Oklahoma, graduated from West Point, and now was in charge of anyone who touched any servers at EDS. Anthony and Jason touted the Opsware technology and potential cost savings.
After listening for a bit, Frank pushed back his chair, stood up, and shouted, “You fucking want to know what I think about Opsware? I think it’s the biggest goddamn piece of shit! All I hear about all day is how much this product fucking sucks. I’m going to do everything I can to get you guys thrown out of here.”
Frank revealed his plan to remove all of our software immediately, demanding all funds to be returned. He was dead serious.
Anthony remained calm, looked him in the eye, and said, “Frank, I will do exactly as you say. I’ve heard you loud and clear. This is a terrible moment for you and for us. Allow me to use your phone, and I will call Ben Horowitz and give him your instructions. But before I do, can I ask you one thing? If my company made the commitment to fix these issues, how much time would you give us to do that?”
He responded, “Sixty days.” Anthony told him the clock had just started ticking and left his office immediately. It was good news: We had exactly sixty days to fix all the problems and make the deployment work. If we did not, we were done. We had sixty days to live.
An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays. I could not afford any hesitation, so I scheduled a daily meeting with Anthony, Jason, and the team—though they were now based in Plano. The purpose was to remove all roadblocks. If anyone was stuck on anything for any reason, it could not last more than twenty-four hours—the time between meetings.
Meanwhile, Anthony worked furiously to find the exciting value we could offer EDS. We started with little things that did not change our fate, but revealed important clues. We flew our main EDS executive, Frank, out to meet with our top engineers and architects. In booking the trip, Anthony reported that Frank requested the longest layover possible in the connecting airport. I thought that I misheard him. “What, he wants a long layover?”
Anthony: “Yep.”
Ben: “Why would anybody want a long layover in an airport?”
Anthony: “Apparently, he likes to hang out in the airport bar between flights.”
Ben: “Why does he like to do that?”
Anthony: “I asked him the same question. Frank said: ‘Because I hate my job and I hate my family.’ ”
Wow. I had no idea who I was dealing with until that point. Understanding how differently Frank viewed the world than the people at Opsware helped clarify my thoughts. Frank expected to get screwed by us. It’s what always happened to him in his job and presumably in his personal life. We needed something dramatic to break his psychology. We needed to be associated with the airport bar, not with his job or his family.
At the same time, Jason marched the team through the deployment with unrelenting precision. A month into the plan, the Southwest Airlines crew that worked the San Jose–Dallas flight knew Jason and his team by name. They made steady progress, but it wasn’t going to be enough. We would not get EDS fully deployed in sixty days—so now we really needed Anthony to deliver exciting value.
As I sat in my office hoping for a breakthrough, my cell phone rang. It was Anthony.
Anthony: “Ben, I think I’ve got it.”
Ben: “Got what?”
Anthony: “The exciting value is Tangram.”
Ben: “What?”
Anthony: “Tangram. EDS uses a product from a company called Tangram that inventories their hardware and software. Frank absolutely loves it, but the purchasing guys are going to force him to switch to an equivalent Computer Associates product, because it’s free as part of EDS’s settlement with CA. Frank hates the CA product. Frank is getting screwed again.”
Ben: “So what can we do?”
Anthony: “If Tangram can come free with Opsware, then Frank will love us.”
Ben: “That sounds economically impossible. If we buy the licenses from Tangram and give them to EDS, that will be a colossal expense. We’ll never be able to describe it to Wall Street.”
Anthony: “You asked me what EDS really wanted. They really want Tangram.”
Ben: “Got it.”
I had never heard of Tangram, so I quickly looked them up. They were a small company in Cary, North Carolina, but they traded on the NASDAQ market. I looked up their market capitalization. This couldn’t be right. Tangram Enterprise Solutions, according to Yahoo Finance, was worth only $6 million. I had never heard of a public company being that cheap.
I immediately called my head of business development, John O’Farrell, and told him that I wanted to buy Tangram, and I needed the entire process to be extremely quick—as in, I wanted the Tangram acquisition done before our sixty-day window with EDS closed.
Tangram was run by Norm Phelps, an interim CEO, which was a great sign that they’d be willing to sell the company, because most boards would much rather sell a company than roll the dice by hiring a new CEO. John got in touch with Tangram and they were immediately interested, so we assembled a team to conduct due diligence while we negotiated a merger agreement in parallel. At the end of due diligence, I brought my team back together. They promptly and unanimously agreed that buying Tangram would be a bad idea: The technology would be difficult to integrate and not that valuable. The company was in North Carolina. It was fifteen years old and the technology was old, too. The finance team thought the acquisition was a money loser. I listened, and then I told them all that I didn’t care about any of that. We were going to buy Tangram. The team seemed shocked, but did not argue with me.
John and I negotiated a deal to buy Tangram for $10 million in cash and stock. We signed the deal prior to the end of the sixty-day plan. I called Frank from EDS to tell him that once the transaction closed, we would include all Tangram software for free as part of his Opsware contract. Frank was ecstatic. Now that we had solved Frank’s Tangram problem, he viewed the work that Jason’s team completed in a totally different light. At the end of the sixty days, Frank gathered our team and made the following speech:
“I’ve given the speech that I gave to you guys at the beginning of this process to at least a dozen other vendors. They all promised things, but none ever delivered. You guys really delivered and I am shocked. You are the best vendor that I have and I am happy to be working with you.”
We’d done it. We saved the account and saved the company. What a relief! But we still had the small matter of the company that we’d just purchased and its fifty-seven employees. Some decisions were simple—we didn’t need nine out of the ten salespeople, because they weren’t selling anything. Some were more complex: Should we keep the North Carolina location? In the end, we decided to keep it and locate customer support there. It turned out that when you accounted for turnover rates and the cost of recruiting and training, Cary, North Carolina, engineers were cheaper to hire than Bangalore, India, engineers. As the years went by, Tangram proved to be a highly profitable acquisition—well beyond the critical role it played in saving the EDS account.
During acquisition talks, both sides had agreed that Tangram’s CFO, John Nelli, would not become part of Opsware. But during the time between signing and close, John began to get severe headaches. His doctors discovered that he had brain cancer. Because he would not be an Opsware employee and it was a preexisting condition, he would not be eligible for health insurance under our plan. The cost of the treatment without health insurance would likely bankrupt his family. I asked my head of HR what it would cost to keep him on the payroll long enough to qualify for COBRA and what COBRA would cost. It wasn’t cheap—about $200,000. This was a significant amount of money for a company in our situation. On top of that, we barely knew John and technically we didn’t “owe” him anything. This wasn’t our problem. We were fighting for our lives.
We were fighting for our lives, but he was about to lose his. I decided to pay for his health costs and find the money elsewhere in the budget. I never expected to hear anything else about that decision, but fifteen months later I received a handwritten letter from John’s wife letting me know that John had died. She wrote that she was absolutely shocked that I would help a total stranger and his family and that I had saved her from total despair. She went on for several paragraphs saying that she didn’t know why I did it, but it enabled her to continue living and she was eternally grateful.
I guess I did it because I knew what desperation felt like.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Almost as soon as the EDS crisis was resolved, I got news that three new clients we had expected to sign were now fading away. An excellent new competitor, BladeLogic, had arisen and was beating us in key accounts. We lost several deals to them and missed our quarterly numbers as a result. The stock price dropped back down to $2.90.
Here we go again.
With a losing product, a dwindling stock price, and a tired team, I knew we were in trouble. To make matters worse, Marc, who had been working exclusively with me on Loudcloud and Opsware as “full-time chairman of the board,” had decided to found another company, Ning. The success or failure of Opsware was really up to the team and me at this point, but the timing sucked. Not only was the company circling the drain, but our most visible spokesman was going to work on something else. Damn. After all that we had been through, how could I ask the team to charge up yet another impossible mountain? How could I muster the strength to do it myself?
I felt like I had no more stories, no more speeches, and no more “rah-rah” in me. I decided to level with the team and see what happened. I called an all engineering meeting and gave the following speech:
“I have some bad news. We are getting our asses kicked by BladeLogic and it’s a product problem. If this continues, I am going to have to sell the company for cheap. There is no way for us to survive if we don’t have the winning product. So, I am going to need every one of you to do something. I need you to go home tonight and have a serious conversation with your wife, husband, significant other, or whoever cares most about you and tell them, ‘Ben needs me for the next six months.’ I need you to come in early and stay late. I will buy you dinner, and I will stay here with you. Make no mistake, we have one bullet left in the gun and we must hit the target.”
At the time, I felt horrible asking the team to make yet another big sacrifice. Amazingly, I found out while writing this book that I probably should have felt good about it. Here’s what Ted Crossman, one of my best engineers, said about that time and the launch of the aptly named Darwin Project many years later:
Of all the times I think of at Loudcloud and Opsware, the Darwin Project was the most fun and the most hard. I worked seven days a week 8 a.m.–10 p.m. for six months straight. It was full on. Once a week I had a date night with my wife where I gave her my undivided attention from 6 p.m. until midnight. And the next day, even if it was Saturday, I’d be back in the office at 8 a.m. and stay through dinner. I would come home between 10–11 p.m. Every night. And it wasn’t just me. It was everybody in the office.
The technical things asked of us were great. We had to brainstorm how to do things and translate those things into an actual product.
It was hard, but fun. I don’t remember losing anyone during that time. It was like, “Hey, we gotta get this done, or we will not be here, we’ll have to get another job.” It was a tight-knit group of people. A lot of the really junior people really stepped up. It was a great growing experience for them to be thrown into the middle of the ocean and told, “Okay, swim.”
Six months later we suddenly started winning proofs of concepts we hadn’t before. Ben did a great job, he’d give us feedback, and pat people on the back when we were done.
Eight years later, when I read what Ted had written, I cried. I cried because I didn’t know. I thought I did, but I really didn’t. I thought that I was asking too much of everybody. I thought that after barely surviving Loudcloud, nobody was ready for another do-or-die mission. I wish I knew then what I know now.
After the speech came the hard work of defining the product. The product plan was weighed down with hundreds of requirements from our existing customers. The product management team had an allergic reaction to prioritizing potentially good features above features that might hypothetically beat BladeLogic. They would say, “How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?”
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data; we were running out of time, so I had to step in:
“I don’t care about any of the existing requirements; I need you to reinvent the product and we need to win.” Nine months later, when we released our new product we could now win any deal. Armed with the new product, Mark Cranney, head of sales, went to war.
After assembling a top-end sales force, he completely revamped the sales process and sent every salesperson through a rigorous and unforgiving training program. He demanded mastery. Any slip-up in technique, skill, or knowledge would be met with total intolerance from Mark.
We held a weekly forecast call where Mark reviewed every deal in front of the entire 150 person sales force. On one such call, a salesperson described an account that he’d forecast in detail: “I have buy-in from my champion, the vice president that he reports to, and the head of purchasing. My champion assures me that they’ll be able to complete the deal by the end of the fiscal quarter.”
Mark quickly replied, “Have you spoken to the vice president’s peer in the networking group?”
Sales rep: “Um, no I haven’t.”
Mark: “Have you spoken to the vice president yourself?”
Sales rep: “No.”
Mark: “Okay, listen carefully. Here’s what I’d like you to do. First, reach up to your face and take off your rose-colored glasses. Then get a Q-tip and clean the wax out of your ears. Finally, take off your pink panties and call the fucking vice president right now, because you do not have a deal.”
Mark was right. It turned out that we did not have a deal, as the vice president’s peer in networking was blocking it. We eventually got a meeting with him and won the deal. More important, Mark set the tone: Sloppiness would not be tolerated.
Now that we’d improved our competitive position, we went on the offensive. In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?” Ordinarily in a staff meeting, you spend lots of time reviewing, evaluating, and improving all of the things that you do: build products, sell products, support customers, hire employees, and the like. Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.
In one such meeting, after asking the question, every person on my staff agreed: “We are not automating the network.” Although the original version of Opsware that we used in Loudcloud automated our network, the software was not robust and, of course, featured the purple-pimp-hat user interface. As a result, when we switched over to being a software company, we narrowed our focus to server automation and never revisited the decision. This worked well for the first several years of Opsware, but now we had an opportunity to bring back our network automation product.
Unfortunately, the Jive was not a good code base and could not be turned into a commercial product. My choices were: (a) start a new project or (b) buy one of the four existing network automation companies. Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional. In addition, I had John O’Farrell, the industry’s greatest M&A negotiator, on my team so I decided to investigate the other companies before sizing the internal effort.
Surprisingly, among the four existing network automation players, the company that we thought had the best product architecture, Rendition Networks, had the lowest revenues. This made some of our businesspeople skeptical of our technical evaluation. However, if I’d learned anything it was that conventional wisdom had nothing to do with the truth and the efficient market hypothesis was deceptive. How else could one explain Opsware trading at half of the cash we had in the bank when we had a $20 million a year contract and fifty of the smartest engineers in the world? No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.
After confirming that acquiring would be superior to building, we negotiated a deal to buy Rendition Networks for $33 million. Within three months of completing the acquisition, John negotiated a deal with Cisco Systems—the world’s largest networking company—to resell our product. The deal included an agreement to prepay us $30 million for advanced licenses. As a result, the Cisco deal alone paid more than 90 percent of the acquisition costs.
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
THE ULTIMATE DECISION
As we fielded the broader product line, our momentum steadily grew. From the ashes, we’d built a software business that approached a $150 million revenue run rate. Along with our revenue, our stock price rose from its floor of $0.35 per share as well as we traded between $6 per share and $8 per share, sometimes trading at a market capitalization of more than $800 million.
Still, everything was not rosy. Every quarter was tough, and the competitive and the technology landscapes changed rapidly. A technology called virtualization was taking the market by storm and changing the way customers thought about automating their environments. In fact, it looked to me like virtualization might be the technological breakthrough that finally enabled the cloud computing business model to work. Beyond that, being a public company was still never going to get easy. At one point, a shareholder activist named Rachel Hyman decided that my ego was out of control, and she demanded that the board remove me and sell the company immediately. This was despite the fact that we were trading at $7 per share, which was ten times the original price of her shares.
Nonetheless, I was not looking for the exits. Whenever a potential acquirer approached us, I would always reply, “We are not for sale.” It was a great answer in that I wasn’t ready to sell and it conveyed that, but it also left the door open to a particularly aggressive buyer. “Not for sale” didn’t mean that we wouldn’t listen to offers—it just meant that we weren’t trying to sell the company. So, when EMC implied that it wanted to buy us, I thought nothing of it. We were trading at about $6.50 per share and I wasn’t planning to sell at anything close to that price. But this time the news of the offer leaked to the press and the stock shot up to $9.50 per share, changing the economic equation, especially since the stock was going up for all the wrong reasons.
Ironically, the higher the stock price went up, the more companies wanted to buy us. Over the course of the next month, eleven companies expressed interest. Given the uncertainty in the business and the implied earnings multiple, their interest was too much to ignore.
To get things started, John and I called Michael Ovitz to get some advice. We felt one of the potential bidders, Oracle, would be the least likely to bid high, because it was extremely disciplined in its financial analysis. We conveyed this to Michael and questioned whether we should pursue Oracle at all. His reply was priceless: “Well, boys, if you are going to have a dog race, then you are going to need a rabbit. And Oracle will be one hell of a rabbit.”
With that strategy in hand, we generated a broad set of bids, all between $10 and $11 per share, with the highest bids representing a 38 percent premium over the current stock price. Although this was considered a good premium, I did not feel right selling the company for $11 per share. The team had worked too hard, we’d accomplished too much, and we were too good a company. The risks of staying stand-alone were substantial, but I still wanted to bet on the team. I recommended to the board that we not sell.
The board was surprised, but supportive. Still, they had a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to ask the tough questions. “If you’re unwilling to sell at eleven dollars per share, is there a price at which you would sell?” I had to think about that one. I had promised the team that if we got to be the number-one company in a big market, we would not sell. We were number one, but how big was the market? Did the team really want to continue or was it just me who wanted to continue? How could I know without panicking the company? And thus began a series of very long talks with myself.
It was an argument to the death, and it was me against me. On the one hand, I argued that virtualization created an explosion of virtual server instances, making what we did more essential than ever. In the next breath, I retorted that while that may have been true, the architectural changes would make our market position vulnerable. I battled myself for weeks before concluding that things were changing fast enough that we’d need to make major changes to our product architecture in order to stay on top. The key to answering the ultimate question was knowing the state of the team. Were they up for yet another giant challenge or were they at the end of a very long road? I decided to bring my direct reports into the loop and ask them what they thought. The answers came back clear: Everyone, with the exception of one person who felt that the opportunity in front of us was still quite large, opted for the sale. Now it was just a matter of price. But what price?
After a long discussion with John O’Farrell, I decided that the right price to sell the company would be $14 per share, or about $1.6 billion. I took that number back to the board. They thought the number was extremely high and that it was unlikely we’d be able to generate a bid at that level, but they were supportive nonetheless. I called back all the potential acquirers and let them know that we would only entertain bids of $14 or more. There were no takers.
More than a month passed without a word, and I figured the M&A talks had ended. I began refocusing on how to make the necessary changes to keep us competitive. And then I received a call from Bob Beauchamp, the CEO of BMC Software. He offered $13.25 per share. I held firm: “Bob, that’s great, but the number is fourteen dollars per share.” Bob said that he’d have to think about it. He called back two days later and offered $14 per share. Wow. The dog had caught the bus.
John and I immediately called back all the other suitors to let them know that we had an offer that we planned to take. Hewlett-Packard was still interested and offered $13.50 per share in an effort to make sure that I wasn’t bluffing. I responded that as a public company CEO, I couldn’t take a lower offer. HP eventually offered $14.25 or $1.65 billion in cash. We had a deal.
When it finally ended—the long road from Loudcloud to Opsware—I couldn’t believe that I’d sold what it took eight years and all of my life force to build. How could I have done that? I was sick. I couldn’t sleep, I had cold sweats, I threw up, and I cried. And then I realized that it was the smartest thing that I’d ever done in my career. We’d built something from nothing, saw it go back to nothing again, and then rebuilt it into a $1.65 billion franchise.
At that point, it felt like my business life was kind of over. I had hired all the best people that I knew or could find, and I had gone through every step from founding to going public to sale. I definitely did not feel like doing any of that again. But I had learned so much. It seemed like such a waste to do something completely different. And then I got an idea to build a new kind of venture capital firm.
We will explore this idea in chapter 9, but first, chapters 4 through 8 will take you through most everything I learned to this point plus a few new war stories from my experiences running Loudcloud and Opsware.