Welcome To The Brave Old World
Mark Hoover, President, Acuitive, Inc.

As referred to in the introduction above, we welcome two new employees to Acuitive this month – Tom Garland and Roy Harvey.   I always enjoy the process of recruiting prospective new employees because it forces me to update my thoughts on what Acuitive is all about and why someone would want to work at a unique and somewhat wacky institution like ours. 

When I first met Tom, it wasn’t even really meant to be a recruiting discussion.  Tom and Roy had started up a strategic consulting company called VenOps.  They were vectored in to us by Peter Wagner at Accel Partners, who thought that Tom and Roy might benefit from a discussion about some of the things we have learned through being in this game for four years.  In other words, Tom wanted to meet and suck me dry of information and learn hard lessons the easy way.  In that light, I think he was surprised by how much information I shared.  The reason for that is that I don’t generally recognize the concept of competition in our field.  We get so many requests for our services; I feel bad having to say ‘no’ too often.  Whenever possible in that situation, I like to be able to vector prospective clients into other smart people so that their immediate needs are met.  Who knows?  If that makes the company stronger, maybe there will be a time in the future where Acuitive can help out as well.  So I recognized Tom as someone whom I could refer with the confidence that the reference wouldn’t damage my reputation.

As Tom and I talked more and more, however, I think we both realized that we are somewhat kindred spirits.  Acuitive is the company that Tom and Roy dreamt of VenOps becoming, in terms of the types of employees, the nature of the services, the business model, and the networking with the VCs and entrepreneur communities.  Acuitive also has another quality that was of more than a little attractive to Tom and Roy – lots of cash in the bank. 

At the same time, I began to learn that Tom was an articulate, mature, experienced, and broad-based person who exhibits all the characteristics I like in someone I work closely with, including family orientation and beer drinking.  Another thing that caused me to take notice of Tom is that he really liked what he had to hear about us.  As a staunch 49ers fan, he came to characterize Acuitive as the “West Coast Offense of Consulting” (with apologies to Bill Walsh).

Tom is a business-oriented person who got grounded in the technology marketplace by working at Silicon Graphics for nine years or so in various technical sales support and business development roles.  Towards the end of his career at SGI, Tom got a taste of the start-up life by helping launch a start-up subsidiary of SGI called Silicon Studio.  That led to throwing himself into the “real” world of start-ups when he became one of the early employees at Mpath, which later became HearMe.   At HearMe, Tom gained a whole lot of strategic and operational experience, managing a large and rapidly expanding budget and staff, leading the vision for content development, launching the company’s web site, and developing a wide range of partner relationships. But by far Tom’s greatest contributions to the companies he has worked for are in the area of “doing the deals.”  Tom has negotiated and closed various forms of deals with Yahoo, Excite, Disney, Go.com, Xoom.com, CNNSI, AT&T, Viacom MTV, Eastman Kodak, Sun, ABC Sports, Intel, ESPN.com, Nintendo, Sega, Electronic Arts, Broderbund, and other industry heavyweights.  Tom is not a shy guy.   He has the skills to create solid business plans, pitch to financiers, recruit and run large teams, oversee company operations, and create and execute on business development plans.  In the coming months and years he will be doing all of these for Acuitive clients, especially brand spanking new companies who need a little bit of everything from Tom as an interim CEO or VP of Business Development.

But do you know what I like best about Tom? – Roy. 

Somewhere along the line at Mpath.com, Tom and Roy Harvey got to know one another.  Quality attracts quality. 

Roy is an engineer by training and by early career experience.   Like me, after more than a decade of technical and engineering roles, somewhere along the line he joined the “dark side” and got involved in Product Management, Marketing, and Business Development.  That mixture of technical and business experience and interest is a rare combination that we are always looking for at Acuitive.  It allows Roy to have meaningful dialogues with engineers and customer technical influencers, and produce everything from detailed requirements specifications to application notes to channel strategies to pricing guidelines and to complete business plans.  In other words, Roy can execute on and/or oversee all aspects of Product Management, from the mundane to the sublime.  He will be doing this for Acuitive clients across a pretty wide range of technical and market areas in the general network infrastructure space.  If you like Dave Logan, you’ll love Roy Harvey.  I’m very much looking forward to working with Roy myself on several combined projects.  And if (for whatever reason) you didn’t like Dave Logan – well, still give Roy a try.  In the least, he can write and produce a theme song for your company. 

It wasn’t a total no-brainer decision for Tom and Roy to join Acuitive.  They had great plans for their own consulting company and had gotten off to a good start.  I had to make a few adjustments to the Acuitive compensation plan to make Acuitive a viable alternative for them.  But in the end, I think that the opportunity to work with, leverage, and learn from the existing Acuitive employees was their deciding factor.

So, Acuitive continues to grow, as we find quality people like Tom and Roy who fit right in.  But are they joining at the right time - are the good times behind us?  I’ve been questioned about this several times recently, usually in the context of the mauling of the technology companies in the public domain in the past few months.  Everyone from my mother-in-law to my dentist to my accountant to employees at those companies expects that Acuitive is hurting due to these events.  And while it is true that our paper value has decreased just like all other stockholders, the fundamental business is as good as ever.  The networking and internet-related applications spaces are as innovative, rich and exciting to work in now as they were in 1999 and the first half of 2000, when the stock market was “excessively exuberant.”   Venture capital money raised and built up over the past couple of years would take several years to dry up, even if people stopped investing in venture capital tomorrow.  That means that good teams with good ideas will continue to get funded and supported by both the VC community and by us.  However, it is fair to say that the barrier-to-entry to being funded has gone up recently, but I view this as just a return to the standards that existed before the “erosion of richness” observed over the past 2-3 years.   And I view this return to higher standards as a very good thing.   It means that fewer companies of greater quality will get formed and these companies will enjoy more VC support than a lot of companies have been getting recently.  There will still be plenty of companies that need the kind of services that Acuitive offers, but we’ll have to spend a lot less time filtering through the myriad half-baked ideas in a crowded market space being executed on by incomplete and inexperienced teams fueled by dumb money from over-stretched venture capital firms.  This will make it much easier for us to identify the companies that we want to work with.   I welcome this return to the Brave Old World of venture capital and start-up dynamics.

(volume 4, number 1)