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June 1999 - The Star - Part 1

1/30/2015

 
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UPSIDE’s 1999 Hot 100
. . . They won because we believe they are the hottest private high-tech companies of 1999 . . . Neoforma, founded in 1996, operates an online marketplace linking buyers and sellers of all kinds of medical products. The company is a rising star in the lucrative business-to-business market . . .

UPSIDE Magazine, June 1999
Ariba IPO Goes Through the Roof
It looks like the Internet IPO market is still alive and well. Shares of e-commerce software provider Ariba went through the roof on their first day of trading on Wednesday . . . Ariba stock priced at $23 and closed at $90, a remarkable gain of 291 percent . . . E-commerce software looks hot, hot, hot.

E-Commerce Times, June 24, 1999
Web Firm Neoforma Names to Top Post Zollars From Cardinal
Neoforma Inc., in another example of an Internet company recruiting top management from traditional industries, said it is hiring a senior official of Cardinal Health Inc. to be chairman, president and chief executive . . .

Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1999
Jeff and I had started Neoforma.

We had provided its first monetary food. We had reared the company, nurtured it, guided it, imposed our will and ingrained our personal ethics. But we did not control Neoforma...

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May 1999 - The Masters

1/29/2015

 
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Sleeping Giants
Large tracts of online economic terrain remain unconquered. But not for long. Business-to-business e-commerce will draw 90 percent of the projected $1.4 trillion in total Internet-based business by 2003 . . . While Jim Clark’s Healtheon mines the online possibilities in healthcare admin and benefits, Neoforma wants the first bite in the $30 billion market for medical equipment and supplies . . .

Business 2.0, May 1999
Healtheon, Neoforma Join Forces
Healtheon Corp., a leading online healthcare site formed by Netscape co-founder James Clark, has entered a partnership with Neoforma Inc., an e-commerce site for the health care marketplace. The two Santa Clara–based companies will offer health care professionals free, convenient access to Neoforma’s online database of medical products . . .
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal, May 19, 1999
Motivation and intelligence in the absence of experience yields dazzling inertia.

I hadn’t thought about Sharon for more than a decade...

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April 1999 - Discontinuity

1/28/2015

 
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Cool Company - A Site Where Hospitals Can Click to Shop
Today hospitals and suppliers checking into Neoforma.com swap 10,000 to 20,000 emails a month about products . . .

Fortune Magazine, April 12, 1999
E-Commerce Poised to Impact Healthcare Supply Industry Significantly
Several companies are lining up to cash in on what looks like the purest form of healthcare e-business . . . Probably one of the most visionary, and by far the best financed, of the medical product e-commerce companies is Neoforma . . .

IDN Strategies, April 1999
The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
One of the Internet’s great conceits is that it changes everything. In the Internet Economy, you can buy anything from Furbys to furniture online . . . But swallowing the trillion-dollar dinosaur that is the U.S. healthcare industry could give Net entrepreneurs a serious case of indigestion . . .

The Industry Standard, April 5, 1999
Balance is not always found in the middle.

In moments of stress or confusion, I often catch myself looking back in time to similar situations...

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Fertilizer

1/27/2015

 
I just finished listening to a podcast by Entrepreneur On Fire. A core premise of their work is the importance of learning from failure.

That got me thinking about... well... failure... and success...

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March 1999 - A Reluctant Coup

1/25/2015

 
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Neoforma, Inc., the online leader in the business-to-business global electronic healthcare marketplace, today announced it has completed a $12 million third round of equity funding led by Delphi Ventures. The round also included investments by TCW/ICICI Investment Partners, Venrock Associates, Amerindo Investment Advisors, MedVenture Associates, TTC Ventures, and Comdisco Ventures.

Neoforma Press Release, March 9, 1999
I was feeling much better about things. Experience should have warned me that this was a bad sign.

The website had steadily improved over the previous couple of months. I still wasn’t happy with it as a whole, but I was very happy with parts of it...

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February 1999 - Shadows

1/23/2015

 
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Sizzling Start-ups — 10 E-Commerce Companies to Watch — Health Site’s Business Thrives
Sometimes success is based on the quantity of business as well as the quality. This may prove true in the case of Neoforma, Inc. . . .

Internet Week, February 8, 1999
We were surprised by how long it took for the imitators to arrive. We were even more surprised by how large their flock was.

Nearly three years after starting Neoforma we caught our first glimpse of real, potential competition—mere shadows of shapes, moving along the periphery...

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January 1999 - The Magistrate

1/22/2015

 
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Neoforma Matches Healthcare Equipment Vendors with Clients Via Unusual Website.
When Jeff Kleck and Wayne McVicker started Santa Clara–based Neoforma Inc. in 1996 . . . they didn’t know they’d be at
the forefront of an emerging market: business-to-business electronic commerce . . .

The Business Journal, January 22, 1999
The New Internet Market Makers
“The main shift that the Web has brought about is the shift of power from sellers to buyers in the markets,” says Finnie. Take Santa Clara, Calif.–based Neoforma as an example . . .

Forbes, January 6, 1999
Many of industry’s renowned mavericks and iconoclasts do not convey their depth and complexity during routine encounters. But some do.

Our software developers had worked almost nonstop for two months— and straight through the holiday season—to get our new website under control. Fortunately, our customers and investors had been largely quiet during the end-of-the-year holidays...

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December 1998 - Bluescreen

1/21/2015

 
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Net Sites Take Liaison Role in Biz-to-Biz Transactions
. . . Neoforma Inc., for instance, provides information on hospital supplies . . . Infomediaries are gaining in popularity. Since its founding two years ago, Neoforma, a Santa Clara, Calif.–based company, has brought in more than 15,000 hospital product suppliers on its Web site . . .

Investor’s Business Daily December 14, 1998
Partitions, earlier erected for protection, now imprisoned the architect.

Since the day that we had enabled our website visitors to communicate with manufacturers of medical equipment, we had been receiving email from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for on our site...

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November 1998 - Make-up and Hair

1/20/2015

 
The Web Hotlist—Web sites worth checking out
Neoforma provides a Web-based community for healthcare professionals that showcases panoramic, 3-D photographic
technology.

InfoWorld, November 23, 1998
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Forget Disintermediation, Portals: There’s a New Buzzword in Town
Another emerging vortex site is Neoforma.com, a Santa Clara, Calif., purveyor of health-care technology and equipment information online . . .

The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, November 24, 1998
One-Stop Shop
Billed as the world’s largest resource on medical products, services and information, Neoforma.com . . . provides online access to an inventory of 13,000 suppliers in 8,000 different product categories . . .

Healthcare Informatics, November 1998
As our audience grew, we had to put our best face before the cameras.

Two months earlier, in September, Junglee, which had been founded three months after Neoforma, was sold to Amazon.com for nearly two hundred million dollars in stock...

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October 1998 - Focus

1/19/2015

 
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Neoforma Designs Website to Offer Medical Search Engine.
Online matchmaker. A website takes a page from amazon.com by linking healthcare professionals to medical products, hardware and services . . .

American Medical News, October 19, 1998
Healthcare Goes Online
Neoforma brings medical community closer via the Web. Until now, the healthcare industry has been slow to move its business processes to the Internet — but that’s changing. Neoforma Inc. is joining VHA Inc. and other companies building online trading communities for the healthcare industry . . .

Information Week, October 19, 1998
Neoforma Makes Itself Indispensable to Buyers and Sellers
The reactions of some of the first buyers and sellers to Neoforma, a new market targeted at hospitals, are the kind that any infomediary could envy. These guys are doing several things right . . .

Net Market Makers October 26, 1998
So much that hadn’t been possible before suddenly seemed inevitable. We passionately came to believe that it was our responsibility to pursue every opportunity.

The Chief Medical Officer of one of the world’s largest aid organizations was going to be quoted in an upcoming article saying that Neoforma was the—sort of—“medical Yahoo” of search engines...

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August 1998 - A Flashback

1/15/2015

 
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Online bookseller Amazon.com said Tuesday it agreed to buy Junglee, a software company that makes it easy to comparison shop on the Web, and PlanetAll, a Web-based address book and reminder service.
Under terms of the transactions, Amazon will issue 1.6 million of its shares—worth $173.2 million based on Monday’s closing stock price of $108.25—for all shares and options of Junglee . . .

Wired News Report, August 4, 1998
A company’s psyche develops slowly, imperceptibly. Old patterns merge with new traditions to form an entirely new cultural tapestry.

Just before graduating from architectural college, I burned out of school in spectacular fashion. I used the excuse that I had run out of money and jumped into a chaotic cycle of exploration...

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July 1998 - Spinning Rooms

1/14/2015

 
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Neoforma Uses Immersive Imaging from Be Here for Groundbreaking Medical Facility Planning Application
Neoforma, Inc. and Be Here Corporation today launched the first-of-its-kind, state-of-the-art virtual reality tour of a medical facility at neoforma.com. Healthcare professionals and medical facility architects around the world can now tour the real world, 1000-room University of Chicago Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine (CAM) from the convenience of their desktop with Be Here’s immersive images . . .

Neoforma Press Release, July 1998
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Panographic image of a medical linear accelerator room
Spinning rooms and not much more.

That was the description that one of our competitors would later use to belittle us. However, I was quite flattered by this characterization. In a time when none of the companies that competed with Neoforma had offered anything original or substantial, we had something quite grand...

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September 1998 - A Classic Scene

1/14/2015

 
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Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, California
I am not one who can live in a stereotype without subconsciously fighting it.

Trapped as I was in the role of an aggressive, dotcom entrepreneur, I lacked many, if not most, of the habits of the natives...

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Afterthoughts - 12 Things to Keep In Mind

1/10/2015

 
Having generally disclaimed all right and ability to draw concise conclusions from my business experience, I will now acquiesce to many early readers of Starting Something who asked me to summarize my advice for managers and entrepreneurs.

My partner, Jeff, and I did many things right that would have been wrong in another place or time. And we did many things wrong that would have been right in other circumstances. Luck plays a substantial role in the fate of young companies. However, there are some principles that are true beyond place and time. Here is what I would have liked to have had posted above my desk throughout the days at my first company, and what I now refer back to often:

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June 1998 - Walla

1/9/2015

 
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Letting go felt very good—until I lost my grip.

Jeff and I were getting tired. Tired of wearing so many hats to work each day. I fantasized what it would be like to focus on only a few jobs at a time...
Independent middle managers, that’s what we needed. Just a few talented people who could relieve our burden in several areas. We were much too picky to ignore the little things. There were many parts of the company neither Jeff nor I had time to run as well as we believed they should be run—like managing the software development process.

I had been searching for someone to run a programming group. Most of the dozens of people I interviewed had high expectations, but showed little promise. Most of them had nowhere near the management experience that I had. Yet they expected salaries that were half again or double mine. I wanted someone more experienced than me at managing technology personnel, not someone just out of school.

The headhunters sympathized, “That’s just the way the market is right now. These are the most sought-after people in the Valley. Most of the good ones have already been hired by the consumer-oriented Internet start-ups. And we can’t get their attention because they’re vesting their options that are worth a small fortune. When they cash out, they’ll probably retire. If you change your mind and decide you’re willing to pay a quarter to a half million, we might be able to find some candidates with more than a couple of years of experience.”

I had this momentary vision of putting my own résumé out there, getting a job making so much money without the daily fear of going broke, or the constant worry over what was not getting done. It hadn’t really occurred to me how much experience I had gained in the last two years. I was a veritable veteran of the Internet boom. Scary thought, because I felt that I knew so little about the frontier I was heading into.

I was trying to hire guides, only to find that they didn’t know much more about the territory than I. I didn’t want to become a technologist. I wanted to hire one. Candidates with just a moderate knowledge of the Internet and people management skills would do fine, but I couldn’t even find those.

Typically, I tended to gravitate toward unconventional résumés. So, when I saw on Larry’s résumé that he had experience as a software team manager and was a part-time Olympic gymnastics coach, I was intrigued. Really, that was what I was looking for—a coach—someone to guide a bunch of smart, quirky programmers with social skills even worse than mine and egos as large as the Valley.

When I interviewed Larry, a tall, matter-of-fact man with a large smile, I thought he would fit the task nicely. He seemed to have many of the characteristics I was looking for. So I hired him.

In addition to the priority I set on hiring someone to run our programming group, I was looking for someone to improve and expand the use of words on our website. The challenge was to find someone who had both the skills of a liberal arts major and the ability to understand and thrive in the wake of the collision between technology, healthcare, business and investment.

Emma was one of the most promising candidates for the job. One reason that Emma said she wanted to leave her middle management job as an editor of the Oracle website was the ruthless nature of the corporate culture. Yet, I could see that she was clearly a product of that environment too. She was aggressive and opinionated. She talked fast and conveyed a desire to take control of something new. I couldn’t help but think of the dire warnings by Denis about the heartless management style at Oracle. But I needed managers who were willing to take control of key parts of this evolving company.

It looked like Larry and Emma would be able to take complete control of their areas. And it was a welcome relief to me. At last I could get further down my endless list of things to do.

But as the months went by, I became concerned about how infrequently they consulted with me for direction. Eventually, I realized that they had taken it quite literally when I said I wanted to hire people who would come into the company and take control. They had been treating the assorted requests and directions I sent them on an almost hourly basis as if they were simply “suggestions.”

I was confident that I could easily clarify things by discussing it with them. They both said they knew I was very busy and were simply following my request to get things done, but said they’d consult with me more often in the future.

This eased my mind — until I found out from Jeff that Larry and Emma had immediately gone to his office and complained that I was meddling in their affairs. If I had really hired them to run their parts of the company, I should give them the authority to do so. If not, then maybe they should go somewhere else.

Jeff did not like to get involved in conflicts between me and other employees. He told them what they wanted to hear—that I had been running these parts of the company for years, so it was only natural for me to want to continue to influence the direction of the website and that he’d have a talk with me.

Jeff encouraged me to give them a bit more room to do their jobs. I told him it was a bad sign that they had smiled in my face, then run to him to complain about me. They seemed to have decided that I was simply an obstruction to be worked around.

It reminded me of my days at Varian, where battles between middle managers inundated the company with inefficiency and mediocrity. I sensed that they cared more about their power than their product. Jeff disagreed. Since nobody else was complaining about them, I hesitantly ascribed my concerns to my need for control. The last thing I wanted to do was to let my personal insecurities affect the company.

At first Todd, who was still in charge of the look and feel of the website, liked the idea of having allies at a management level. He was emboldened by their increasing agreement with him on some of the issues he and I had disagreed on over the last year and a half. I noticed a change in him too. He included me in fewer decisions and instead chose to run things by Jeff. Jeff was focused primarily on investors and key business partners. He was used to me handling detail-oriented issues and assumed that I would work these conflicts out on my own. Todd, and others, considered the absence of negative feedback an endorsement for whatever they wanted to do.

This was working great for Todd, until Larry and Emma turned on him and began to dispute some of his decisions. Suddenly, he was the incensed one. He had taken the Neoforma website from an obscure, rather plain destination and turned it into an international attraction, and a thing of beauty. Who were they to question his judgment?

Seeking an ally, Todd came to me complaining about their underhandedness and lack of respect. He said that when he’d told them I had already directed him on a major design issue, they’d said, “Wayne doesn’t run the company, Jeff does.” It created the desired effect. I was very upset.

I ranted at Jeff, “I hired these two. How could they be so disrespectful, so disloyal? They’re both competent, but they’re sneaky and under- handed. They constantly whisper behind closed doors. We are not a culture of closed doors. These aren’t the kind of people we want to build out our company. They are creating a culture of division. We have never tolerated that before. Why should we put up with it now?”

Jeff listened respectfully to my tirade, then responded gently. He knew that I was overworked and he knew I was a control freak. “Come on Wayne. They are just trying to do the job you hired them to do. Let’s give them time to prove themselves. Right now there is too much work to do.”

In all matters except money, Jeff and I had always been able to agree to disagree. Many of our arguments had been heated, to say the least. But we had always been able to make difficult decisions, one way or another.

And over the years, we’d developed a fallback plan. Whenever we couldn’t resolve an issue by talking it out, we referred to the last disagreement. Whoever had conceded on that one got the right to decide on this one. I don’t remember what the last disagreement had been, but I must have won that one because I gave in on this one.

We would keep Larry and Emma, at least until the new website was released. I would be nice to them and exert my influence less directly. Jeff had always been able to depend on me in the past and assumed that this crisis was no different than previous ones. Unfortunately, his confidence in me would prove to be overly optimistic.

On movie sets, they have a great word to describe the indecipherable background conversation over which the main characters are communicating. They call this necessary, but empty, noise, walla.

Sometimes the walla distracts us from the main story.

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    About Me

    I am an architect, writer, and serial entrepreneur. 

    I'm also a dichromatic tritan, which means I'm one of between 150 and 1,500 people in the US with this rather extreme form of colorblindness. I write about how colorblindness has profoundly affected my life's path on my other blog: dichromat.com

    My surreal journey as co-founder of Neoforma (formally NASDAQ: NEOF, later acquired by GHX) is the basis for Starting Something, a multiple award-winning book, used in many biz school entrepreneurship classes:

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