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Casting - More About Hiring

11/28/2014

When I finished the first draft of Starting Something, the book was too long. Going into the process, I had thought that I would struggle to come up with enough words to fill a book, so this was quite a surprise. Thanks to two great editors, most of the pruning was quite painless, making the book better with each omission. However, there was one overlong chapter that I was very reluctant to trim.

The Casting chapter is about hiring. The book’s core message is that a company’s ultimate product is its culture. How could I exclude some of our most important experiences – successes and failures? But this chapter was contrary to my objective to keep each chapter as short as possible. So I ripped the following section out of that chapter, telling myself that I’d likely release it separately at some point.

Over the years, many people have asked me to expand upon my hiring process. After much procrastination, here goes.

This section covers a period in 1998, just after our first large funding round. The market for talent was very hot, making it essential to work with recruiters. This picks up near the end of the Casting chapter. As it was extracted from the book, this prose is told in the past tense, but I still apply the same principals and practices today…

August 1996 - Casting

11/26/2014

A company’s ultimate product is its culture.

We weren’t rolling in dough, but for a time we were making more money than we were spending. And the work was piling up...

July 1996 - Two Worlds

11/25/2014

By day, I was a disempowered middle manager. By night, and on lunch hours, I was a respected business leader, speaking as an equal with the CEOs of major companies in the industry.

In our early days, we were still focused on the radiotherapy portion of healthcare. This was the area we knew best. In that in-between time, while I still worked at Varian but ran Neoforma, I existed in an odd, ethereal state...

June 1996 - Borders

11/24/2014

CompuServe, Microsoft Forge Major Strategic Alliance
CompuServe Inc. (NASDAQ: CSRV) and Microsoft Corp. today announced a far-reaching strategic alliance that includes a comprehensive technological partnership as well as marketing, distribution and commercial opportunities . . .

Microsoft Press Release June 4, 1996

There is nothing more frustrating than watching someone wear their fabric of memories and behaviors in such a way as to enshroud rather than enhance the beauty that is their unique potential.

She was charming. I first met Cassandra when a very good friend and former business partner invited me to meet his new, attractive, very stylish girlfriend...

May 1996 - The Frontier

11/21/2014

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 Beta Now Available
Microsoft Corp. today announced the immediate, worldwide availability of Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 3.0 beta software, the next generation of its popular World Wide Web browser . . . For users, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 provides a dynamic browsing experience for viewing content created in
Java, JavaScript, Netscape™ Plug-ins . . .

Microsoft Press Release
May 29, 1996

I’d like to say that we had it all figured out from the beginning. That we knew the Internet would be the hot place to be. But it wasn’t like that at all.

Our survival would depend on how efficiently we could get our message out to a diverse and potentially hostile audience. While we had great advocates using our software, we weren’t certain how openly we would be welcomed by healthcare equipment suppliers...

April 1996 - The Prequel

11/20/2014

Neoforma opens corporate offices in Mountain View, California.

April 1, 1996

Yahoo IPO closes at $33 after $43 peak
Yahoo’s much-anticipated entry to Wall Street began with a bang this morning at $24.50 per share and hit a high of $43 before closing at $33. Yahoo opened at about 8:45 a.m. PDT and shot up to $43 an hour later, which equals $1 billion for the company . . .Yahoo has been the talk on Wall Street and Silicon Valley since it filed for the offering last month, the most closely watched high-tech IPO since Netscape Communications made market history in December . . .

CNET News.com
April 12, 1996

There was no master plan. A series of chance encounters planted the seed that was to become Neoforma.

Neoforma’s first offices were located just a few blocks from my house in Mountain View, California, a suburban town near Stanford University and just south of the halfway point between San Francisco and San Jose.

March 1996 - Inking It

11/18/2014

Neoforma incorporated.

March 6, 1996

It was an inauspicious start.

Neoforma’s official beginning can be traced to a day more than three years earlier than our IPO filing. At the time, I would never have predicted the scale and intensity of the course we were about to take...

October 1999 - The Printer

11/17/2014

Medical supplies supply the next B2B wave
Take the temperature of the medical equipment supply industry and you’ll sense the next hot batch of business-to- business IPOs... Neoforma.com filed Friday for an IPO... In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a $75 million IPO, Neoforma.com disclosed that it received a final $70 million round of private funding this month...

Red Herring
October 16, 1999

Somehow, I ended up on the outside, looking in.

An initial public stock offering (IPO) represents a company’s official launch into the delightful realm of public scrutiny. It is the time when a company steps into the public limelight, drops its drawers, and says — Look at me. Here’s what I intend to offer you. To competitors, it is the first real glimpse at the company’s pricing and positioning strategy. To investors, it is the first chance to evaluate whether this new offering represents a chance to make a killing...

Starting Something - Introduction

11/16/2014

I made a few hundred million. I lost a few hundred million. But that does not in itself make this story particularly unique — considering the place and time: Silicon Valley, at the end of the twentieth century.

Back in 1996, my partner, Jeff Kleck, and I started a company called Neoforma. We started with a product. A good and needed product. But this product served a very large and complex audience — the healthcare industry. So we could only provide for its initial needs. Other people would be needed to facilitate its growth and ensure its survival. Our company had to grow into something beyond its product. As it happened, it turned into quite a large production...

Starting Something Else

11/15/2014

I have often been asked by those that have read Starting Something if I would be willing to share more than was put down in that linear sequence of pages. My standard answer has been that... "yeah... I should probably get around to that."

When I give presentations to assorted groups on the subjects touched upon in the book, I do indeed often refer to some of the chapters that I cut during the grueling editing stage. So... it is now time to get some of that stuff into the public record. I will post some of those edited chapters and sections here.

I did not write Starting Something for profit... and in this I have succeeded. While the book seems to be popular with those who read it, the current audience is primarily limited to students in classes at the many colleges that use the book. In this blog, I will gradually release all of the chapters for anyone to read. I will intersperse those posts with assorted unpublished material, random thoughts, and self-indulgent rants.

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