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Saying Something

The Interviews - Part 7 - Hiring and Firing

8/2/2018

 
This is the seventh in a series of 11 videos produced by the Smeal College of Business at The Pennsylvania State University. This one focuses on team recruiting, growth, and culture.

July 1999 - The Cast - Part 2

2/5/2015

 
The last big position we had to fill was someone to lead our engineering organization...

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July 1999 - The Cast - Part 1

2/4/2015

 
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Chemdex Shines on Market Debut
Chemdex, an online seller of laboratory chemicals and equipment with sales of $29,000 last year, rose almost 60 percent in its first day of public trading . . . The Palo Alto, California–based company rose 8.87 to 23.87 . . . The company closed with a market value of $758.65 million.

Chemdex’s investors include Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers . . . The company will use $30 million of the net proceeds to fund anticipated operating losses . . . It will use the rest of the proceeds . . . possibly to acquire complementary businesses, it said.

CNET News.com, July 28, 1999
Doing what’s good is not always what’s best.

At first, I didn’t see much of Bob...

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June 1999 - The Star - Part 3

2/3/2015

 
Here's the rest of The Star. Things get a bit surreal and intense...

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June 1999 - The Star - Part 2

2/2/2015

 
Here's part two about our quest for a new CEO...

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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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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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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...

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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…

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August 1996 - Casting

11/26/2014

 
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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...

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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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