As my confidence in Neoforma increased, my situation at Varian continued to decay...
Sometimes a shove from the nest leads to flight. Sometimes it doesn’t. Time would tell.
As my confidence in Neoforma increased, my situation at Varian continued to decay... Zona Research Indicates Microsoft Internet Explorer Share Now 28 Percent We meant well. We were focused on making things better in our little corner of the world. How could we have imagined that we were causing such a fuss?
When we started Neoforma, Jeff and I considered ourselves, in part, to be champions of the small company... Department Toolkit Now Available We were going to change the world. All we had to do was let the world know.
The largest U.S. trade show for medical equipment is held every November in Chicago. I had attended, and dreaded, this show for many years... 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... 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... CompuServe, Microsoft Forge Major Strategic Alliance 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... Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 Beta Now Available 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... Neoforma opens corporate offices in Mountain View, California. Yahoo IPO closes at $33 after $43 peak 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. Neoforma incorporated. 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... Medical supplies supply the next B2B wave 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... 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... |
About MeI am an architect, writer, and serial entrepreneur. Archives
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