David Brown
This is the story of how David Brown, along with two partners, started a small software company and grew it to $13 million in annual sales and over 100 employees. The book is not about business, it is about people. It is about how three young rag-tag twenty-somethings could conceive and run a company in a non-traditional way, providing focus on employees and customers, not on the business and profits. Yet, they became highly successful at all the things they didn’t set out to do and had a lot of fun along the way.
Originally from Montreal, Canada, David Brown is a born entrepreneur. After working for several startups, he co-founded and ran Pinpoint Technologies, a software company creating software for ambulance companies. Over the course of 10 years, he saw the company grow to over $13 million in annual sales and 100 employees. David lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife Kris and his two small children.
Prelude
The date was October 15, 1999; in many ways the best day of my life, yet I was seething mad. We had just sold the company we had built, Pinpoint Technologies, for more money than we ever thought possible. David Cohen, Bob Durkin, and I, along with our wives were out to dinner at the Red Lion Restaurant in the foothills above Boulder. The final days leading up to the sale had been frantic; I had spent the days pulling documents from files and sending them to lawyers, at night I stayed up late, often until the wee hours reading draft contract language or discussing it with our attorney.
October 15 had been the date we had chosen to close the transaction many months before. On that morning, we were scheduled to go into our attorney’s office at 8am for the signing. After going in to the office at 6am to finish some last minute faxing, David, Bob and I went to the attorney’s downtown for what we thought would be a routine process of signing the documents. Ten hours later, we emerged after having had several arguments with the other side on what amounted to trivial issues (for example, they wanted to see our mortgages to confirm that we hadn’t pledged the company to a bank).
In the end, the deal got done and we went out to celebrate. At the time, I was furious at the attorney for the acquiring company, ZOLL, who I felt was bringing up new, unimportant issues at the 11th hour. In hindsight, I blame our attorney for stirring me up as much as I blame the other side. It was just such a shame that such an important and exciting event caused so much frustration.
By the end of the dinner, my anger had subsided and we managed to have a great time, giddy in our celebrations. We even played “Russian credit card roulette” for the expensive meal, each one of us putting a credit card into a pile and letting the waiter choose. I lost.
The Birth of a Company
Pinpoint was really the brainchild of David Cohen, with whom I worked at Automated Dispatch Services (ADS) in Miami. On December 7, 1993, David suggested that we start our own company. At the time, we had at best a vague idea of what we might do, but we nevertheless went online (the Internet was virtually unheard of in 1993, but David had a CompuServe account) and formed a company. Somehow, I was officially named President and David vice-president, but we both maintained VP titles for years until we became sure of our respective roles. Bob Durkin also worked with us at ADS and we talked to him about our ideas as well, formally bringing him on board as a joint owner in 1995.
Over the years, we formulated our business plan and launched our first product, RightCAD in 1995. RightCAD was a computer-aided dispatch product for ambulance companies and was based in concept on a system that David and I had helped develop for ADS, called EMTrack.
We had no idea early on that we would be so successful; in fact, I remember a conversation in which David and I predicted that the most people that the business could ever support would be ten. By the time we sold to ZOLL in 1999 we were 50 employees and by the time I left in 2003, we were over 100.
Within 10 years of incorporation, Pinpoint would be selling $13 million dollars a year and would be recognized as a leader in its industry. Yet it had been formed on a whim, without a business plan, by a couple of guys in their 20’s who really had a lot more spirit than experience. That spirit carried us very well through the years, allowing us to adapt well to the changing environment of a growing company and overcome the many obstacles of growth. In 10 years of working together, David, Bob and I have never fought, never been petty, never allowed egos to get in the way; in fact we have never really had any major disagreement of any kind and remain best friends. Along the way, I got to work with a lot of great people in a great environment. I can honestly say that most every day of those 10 years was a lot of fun.
This book is an attempt to put to paper the spirit and environment that allowed us to be successful while at the same time recounting some of the countless funny and interesting anecdotes that we experienced along the way. Perhaps it will provide some insight into some of the things that worked well for us; perhaps it will be an interesting anecdotal story. Or perhaps not.
