In January of 2003 the CEO of I/O let the company know that he was leaving to join Halliburton. That made working for the company much less attractive to me.
Around the same time a headhunter started calling me asking if I would be interested in joining a small software company that was recently created out of an industry sponsored consortium. I think my first interview was in December of 2002 I finally received an offer in May of 2003.
I started the job June 1, 2003. OpenSpirit had 18 employees at the time, and under $2 million in sales. Our cash position was precarious, and I was brought in to try and take this company to a stage where we could sell it.
The Company was dedicated to upstream (that is, exploration and production), subsurface (that is, seismic data and interpretations, well log data and interpretations, and other information associated with the view of the earth model), middleware (software that performs operations between data and applications. Think of plumbing.) Our clients were mostly the Information Technology and Data Management departments in the oil companies. The users were mostly geologists and geophysicists.
My first day on the job was in Stavanger, Norway. The EAGE (European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers) convention was being held there. We also had a user forum in town. It was an eye opening experience. The team was good, but the clients had many, many issues with the software. (Most of it focused on the speed of the operation and what sort of data the application move)
The company was funded with a reasonable amount of capital for the market size. There were a couple of other companies that were started at the same time with similar goals (Trade Ranger and PetroCosm were the two biggest. They each had investments of about $100 million each. We had, to this point, about $4.5 million)who crashed and burned well before I even started with OpenSpirit.
The Company was funded by Schlumberger Technology Company, Shell Technology Ventures, and Chevron Technology Ventures. Later, we added Paradigm Geophysical as a balancing partner to Schlumberger.
We did go through several small rounds of capital before we brought in a large round when Paradigm joined. In a small company like this, cash was always the problem that was hanging over your head. It didn't really help that nobody in the company has any experience working for a start-up. I would have company meetings regularly where I would express my discomfort at the state of our Balance Sheet. I found no commiseration. But by virtue of the fact that we were small and lean, we were able to make money for almost every year I was running the company.
We grew pretty strongly in the middle years of my tenure. We had a good team, though at times rather dysfunctional. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that management was fired, management quit, and the company survived in spite of both events. (de mortuis nil nisi bonum).
The decision to sell the company, and the process we went through deserve their own post.
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