I have so many great memories from the deals I collaborated with so many people on, to sales kickoffs, President's Clubs, etc. However, I clearly remember November 4, 1999 since it was my 10 year wedding anniversary. I missed the anniversary since I got home after midnight, however, it was well worth it! That morning Mike Vollman and I took the ferry across Hudson River to Weahauken and closed, what was at the time, the largest deal in company history! On the way, we saw in the news VIGN was doing a 3-1 stock split. As we sat with legal, I was trying to calculate what that meant to Vollman! :-)
We arrived at the client first thing in the morning and didn't leave until after 9 PM, contract in hand! Like I said missing the anniversary was well worth it!
Yeah, I remember Con (and other engineers) being really interested in updates on pre-sales action. So refreshing to have that integration in a company.
Although I was long gone by then, your memory connects back to what Neil and I set out to do: create a company full of A players that was fun to work at. Neil later evolved this to "a high performance adult culture". In the early days of turning this into a way of life, everyone was "in". Everyone was at 99-100% of what they could put in. And I'd say that even more important was that each department understood why they needed to go to the mat for the other groups. The classic marketing vs. sales bullshit, or engineering vs. marketing crap.. we kept that out for a long time. Everyone saluted, and everyone knew that it was about getting the deal done. I remember Con coming up to me on the last day of either Q3 or Q4 1997 and asking my why the sales bell wasn't ringing yet, and should he be worried ? Imagine that -- an engineer calculating the revenue line in his head -- You and Mike squatting onsite until you had a signed contact is just that. -- Thanks for sharing.