From English Prof to Tech Startup CEO: Steve Adams of Sabrix (Part 3)

SM: You arrived at Novell to take charge of a project that was far behind schedule. What was your strategy at that point?

SA: We spent a lot of time thinking about what we could do with the technology, specifically how to get it to the market. We made the decision, relatively quickly, to deliver it as a service via the Internet. We made it free to begin with, which allowed users to tackle the learning phase. That also let us learn what people would value.

DigitalMe was the brainchild of Mike Sheridan, who was one of the Java guys at Sun. I told them to give me 90 days and we would try and attract the right kind of audience. We then got folks like AOL on board, and we launched DigitalMe. It was the first germane Internet story that Novell ever had. We attracted financial analysts, industry analysts, financial press, and business press in a way that Novell had not previously been able to do. We moved the market cap of the company $800 million on the day we launched.

No good deed goes unpunished. A few weeks later we were going back to work to figure out how to monetize it, and I got a call from Stewart saying that securities analysts had moved them down from a buy to a hold standing, and they cited marketing as the reason. I told them I did not come to Novell to take a marketing job, but I was a good soldier so I took the marketing assignemtn as SVP of Marketing for Novell, knowing that it would be a short tenure. I promised to reposition and rebrand the company, which I did over 18 months. DigitalMe died because after I left nobody focused on it. Instances of similar technologies came out, like American Express Blue Card, Microsoft Passport, and many others since then.

SM: What year does that bring us to?

SA: Around the end of 2000, which was when I was granted my unconditional release. I really liked the general manager role while I had it, and I decided that I would go get a CEO job at a startup.

SM: Where?

SA: A Sequoia-backed firm called Uniscape. I was there for about 18 months and transitioned it from the Internet bubble era. It was globalization software. You could take all of your content in one language, pass it through our translation engine, and it would come out whatever language you wanted on the other end. It was a 95% solution, and after that you had to go to a manual review. I sold that company in May of 2002 to a German company that was later purchased by SDL.

I got recruited to Sabrix in the middle of the transaction. I told them I could not take their offer at that time because it was not clear if I would have to join the merged entity or not. They were generous enough to wait for me. I finished my transition on a Friday and started at Sabrix that Monday.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From English Prof to Tech Startup CEO: Steve Adams of Sabrix
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