From English Prof to Tech Startup CEO: Steve Adams of Sabrix (Part 4)

SM: What is the story of Sabrix before you entered the picture?

SA: There were three founders who were IT professionals at Techtronix. The CFO there, Carl Neun, was one of the early guys who recognized the need to take disparate systems and centralize on a central instance of Oracle. While there are a lot of people doing those things today, he was doing this in 1995–1997. Gary Allen was the IT lead on a $55 million project to centralize all of the applications on a single instance of Oracle. What they found was there was no way to centralize the transaction task component. There was no product available. He commissioned the team to build it, and they built an instance of it. The tax community is relatively small, and people started pinging them about what they had done and how they had done it.

They saw a business opportunity, so the three of them decided to first go into a consulting role. That was in the late 1990s. In 2000 they took their first round of funding and incorporated Sabrix to build a company to go after the transaction tax space.

Ironically, over the next 18 months they began to feel that the opportunity was as an application service provider. This was an application most appropriately delivered in an on-demand platform. However, it was the nuclear winter of software and software startups were collapsing everywhere. To be a small company handling financial transactions in an ASP model was not going to work.

MDV came out and invested in 2001. They really shifted the focus to taking their platform and moving to the enterprise. They completed that around the time I joined on June 3rd. We shipped the first enterprise software application on June 26th.

SM: When you arrived the company had just delivered a product. No revenue.

SA: No revenue and no significant go-to-market piece. They had some fits and starts in the sales and marketing side. My goal was to bring a sales and marketing focus to the company and build out the sales and marketing infrastructure. That is what we did.

SM: What caught your attention about this opportunity?

SA: My roots are all in marketing. One of the toughest things is that I was always less intrigued by the technology than the business problem. After having been in a number of jobs where it was really cool technology in search of a business problem, I decided I had been through it enough.

One of the most important things I learned was during my marketing tenure at Novell. If we had a Jacuzzi and we were selling that, we would have flipped it upside down and talked about the copper pipes, the heaters, and the motors. What we had to do was flip that Jacuzzi right side up and look at the experience. It is beautiful, the water is warm, the steam is rising up. That is how it is sold. Don’t show the plumbing, show the allure.

In the experience of following my own guidance, the thing that really intrigued me was a very specific business problem. There was a very well defined target buyer and great return on investment for solving that problem. That just does not happen that often in Silicon Valley. It should happen all the time, but it doesn’t.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From English Prof to Tech Startup CEO: Steve Adams of Sabrix
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