Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope (Part 2)

SM: How long were you at Marimba?

DC: I stayed there for a while. I loved it, but it was a little heady. It was the beginning of the hype Internet days, and it ended up being about certain people and not very much about running a business. That ended up being a majority of my job, which was crazy. What I thought Marimba could do well was B2B. That is a boring term now, but was new then. The ability to deploy an application for procurement to a supplier and iteratively update the application and data was something that I felt would have a significant impact.

Along came an opportunity with a B2B company called Extricity. I joined them as the VP of marketing and business development and had a great time. We did a lot well and filed to go public. It is a funny, sad story. I bought new luggage and new suits so that we could go on the road show. That Friday night, the market collapsed and the bankers pulled back. However, a month later we were acquired, and that turned out well for everybody.

SM: Who acquired them?

DC: It was Peregrine, and it was not a pretty picture for those who stayed.

SM: That was a very dysfunctional company.

DC: It was. I remember that Peregrine would brag about having 24 quarters of never missing its number. They were very proud of that, but to me it meant it was just a matter of time until they did. They did eventually fall apart. The beauty of that acquisition was that there were no handcuffs on anyone’s trading. If you were that type of person, you could get out of your position on day one, and I did.

SM: Where did you go next?

DC: From there I took on my first CEO role with BizGenics. It was an analytics software company. It was a heads-up display where you could integrate disparate order management systems. Most companies have over 10 order management systems, and they have no ability to look across all of them and optimize fulfillment of all of them based on criteria such as biggest customer, best customer, or most unsatisfied customer.

SM: Why do companies have so many order management systems?

DC: It could be different lines of business, different channels, and other issues such as unintegrated acquisitions. It was really interesting, and surprisingly the norm. The idea behind the company was very solid, and we soon gained some large customers like IBM. We ran all of Compaq’s PC division as well as Schick razor blades. We were able to have a Series A funding round.

I founded that company two weeks prior to 9/11. We all know what happened to software companies after 9/11. I can remember calling DHL that morning by the airport, and there was not a single plane in the air. DHL was going crazy. You can imagine what it meant to ground all of their planes all over the world.

We were challenged to raise a Series B, and we ultimately sold the company. I am not sure anyone made money, but people got money back.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope
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