Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle (Part 4)

SM: I know you sold ChiliSoft to Cobalt, but didn’t they get purchased by Sun?

CC: They were purchased by Sun about five months later. Sun had to have known about the purchase ahead of acquiring Cobalt. It is part of their platform now. We closed the deal when Sun stock was about $64, before the reverse split. We watched it go all the way down, telling ourselves it would never go below $30, then telling ourselves it would never go below $20. I sold some but not all of it. It went all the way down to $2.39 at the bottom, and people just held on to it.

SM: In the end did you make some money off of ChiliSoft?

CC: Yes. The interesting thing is we had fixed the number of shares versus the stock price. That is definitely a lesson learned. The venture guys looked brilliant in February of that year before the price went up. It started as a $100 million deal, went to $130 million, and by the time it was announced it was $70 million. We should have just fixed the price and nailed it down.

SM: On the receiving end, you certainly do not want to be a victim of the volatility.

CC: It was interesting with ChiliSoft. I really felt that people were underserved by software. At ChiliSoft I started an internal effort during the last six months that I was there to build a suite of small business applications, which were hosted integrated applications which could be sold through our ISP partners. We had deals with AT&T who had 20,000 small business customers. The idea was to do subscriptions for $2-$3. This was in 1999, right around when SalesForce was starting.

SM: What year was the Cobalt deal?

CC: We closed in 2000, but we started talking in 1999. I was encouraged out the door because I was not happy like a lot of founders are.

SM: What did you do after you left?

CC: I went down to Costa Rica to try and decompress. I chilled out and learned Spanish. I was introduced to someone who worked with street kids and listened to her story. I then ended up flying to Nicaragua to see what was going on. That changed my life. I got involved in human rights issues there. I did a documentary on it and worked with a bunch of rights associations out of New York trying to get some intervention. There were tens of thousands of kids in Latin America.

SM: I grew up in Calcutta, India. Street kids are a much bigger number there. There is an organization we support called Future Hope. It is run by an English guy who lives in Calcutta and has built a home for street kids. He is taking them off the street and giving them a family. There are probably a hundred thousand street kids there.

CC: It is tragic. At some point I realized this is systemic and we need changes. That became very frustrating. It is hard to have an effect because they just keep coming. We have an international economic structure that is not conducive to changing this.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle
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