It took almost six months for my former company IronPort’s acquisition by Cisco to close and it seemed like forever. Although I was still the CEO by name, I was essentially running a “puppet” government with every hire, major expense and strategic shift needing explicit approval from my soon-to-be-overlords. Since Cisco was a functionally organized…
More »“We like what you guys are doing but there’s no way we’d replace the aorta of our communications infrastructure with a beta box from a 20-person startup.” —Director of IT, Fidelity Investments (circa 2002) Call it the enterprise startup conundrum: how do you earn legitimacy if no one will give you an opportunity to become…
More »I had a real struggle preparing to be a public company CEO. And it had little to do with having scalable internal systems or making the quarterly numbers… I just couldn’t keep secrets from my employees. As CEO of IronPort, I wanted to be completely transparent with my entire team but my board of seasoned…
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