Triangle Tweener Talks

00:00:03 - Chris Evans
We wanted to see if a couple of kids from North Carolina could get rich and famous doing software, but it wasn't. We had in our mind said, okay, how do we want this story to end? And so when there were opportunities to end the story, we weren't looking for them and we didn't recognize

Announcer - welcome to Triangle tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between. With an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Tweener Talks is produced by Earfluence. Now here is your host, serial Founder and General Partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo.

00:00:44 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to this episode of Triangle Tweener Talks featuring Chris Evans. Did you know the first Windows email application was born right here in the Triangle? Chris Evans started his first company in 1985 while he was a freshman at NC State and the company was called DaVinci Systems. They started out as consulting and then build the world's first email program with a graphical user interface on Windows. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors, bank of America, whose transformative technology group helps game changing tech businesses and founders realize their boldest ambitions across a wide range of technology sectors. Robinson Bradshaw, a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle startup ecosystem Smashing Boxes, a Durham based design centric digital transformation company and our friends at Eisner Amper, one of the largest business consulting firms with a dedicated technology practice offering outsourcing, accounting, tax and advisory services. Their experienced professionals serve more than 2,000 technology companies from early stage startups to public companies. Discover how they can help you across a wide range of company size projects like international expansion, M and A or IPO@eisneramper.com Tech and special thanks to our friends at Earfluence who helped produce this podcast. Chris's second company, Accipiter, was famous in the 90s for selling Asipitor to CMGI and delivering a tremendous outcome that later became an even bigger outcome as CMGI rode to the top of the Internet wave. In fact, if you were fortunate enough to be in one of the very early Triangle investment groups called TIG and you wrote a $25,000 check into their round that would have delivered to you $1 million, it's a wild story that could only have happened in the 90s during the dot com boom. And in addition to some great business stories, Chris shares some personal lessons he's learned and I think as any founder we can really learn A lot from this, some lessons around hubris, what to do when the universe feels like it doesn't want you to succeed in some ways, what happens when your best friend basically fires you? So I've known Chris a long time and some of these stories were new to me and very heartfelt from Chris. I appreciate him coming on. We dug really deep into these because I thought it was really interesting and a lot of lessons for you guys. So we are going to have Chris back on for. We only covered like maybe one third of his career, which has been he's done a million things, so there's a lot more to learn. But this will set the stage for that and I really enjoyed it and appreciate Chris for coming on and spending so much time. And he also bought props. So if you watch the video version of this on YouTube, you'll see he bought some interesting memorabilia from 40 years ago when he had started DaVinci software. So let's jump in. This is a great one. Here is my conversation with Chris Evans.

00:03:49 - Chris Evans
I was born in Buffalo, New York, moved to Rochester, which is about an hour and a half. It's like the Greensboro of Buffalo, if you will. And then when in 1980, my dad took a job with Nortel and moved the family down here. So that was just before I was starting high school, which was great for me because I didn't really relate well. I was the only computer geek I knew in my small town in New York and didn't feel like there was, didn't feel like I had a tribe. And I come down here and by some small miracle, the Yenlo Magnet program here in Raleigh had just started. Even though I was woefully late to the party, they wound up making room for me. And so my first day of school in North Carolina was on a bus that had two of my co founders for my first company, as well as a number of other people who were deeply smart, interested in the same things that I was interested in, really passionate. They would spend a couple hours a day to go to a school so they could take an extra hour of math or science or Russian or whatever. And so all of a sudden I was sort of dropped into my tribe and it was like a rebirth. It was very exciting.

00:05:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. People may not remember Nortel. So that sounds for Northern Telecom and it was a Canadian company that had, you know, was selling. They sold like the back. Backend gear for telephone companies.

00:05:15 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah. When you have a phone office and I want to. Back when I want to call you and I punch a Bunch of numbers in, and then it goes through a switch to be able to connect to you. Those switches first were analog and then Nortel pioneered a digital switch. So these things were happening in silicon and it made it very clear, it made it run with a lot less energy, made everything run more efficiently. And Nortel was like right at the front of that. And it turned out my dad was running the technical support for that wave of new products that they were launching. And so he was kind of in a key position of making sure that when customers had a problem that they were resolved very quickly. So I saw that and kind of came up with soldering irons and circuit boards and wiring things. And that was stuff I would do for fun with my brothers and sisters at that time. Yeah.

00:06:07 - Scot Wingo
Was your dad technical or. He had just kind of gotten into this through being a manager of support.

00:06:11 - Chris Evans
Yeah. So technically he didn't go to college. Unfortunately, his dad died just after he graduated high school. And so he wound up going straight to work to put his younger brother through high school and into college. But he wound up being the 13th man on a 12 man Wurlitzer assembly line. So he had to basically be able to do every job. And then he was a line working on phone lines and services, like out on the line poles, going into office, correcting things, eventually working his way into management through that way. But he always knew sort of in depth how all the things work technically, what was going on. Yeah.

00:06:46 - Scot Wingo
So I think the train tinker kind of thing.

00:06:48 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And I think that was a value that came in through the house.

00:06:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Do you have a world?

00:06:52 - Chris Evans
You know, I don't.

00:06:53 - Scot Wingo
I should get one with like the bubbles. A world tour is a jukebox and at this point in time, they're piping 45. Is that like little.

00:07:01 - Chris Evans
Oh, yeah.

00:07:02 - Scot Wingo
Like kind of more records.

00:07:03 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just really probably one of those things that, you know, went from being. Nobody knows what that is to it being retro cool these days. So I probably should have gotten one 10 years ago when nobody wanted one. Now it's, you know, now they're probably hard to get.

00:07:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. They're tricky.

00:07:19 - Chris Evans
Cool.

00:07:20 - Scot Wingo
So then you. I didn't realize that Enlo was such a, you know, I know the magnet program, but I didn't know, like, there was such a concentration of folks that would. We would hear about later.

00:07:28 - Chris Evans
Yeah. So, yeah, there was a, you know, just on the school bus. Not only were there our group, there were several people. So Brian Harry, who was our cto, was with us. He went on to be part of the School of Science and Math. Several other people on the bus were also part of that. I think the dean of the Carolina Law School was on the bus with us. The Register of Deeds for Raleigh was on the bus with us. There were other people who designed projects that went on the space shuttle, other tech people who moved out to Silicon Valley.

00:07:57 - Scot Wingo
Wow.

00:07:58 - Chris Evans
It was. Yeah. I mean, it was just sort of this fabulous connection of people who sort of moved to North Carolina with their families when RTP started up. And so we all kind of came from technical backgrounds and found these connections. So two of the people that I started DaVinci Systems with, Bill Nussi and Paul Ramsey, were on the bus with me. And it started out as an argument. I had an Apple computer back when that was a thing. And they had TRS 80s. And there was this argument.

00:08:29 - Scot Wingo
Trash 80s, yes.

00:08:30 - Chris Evans
And they.

00:08:30 - Scot Wingo
I'm an Apple guy too.

00:08:31 - Chris Evans
So they were arguing that the microprocessor, the really geeky stuff, the microprocessor, the TRS 80, the superiority of that versus the what, 6,000, 502? I think the Apple chip. My argument was, yes, but Apple has color. And I think I won that argument in terms of where things sat. But we kind of understood that we cared about these things closely. We actually started the computer club at Enloe together and kind of got that going. And Bill and Paul actually created a little software business for the TRS 80 when they were still in high school. So we had already kind of been involved with getting some things started together and working as a team and having some notion of business. Bill brought me into something called Junior Achievement, which at the time was this kind of fun thing where you would go out and a group of maybe 15 kids would start a company together and they'd run it for about from September to March, I would say, with a company, team of advisors of adults who would advise you in it. And so you would make some product and go out and sell it. And you'd have a finance person who was keeping the records of finance and production, who was managing the productivity and marketing, and a CEO that was overseeing everything. And you kind of learn how these systems worked and how they interoperated. And so I wound up doing that for four straight years. It was really tremendously beneficial to me and some of the other people in that program. Bill Nussey, Alan Fulcrod, who was the. Another great entrepreneur in town, also went through it. Unfortunately, it takes the number of adults it takes to sort of teach a small number of people through this process makes it really hard to sustain, particularly as you sort of move to different priorities in different cultures. So they do some things in school now, but at that time it was really formative. Also, I had an older brother when we moved down here. He had a disc jockey business where he would go and do weddings and birthday parties and things. When he moved down here, he bought out the couple of his friends up in New York and brought me on as his partner. And so we would be going out on weekends and, you know, just sort of setting up lights and music and playing for parties and everything. Yeah. And so I was already doing that kind of business as well and kind of getting a sense of, okay, how do you market? And you're a roadie, how do you basically. Yeah, yeah.

00:10:59 - Scot Wingo
The sweatshirt and the hoodie.

00:11:00 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah. Working for that minimum wage, as Jackson Brown would say. But yeah. So it's. So there was already this notion that starting a business was not daunting. By the time I graduated high school, I'd done it five times in different ways and been a part of it.

00:11:18 - Scot Wingo
But it's interesting, your dad was a corporate guy. Did you not want to do that or just didn't really think about it. You just thought this was fun.

00:11:24 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And I'm the fifth of six kids, and I've heard from other people this notion that the fifth kid, if you have five or more kids, the fifth kid tends to be the entrepreneur. And some of it is. Some of the other stuff was taken. Right. My brothers were good at sports, couldn't do that. I played an instrument, but others had already done music. Others had done some things academically, and so really just trying to find my space. Entrepreneurship was exciting there. And it was also like the people that I felt closest to were also drawn towards entrepreneurship. Yeah. Bill Nussey and I would go on to be best friends. We were best man at each other's weddings. And we were just really, really close and connected and looking for ways that we could work together. And entrepreneurship seemed to be a key to that. So when we graduated high school, we both wound up at NC State. He was a year ahead of me, but when we went to, we got into this time of year. So this is 40 years ago, it's Christmas break. Paul Ramsey, who's with us, is really good at coding. He was at the Naval Academy, but was getting ready to leave there and sort of go a different pathway. And there was a fourth founder, Matt Ako. Matt was a few years younger than us, but really, really smart. When he started in 9th grade at Denlo. He was taking basically 12th grade English, advanced calculus, other things. His dad was a very famous professor at NC State. Just really well educated. His family was also very connected. He saw opportunities to be able to do some software consulting if he had some friends who could write code and put some things together. For a long time we just felt like he was a guy that basically made up a lot of stuff. He would tell these stories about, you know, my friend who's the colonel, who runs the NORAD program under the mountain in Colorado, watching for ICBMs and my other friends, and all these things are going on. And then at one point, Bill called him on it, and then Matt basically showed him, no, these things are real. And Bill is like, oh, we should do something with this. And so we thought, okay, let's start a company. We have a bunch of, you know, we know a lot of other computer geek friends.

00:13:49 - Scot Wingo
This is while you're at State?

00:13:50 - Chris Evans
Yes, we are.

00:13:51 - Scot Wingo
We were friends one year in or.

00:13:52 - Chris Evans
Yeah, so this is. This is my freshman winter break. It's Bill's sophomore winter break. But we felt like we had a lot of friends that were good at computers. And the PC had just come out. So this is 85. Yep, 84.

00:14:04 - Scot Wingo
85.

00:14:05 - Chris Evans
Right. So the PC had just recently come out. It didn't. So nobody really had more experience with it than we did because it had just. It's a new platform. We thought, well, gee, we could probably, you know, pimp out our friends to local businesses who needed software written and computer set up and all these other things. Hey, can you do these things and we can make some money on the side and see where it goes. And so DaVinci started out that way, pretty much just doing any odd job that somebody needed someone who knew how to work computers to do. But within a year, that really changed. And I think that's something that, as I think back on it, there's different reasons for starting a company. This was really just. We saw an opportunity to do something that we felt energized about doing. So let's just go do that.

00:14:49 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, you're poor college kids. You know how to work on computers.

00:14:52 - Chris Evans
Any money people need help with computers.

00:14:54 - Scot Wingo
Why not make a little extra money?

00:14:56 - Chris Evans
Yeah, but what happened was that. And at that time, right, there were no software businesses in Raleigh. I mean, sas, which did something mysterious and carry that we didn't quite understand.

00:15:06 - Scot Wingo
Mainframes.

00:15:06 - Chris Evans
But as far as, like, PC businesses that you could understand and see yourself starting up, there wasn't really a lot going on here. And it was kind of, you know, the computer business was like, was like the movie business. It was something that you read about in magazines that happen on the other side of the country. But then in that first year, we wound up having an opportunity to go to comdex, which is, you know, was the big trade show where everyone showed up to show off what it is that they're doing in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, yeah. So the four of us are like living in one double room. You know, we have one room with two beds in it in Vegas and we're.

00:15:42 - Scot Wingo
You're not even 21 yet.

00:15:43 - Chris Evans
No. Yeah, it's crazy.

00:15:45 - Scot Wingo
Very hard to travel.

00:15:46 - Chris Evans
Hard to travel. It was also, it turns out if you, if you win any money in Vegas, they want to see your id, which means that you can't claim what you win. But when we're out there, we wound up crashing a bunch of parties, right. As they were a bunch of teenagers. And so we were, we would go to like Microsoft's party and we, we, you know, we went to the Dell computer booth and there's Michael Dell schlepping computers out of his booth and we go to Microsoft. Actually was in a cab line with the president of Microsoft, John Shirley at the time. And I'm just like this 19 year old kid and it's like, I see his badges, I see you work at Microsoft. What do you do? And he kind of looks down his glasses at me. I'm president, right. It's like, well, cool.

00:16:27 - Scot Wingo
What's the president do?

00:16:28 - Chris Evans
What does that do? But it was just kind of this wild time this week. We can't. It's like we snuck out of the circus tent. We couldn't believe it. But coming back, we looked and we thought, you know, we could do this. There's nothing they're doing that we could.

00:16:42 - Scot Wingo
Well, Bill Gates was like, he was like. When he started Microsoft, he was like 18.

00:16:46 - Chris Evans
17.

00:16:46 - Scot Wingo
18.

00:16:47 - Chris Evans
Yeah. I mean, fun fact is, about the only person who worked at Microsoft younger than Bill Gates was Matt Alco. So when we got out there, Matt wound up making friends. The original team that wrote Microsoft Windows got to go to Vegas as an incentive for them finishing the software before comdex. And so they were the only other people our age walking around. And so we got to be friends with them. Matt impressed them and they recruited him to come join their team. So he moved out to work with Microsoft.

00:17:14 - Scot Wingo
They broke up your merry band.

00:17:16 - Chris Evans
Yeah, but it was a good thing because Matt gained a lot of intelligence at that point. Windows was this thing that Microsoft was pushing that was kind of graphic y but nobody knew if it was going to catch on where it was going. It's hard to think of now, but it was by far a certain thing. What Matt knew because he was on the team was that IBM had basically decided to give the win to Microsoft and make Windows a part of IBM's platform, which meant it was going to be a part of everybody's. So we knew in advance that Windows was going to blow up. So now we're thinking, okay, right now we're doing consulting, which means if we're going to, we're basically charging by the hour. So if you want to make more, you have to work more. Yeah, and we wanted to make more and work less or make, make more without having to work more. Well, either one was fine and started to get hard.

00:18:06 - Scot Wingo
Like classes start to ramp up too.

00:18:07 - Chris Evans
And you're kind of like, yeah, yeah, it, it, it was, I mean, and we were, I mean I'm, you know, electrical engineering is not, is, is hard to do kind of as a hobby in terms of those classes. But I, I, we, we managed for a while. I mean we were, what did you.

00:18:23 - Scot Wingo
ECE versus compsa.

00:18:26 - Chris Evans
So ECE had just come out that year. What it came down to was ece. You didn't have to take thermodynamics, which was a, you know, which sounded like a good thing. But I also, the me at that time wanted to take the toughest thing that NC State had to offer, which was ee. Yeah. And so, and at that point in.

00:18:48 - Scot Wingo
Time Comp Sci was in the math department. I had the same thing at South Carolina and like, and it was kind of boring because like you couldn't learn. Some of this engineering stuff was interesting but like over there it was no design theory, none of that kind of stuff. It was just like more math. Like, like a lot of math. And the first also is back end loaded. So you'd like do almost all math for the first two years and then a little comps on the back end. And I was like, yeah, when do I get the program?

00:19:12 - Chris Evans
Well the same thing was with engineering.

00:19:13 - Scot Wingo
Year three you'll get a lot of programming. Like I kind of want to know.

00:19:16 - Chris Evans
The same thing with engineering. It wasn't until my junior year I realized I'm never going to learn how a TV set works. In this electrical engineering degree I thought I was going to learn sort of all the magic of how the things around me worked. And I realized that no, that's, I guess Beneath what I would be doing. But yeah. And they load you up with a lot of math. The only computer science class I wound up taking, it was just depressing. You went into this basement, There were a bunch of green screen terminals where you typed a bunch of arcane stuff into a. Into a computer to make it do what everyone else had done before you. There was no creativity, no inventiveness.

00:19:52 - Scot Wingo
In high school, you already had an Apple ii. Imagine. So you already, like, you already had a personal computer that was color. So now you're like going back into the old school.

00:19:59 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And overall, and I think this is different with computers now. People buy computers to run code that other people have written. Yeah, right. And when that original space with like an Apple ii, mostly you had a computer that it was like a blank canvas. You could make it do anything that you could imagine. You just had to sort of learn how to make it do that. And some of it was iterative. I would. There were magazines that would have, like, games that you could put on your computer by typing, line by line, every line of code and written in the magazine and run it. And inevitably you get some things wrong. But you learned about how code worked by debugging it. Where do I think the code went wrong? How well do I understand the code? To understand if this happened, it must be in this section. And then you can go and say, well, gee, I want five lives instead of three. Where's the code? Where do I tweak the code to do that? Or I want to change the ending of the game so that it does this. And so you start. You're not necessarily starting from scratch, but you're modifying things and you gain that power. And so to me, a lot of the fun of it, it's. If I was interested in cars, the ability having a shop where I could make whatever car I wanted is way out of my range. Maybe after doing other things for a long time, I might be able to afford that. This was a machine where anything in that machine's world I had the power to create. And that's just. I mean, that's really powerful. And it's kind of. It's a little depressing how few people actually see it that way. Now. I think that original wave, what people thought was this was the device. This is definitely what Steve Jobs was thinking, what other people. This is the device that is going to free people to think differently more broadly, with more possibilities, to provide creative expression to people that aren't maybe naturally artistry, musicians. And they thought that this is Going to bloom in a thousand places. And it sort of settled down into a few things that everyone is running instead.

00:21:59 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's email. I blame you.

00:22:04 - Chris Evans
Yeah, well, email. And so we come back from Vegas and we wound up thinking, okay, so we want to write, we want to sell a commercial piece of software. We want to write it once and sell it lots and lots of times instead of having to write different code for every person. And we thought, well, what should it be? And we thought, well, let's make a. This is like the worst product development, product planning ever. But it's like, let's make something that runs on Windows because we think that's going to be popular. And IBM had just pioneered a local area network so the computers could talk to each other. And we had some friends who gave us some of like the old prototype equipment from their experiments that was like, you know, free equipment for us was like, that was heaven.

00:22:48 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So back then the computers didn't. They weren't on the Internet. And to get on the Internet you would have to go through a acoustic bod kind of thing.

00:22:54 - Chris Evans
Oh, we're not even talking Internet yet. This is just having one. Having the computer talk to the computer in your office. Right. So what it had to do at that point was just, what if the computers in your office could talk to each other?

00:23:05 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And it was like token ring back then.

00:23:07 - Chris Evans
Like token ring is exactly what it was. And so we thought, well, let's write, let's make a product that uses PC's network together and Windows. And so then it was like, well, that's going to be email. And so it's like, okay, let's write email. And so we.

00:23:25 - Scot Wingo
But email existed, right. Because Usenet was out there.

00:23:29 - Chris Evans
A mini computer. Yeah. So unlike, unlike in corporations where they're on these green screen mini computers and IBM computers, there was, there was this. But if you were on a PC. No, there wasn't really any. There weren't any email options or they're just starting to come out.

00:23:45 - Scot Wingo
You'd have to like open up a console window and then like, you know, log into a bigger machine and then you do your email in there. But it wasn't a wysi. It wasn't graphical at all. Yeah, it was like very much a command line.

00:23:56 - Chris Evans
And the first step was, can I send an email to the other people in my office? Right. Just when, like, if you can connect the computers, what would you want to do? Send email to each other and share the same printer. See, everyone didn't have a printer. And Maybe share the same file server so that we can all access the same files together off of a database, let's say. So what we wound up doing, we wrote the first email to run on Microsoft Windows, the first graphical user interface email ever, as far as I know. And so we had to, I mean, you know, talk about like just open space. We wound up writing. Yeah. How do you attach a file? Oh, you need a paperclip icon. We did the paperclip icon.

00:24:36 - Scot Wingo
You did the paperclip.

00:24:37 - Chris Evans
You're attaching something, right?

00:24:39 - Scot Wingo
Precursor to Clippy.

00:24:40 - Chris Evans
Yes, yes. I'm. I'm Clippy's godfather.

00:24:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:24:45 - Chris Evans
Boy, that was. I mean, that's pretty. An obscure reach back you're going to have on the YouTube. There's going to be like an explanation of what Clippy is. It pops up somewhere right about there right now.

00:24:54 - Scot Wingo
The guy that wrote Clippy lives in the triangle now.

00:24:57 - Chris Evans
Oh, does he?

00:24:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, he worked first at Chavez. His license plate was Clippy. And he was like, ironically proud of it.

00:25:04 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would have to be ironic, but. Yeah, it was. But sort of just creating this, this program to see what we can do with it. And so it was strategically. So there was like no market. Right. It was. There were. There were some computers that were being networked together and there were some companies that were trying to figure out how to run Windows on those computers.

00:25:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, there was too many ands. It was like you had to have a PC. You have to have more than one PC and you had to be in an office and you had to have a LAN and they had to be running Windows. Yeah, so that's a lot of ands.

00:25:39 - Chris Evans
So not, not a big market. But as it turns out, in a, you know, sort of in a Forrest Gump sort of way, we sort of stumbled into something that was fortunate and that was that Microsoft was trying to convince the world that Windows was a serious platform that businesses should use and not just a toy. And so they were featuring all these. Develop all these programs that were being developed to run on Windows. The problem was a lot of them were painting programs and other things that just sort of reinforced that toy thing. But then there was this email. So every time Microsoft was doing something on stage with a lot of people, they were showing off this DaVinci email and hey, show how this email works and how you can send email in this graphical interface. So we are getting a lot of this.

00:26:24 - Scot Wingo
Seems like they'd be your biggest customer because where's the biggest concentration of people that are on Windows have PCs and have networked them. It's got to be Microsoft and IBM.

00:26:33 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it does. They were, they weren't. And that's a different. Yeah, I'm not even sure looking, I'm not even sure why, but they weren't. But they were excited about having a bunch of developers. And it turned out there were these big companies, Fortune 500 companies, all had their IT departments working on how we're going to migrate to Windows. And so we had lots of really big brand name companies calling, wanted to do demos. Now had we had thousands of customers, it probably would have killed us because we were again like 20 year olds in a rented apartment on Hillsborough street trying to do these things. It was actually sort of a much better glide path to be sort of innovating where people found it very exciting, but not needing to have, not having to support thousands of users like that immediately. But we wound up having sort of a lot of visibility, a lot of energy. But we had some time to figure out, okay, how do we really make a product? The first version was just, it was not great. There weren't really any design systems in it. There was a Silicon Valley company that wanted to buy us or wanted to buy the product and publish it, and Software Publishing Co. SPC. Almost nobody would know it now, but they had some people who are really good in product design and development. And so they sent their team out and they basically helped us make the product that actually would be a good product with the right feature set and the right design solutions.

00:28:02 - Scot Wingo
So you signed that deal that they would help you distribute?

00:28:05 - Chris Evans
We did. And then they canceled. They got afraid at the last moment, canceled it and we wound up with 100% of the rights to what we were doing.

00:28:13 - Scot Wingo
Nice. They helped you kind of.

00:28:14 - Chris Evans
Yeah. So there's a dark moment, right, because we thought this is when we finally get paid. It was at that point I had had to decide, this is an 87, 88. I had to decide to not keep going to classes. I couldn't work out a way to be in town during midterms and finals because we were just traveling a lot and everything. So it was a little bit scary that all of a sudden it's like, okay, where we thought the money was going to come from is not coming, but do we still believe in it? Are we still energized by it? Yes, we are. Then let's go keep chasing it.

00:28:46 - Scot Wingo
So they had some kind of advance and once you got to a gold copy or something that they approved, they were going to pay you a big advance. By the time you got there.

00:28:54 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it just did. Yeah, they just vanished.

00:28:57 - Scot Wingo
And back then you needed publishing companies because a lot of software was bought. A. And you bought some Visual Guides. A. It had. It was physical.

00:29:04 - Chris Evans
Right.

00:29:05 - Scot Wingo
So it wasn't, you know, wasn't SaaS.

00:29:07 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:29:08 - Scot Wingo
You couldn't even. It wasn't E Commerce. You can just order and have it shipped to you.

00:29:11 - Chris Evans
Yeah. When you bought software, you actually. We actually mailed them the software. It was that. That long ago on, you know, floppy disks, like.

00:29:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:29:19 - Chris Evans
And none of those hard disks, actually. Floppy. Floppy disk.

00:29:22 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:29:22 - Chris Evans
So, yeah, that was kind of fun. Yeah.

00:29:24 - Scot Wingo
And then, you know, there. There were actually places you could go buy software. So there was like. For consumers, there was Babbage's.

00:29:30 - Chris Evans
Oh, yeah.

00:29:31 - Scot Wingo
A couple other places. But even then, you know, there were. There were business places you could go and look at software and buy it. Yeah, yeah.

00:29:37 - Chris Evans
And that was.

00:29:38 - Scot Wingo
It was in boxes and that was where shelves and stuff.

00:29:41 - Chris Evans
Channel strategy became really important to us. So in any given town, almost no business was just going to buy our stuff and set it up. They were going to pay somebody local to set up their local area network and make everything work. And so the key was to have the leading companies in any town be resellers who sold our software so that they would say, okay, here's our proposal for you. We're going to install these wires and we're going to install this hardware, and we're going to install this printer server. Then we're going to install this email. And so the email was a way that they could make good margin on the setup that the customer would always buy. And what we needed to do is be able to find and cultivate those relationships so that even when some storms came a little bit later, that we had that, that channel network gave us some stickiness, gave us some momentum, that allowed us to keep going.

00:30:34 - Scot Wingo
But it was super fragmented. You'd have, like, you know, some entrepreneur in Columbus would set up Columbus Computers, and then like, typewriter people were doing it because they were like, oh, typewriters can go. We're going to move to this. So you had some of that. You had computer people, you had mainframe people like Burroughs people were trying to, like, get into it. And they were called VARs, value added resellers. Yes, yeah.

00:30:54 - Chris Evans
Yes, they were. Yeah, yeah. And so what we had to do was be able to develop that. And some of the way that we did that was. And we're competing, I sort of fill in, so we start to get some traction. I'll get to where the bars are, but we start to get some traction and some notice. Magazines are writing about us and everything. We wound up creating a character based. We figured out that there weren't enough people running Windows. We went back and created a character based version of our product. Probably the only company to do a Windows version and then a character based version as well. And we had to add Mac and some other versions as well. But once we did that, we got to where we had competitive reviews and magazines. We wound up coming in number one in PCWeek and InfoWorld and these other things. We are rated highly across all these different products. And so this is like by 89 we kind of had, we were at the top of the heap. Everyone wanted us. And really the alternate timeline is when we sold the company in 89. Because that was when Microsoft decided that they needed to have an email product. And other companies, WordPerfect, they had a spreadsheet and a word processor and they wanted to have email. Lotus wanted to have email. So these big companies wanted to have office suites where they were selling you everything all at once. And so we were about to come into a place where these big companies were trying to give away the email to get somebody to buy a suite of product. And we're still trying to sell it independently. And we had people come and ask us about, you know, sort of inquire about do you want to be acquired. But at that point, from an entrepreneur standpoint, and this is like young entrepreneurs, we're just, we're like a fraternity, we're just having fun. It sounded, it sounded tedious, the idea that some company would buy us and then make us do what they wanted us to do. And we just wanted to kind of keep playing this thing out.

00:32:51 - Scot Wingo
You're probably busy because you seems like you're really good at listening to customers. Right. Because you wouldn't have done the green screen unless a customer. And like once you get customers, you're suddenly very busy and you're like kind of myopic, like, well, we gotta, you know, we gotta build all this stuff for customers. Like selling the companies, you know, just can be a distraction from doing that.

00:33:09 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And it just, it didn't, you know, we weren't really doing it for the. We wanted to see if a couple of kids from North Carolina could get rich and famous doing software. But it wasn't, we hadn't in our mind said, okay, how do we want this story to end? And so when there were opportunities to end the story, we weren't looking for them and we didn't recognize them. And so Fast forward from 89 to we were kind of at the top of the heap. A couple years later. We're competing with companies like Microsoft and others who have. Their coffee budgets are larger than our revenues. But they. And we're still trying to sort of keep up with them and be able to compete against them during that time. And that was a much. That was a much harder deal. But the way that we did it was we had in different towns, we had experts who were in love with our product, that we really supported them. We did a lot of work to find there's out of 80% of the resellers that you have are garbage. They're almost never going to sell anything and they're going to want to take a lot of your time. And so you kind of have to have these places where it's like, oh, do you want to be our platinum reseller? Because our platinum reseller has to meet this certain sales quota. But then we're going to take you and give you this ex education and certification programs and like lock you in where you have something that you don't want to lose. So you stay with us. So we had to do a lot of that. And we did contests for them. Some of these stuff, these T shirts and everything were like sales contests. We had.

00:34:34 - Scot Wingo
Yep.

00:34:35 - Chris Evans
Where we were. We had one that. This is the Autobahn that was Servant Safari. They each had a theme. So Servant Safari, the. The winning reseller got to go to Hawaii. The Autobahn. They actually got to go to the Autobahn in. In Europe. This was a baseball themed one. And they got to go to the World Series. And so we were creating like T shirts and caps and yeah. There was a trip to Italy where we would send their significant others, Italian cookbooks and Italian phrase books to sort of get them. Hey, are you. How are you doing on selling this product? I really want to go to Italy.

00:35:07 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:35:07 - Chris Evans
A lot of things that were just really deep and specific and memorable. You know, we couldn't throw. We didn't have the budget that a large company had just to throw, you know, cash incentives at people. So we had to do something that was creative that would really kind of stick out from other things that they were doing. And that was actually John Ostopnick who had spent time at Novell and really understood this game was someone that brought that expertise in. We also had Don Raney who has been now a venture capitalist here, but we brought him in.

00:35:42 - Scot Wingo
I didn't know Don entered the story.

00:35:43 - Chris Evans
At this point, Don was our head of channel marketing, and so he'd built for Novell this reseller program where he had done that. Find the 5, 10% that are doing all your sales and lock them in. He done that for Novell, and then he came over and really executed that program for us. Yeah. And. And we became close friends. And so later when I started Exciper, Don was my. I asked John Don to be my independent board member there and gave me great advice. And that ultimately led to his role with Inner South Partners and with other venture partners.

00:36:17 - Scot Wingo
Got it.

00:36:18 - Chris Evans
Going in with that.

00:36:19 - Scot Wingo
Okay, cool.

00:36:20 - Chris Evans
So. Yeah.

00:36:20 - Scot Wingo
All right. So it's. So started in 84 and you talked about 89 and then past that. So. So where does. Where does this.

00:36:29 - Chris Evans
Yeah, so. So in 90. Really. So by 94, even though we were kind of holding our. Holding our edge.

00:36:36 - Scot Wingo
So you're 10 years in.

00:36:37 - Chris Evans
We're 10 years in 92. I actually wound up departing the company, and it was. It was awkward. Bill fired me, my co founder. Okay. Best man at my wedding.

00:36:48 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:36:49 - Chris Evans
And I get it. Basically, we had venture. We had venture capitalist investors in the company. And let's back up.

00:36:58 - Scot Wingo
And so it seemed like you bootstrapped this for quite a while. When did VC kind of enter the picture?

00:37:02 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:37:03 - Scot Wingo
Couldn't imagine. Freshman.

00:37:04 - Chris Evans
Yeah. 89. So Novell actually made an investment in us, and then Wakefield Partners made an investment in us. Tom and Anna Nelson, before Steve was involved, were involved. And I think for them, having investment in a company where your executive vice president and your CEO were both. What would they have been? 28, 27, something like that.

00:37:30 - Scot Wingo
Was Bill's CEO.

00:37:31 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And still just really kind of rough. Was about twice. Roughly twice as much immaturity as they probably wanted.

00:37:41 - Scot Wingo
A lot of fart jokes in the boardroom.

00:37:43 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And so it's. You know, and I just. I had a. I made some really strange wardrobe choices back in the day and. Talk more about that. Yeah, let's say. Let's say that it was a. Yeah, it was whatever. You would imagine this.

00:37:59 - Scot Wingo
You're so conservative and button down. This makes me very.

00:38:01 - Chris Evans
This hat striped suit is probably what you're. What you're trying to imagine, but kind.

00:38:05 - Scot Wingo
Of like a Palmer lucky vibe, you know, Palmer lucky. He's a. He's got like a cool beard and like wears squine shirts and they're like custom made for, you know, that.

00:38:14 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:38:14 - Scot Wingo
Kind of like a hippie surf vibe.

00:38:17 - Chris Evans
I just. Yeah, it was just. It was just weird. But it. But at any rate, I. I w exiting in 92.

00:38:24 - Scot Wingo
How much did you guys raise?

00:38:27 - Chris Evans
Let's see.

00:38:27 - Scot Wingo
Just kind of put it in perspective.

00:38:28 - Chris Evans
You know, I think we raised a half million from Novel. I think it raised about another a million, maybe another. I think one and a half million total. It's tough to. I mean, this is 35 years ago.

00:38:41 - Scot Wingo
Was that the only money or did you guys do subsequent rounds?

00:38:45 - Chris Evans
Not really. I mean, we were cash positive. At the same time, I feel like we didn't know what else we wanted to do. Right. It's like we built this email program and it was sort of running. We were competing against much larger companies. Ultimately we wind up selling to one of the other independent email companies and merging those companies together. But I think that we started out with this vision of can we accomplish having a legit worldwide software business as a startup in Raleigh. And once that box was checked, I'm not sure we ever sort of came back and said, well, what's the even bigger, hairier thing that we want to do or that we weren't on the same page with?

00:39:31 - Scot Wingo
It seems like you could have, in hindsight with Wiz, you know, the age, you could have like done a suite or like, you know, there's, yeah, customers probably want you to do like more productivity stuff or who knows?

00:39:40 - Chris Evans
Yeah, I mean they were, they were looking for other things. But we were also kind of fighting to stay, fighting to keep people believing in what it was we were doing in the face of these large companies.

00:39:52 - Scot Wingo
You had a full frontal attack from.

00:39:53 - Chris Evans
Everybody and it was hard, you know, I mean, you know, with Microsoft you have, you know, for several years, they're, you know, we're on their shoulders and they're cheering and saying, look at these guys, they're the greatest ever. And then, and then I'm sitting next to Steve Ballmer saying, I don't believe, why are you still in this business? We're going to roll over you. For God's sake, get off the ship and do something else. This is just a slow moving train wreck. And it was just sort of hard to hear. And I think at that time it felt like a betrayal. I think now I understand there's sort of kindness that there actually is. Like I'm, you know, I'm worried about you. There's nothing I have to make. The choices I'm making, I'm not going to not do the business that I need to do for that because I'm worried about you. Yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm not worried about you. So there was, there was kindness. It was tough to see it kindness back then, But I think 22, tough.

00:40:44 - Scot Wingo
Love doesn't land very good.

00:40:45 - Chris Evans
Yeah, but it was, I think that we, you know, the ability to sort of imagine where we wanted to take this thing next was a little bit hard.

00:40:54 - Scot Wingo
So nussy fires you 92.

00:40:56 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:40:56 - Scot Wingo
And then that, that sucked. Yeah. And then I guess they sold it in 94 at that point.

00:41:01 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it did. But it was a, you know, and for a while it, you know, it, it, it hurt. But ultimately, and Don Rainey gave me some great advice was not basically not to hide from it. It's a thing that happens. Right. And if, when you're talking to somebody else about what goes on that they're going to take their cue of what is this and what isn't it based upon how you talk about it and how you react on it. And so to me there were actually, there were some things I needed to learn. I needed to have brokenness. I was at that point a cocky kid who thought he was the smartest guy in the room and didn't mind everyone else knowing. That's what I thought. Right. And I had to kind of go through this brokenness to be able to, I think be better at what it is that I'm doing. Right. That that guy was not going to gather the kind of trust and have empathy and be sort of have situational awareness to be able to create what I wanted to create down the road. So yeah, it wouldn't have been on my bucket list of things that I wanted to have. But at the same time, looking back, I'm happy to have had it and Bill and I are still best friends and you know, really connect well. So it didn't, it, it didn't do an, it didn't damage anything important.

00:42:22 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:42:23 - Chris Evans
You know, but so it DaVinci kind of played itself out.

00:42:27 - Scot Wingo
So just so you know, the 40 year anniversary is this year. So that's, you know, celebrating that. Congratulations on that. That's pretty wild to think that's been that long. And. Yeah, yeah.

00:42:36 - Chris Evans
And there's, there's so many, I mean there's different spin offs. Right. So.

00:42:40 - Scot Wingo
And you, Chris bought pictures. You probably won't be able to see them on the camera, but we're going to put them into the show now notes and you know, kind of show you what an office looks like. You know, here I noticed there's a Playboy bunny there. Not politically correct now.

00:42:52 - Chris Evans
Is that what that is?

00:42:53 - Scot Wingo
I don't, it's probably not. You don't Know what it is?

00:42:55 - Chris Evans
I don't know what that is. Come on. Come on. It looks like a duck. Come on now. It's like a duck sideways. No. Is that a.

00:43:01 - Scot Wingo
It's a Playboy bunny and then lava lamp.

00:43:03 - Chris Evans
These are.

00:43:04 - Scot Wingo
These are fun for ambiance. But what's funny when I look at pictures from my offices is like how big the computers are and the screens are like, you know, they're just like embarrassing.

00:43:13 - Chris Evans
There's a picture of Brian Harry working and, you know, he's the CTO because he has two big monitors.

00:43:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Company mascots of parrot.

00:43:19 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:21 - Scot Wingo
So we had a Brian. This is funny. I recognize him by the back of his head.

00:43:25 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And we had so many people, you know, so Brian Harry, who is our chief technology officer, and a couple of other guys went off and started OneTree software that created SourceSafe and went on to Microsoft. We had Don Raney, of course, had some entrepreneurial ventures of his own and did work in that space. There were a number of other companies that spun off from DaVinci era or entrepreneurs that were launched from DaVinci. And I think from a legacy standpoint, and I think you probably feel this too, that in terms of the lasting value of what you've done, is this notion of other people who have learned how to and gone on to start other companies as well. There's a legacy there.

00:44:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:44:10 - Chris Evans
One of the greatest stories of my life are the opportunities I have to take. A great team working on a worthy mission out on an adventure to do something that nobody knows whether it can be done or not.

00:44:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. That's the fun of it all.

00:44:22 - Chris Evans
And when you do that, it's yours forever. Right. Anyone on that team, I could run into in the mall or I could run into out at a park or wherever. And it's like we have this thing together, like a team that's won, you know, that's won a championship or something, that you always have this connection and this is something that you've always have done together in terms of this group. And I mean, to me, that's one of the greatest joys. If that's not a part of why you bound to be an entrepreneur, then you're really missing out. And particularly starting as a group of four founders who went off and did this together, I think it really cemented that value.

00:45:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:45:01 - Chris Evans
You know.

00:45:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. This one's fun. It's got. So it looks like it's that you guys were in like those business suites over Hillsborough looks like. Is that right?

00:45:08 - Chris Evans
Yeah. Yeah.

00:45:09 - Scot Wingo
You Know, because I think we're looking out onto. Because that. That's that.

00:45:13 - Chris Evans
Funny story. There's.

00:45:13 - Scot Wingo
That's that building on campus still.

00:45:15 - Chris Evans
Yeah. Funny story. This building. That building is right at the end of Dan Allen and Hillsborough Street. It's the same building that Jim Goodnight started Sass in.

00:45:23 - Scot Wingo
Huh.

00:45:23 - Chris Evans
Okay. And. And I was. So I'm sitting right on the corner of Dan Allen and so. Which is a great office to be in because at least once a week somebody would get T boned in that intersection. And you just have power lines.

00:45:34 - Scot Wingo
It's interesting, like how many. How many wires there are right now. There's. They must have like minimized that.

00:45:40 - Chris Evans
Yeah, that's.

00:45:41 - Scot Wingo
I remember they would throw shoes on them. Like, I didn't understand that when I first came. It's like something.

00:45:46 - Chris Evans
A meme before people knew what memes were. Yeah, yeah.

00:45:49 - Scot Wingo
It's a story on the Blues Brothers here.

00:45:51 - Chris Evans
So that's Bill. Yeah. So Bill Nussey is on our. Is my co founder is on the right. Let me see that. Yeah, Bill's on the right. And then Bill Burden, who also shared an apartment with Bill and I, is the other guy. He was our graphic designer. So all the COVID art and everything else that we did, he was doing that kind of work designing our paperclip icon, you know, all those other things. And so back in high school, they had this Blues Brothers thing they would show up in parties with. And so they made a reappearance. But it really was almost like a fraternity. We had one office in the back that had a bunch of video games from. There used to be an arcade in downtown Raleigh that one of our employees was the owner of. And so it was in a warehouse and he thought, I'll just move them in here. So we had all these old video games. We had another room that just had like a little plastic swimming pool and a palm tree as a beach you could hang out. And one time we filled. I think it was Brian. We filled his office like entirely with balloons for his birthday. And the amount of static charge of a room full of balloons, they just start popping by themselves. We hadn't really thought about static charge and floppy disks and hard drives and.

00:47:06 - Scot Wingo
Everything erased all the.

00:47:08 - Chris Evans
Hadn't really thought that through. I think we survived. Backups were good things to have. It was good. Cool.

00:47:14 - Scot Wingo
Where'd you guys come up with the name DaVinci? Because this is. What was this what it was called when it was consulting or later.

00:47:19 - Chris Evans
You pivoted. Yeah. So it was DaVinci Systems was a company. And really we felt like we're this drawn to this idea of technology also being a form of art. Right. How do you take, in terms of software, that there's creative expression to it. And Da Vinci was somebody who did that. Right. Even when he was designing helicopters or designing machines and everything, there was always sort of art to it. He was always.

00:47:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:47:46 - Chris Evans
Interested in that sort of fusion of art and architecture and design and engineering. And so he was, you know, kind of a patron saint of that way of looking at it, I think. Yeah. And so we just. And, you know, at that point, all names were available. It was a greenfield.

00:48:01 - Scot Wingo
So.

00:48:01 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:48:01 - Scot Wingo
Let's grab the mind that you took some of his designs.

00:48:04 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah.

00:48:05 - Scot Wingo
The copyright expired on this.

00:48:06 - Chris Evans
Yes. We had a free art. Yes. It just, you know, it's like all the free art was also a fortunate choice, I would say. Yeah.

00:48:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. So kind of a good run. So lasted 10 years. Sold the company two years before you had some kind of a little wake up, kind of a, hey, I need to reevaluate. When they sold the company, was that a positive thing or. It kind of like basically didn't really get back what was.

00:48:30 - Chris Evans
No, it was we, we. So it was a, it was a good win. It wasn't a great win. Yeah.

00:48:37 - Scot Wingo
Even though you weren't actively involved, you were still a shareholder, I imagine.

00:48:40 - Chris Evans
Oh, yeah, yeah. So had we. But had we sold it a few years earlier to Microsoft or Lotus or something like that, it would have been a much bigger win. As it was, our investors made their money back. I guess I would look at it as it was enough money that I didn't have to worry about how my kids were going to go to college and I could afford to screw up badly once there's enough money that you could play with house money once and see where it goes. But it was not. It was not. Well, gee, I, I, you know, I guess I'll go retire somewhere or, or, you know, go buy a big house or anything. It was just, it was a nest egg at that point.

00:49:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:49:18 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:49:18 - Scot Wingo
But still being a kind of going from a student to having a, you know, a little bit of a cushion.

00:49:22 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:49:23 - Scot Wingo
Lets you take a bigger swing on your second shot.

00:49:24 - Chris Evans
Yeah. No, it was very validating. Yeah.

00:49:26 - Scot Wingo
So it. So at NC State, did you finish or.

00:49:29 - Chris Evans
No. So I, I left with, I think there's 21 credit hours hanging.

00:49:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:49:34 - Chris Evans
I was, I made it halfway through my junior year, the spring semester, my junior year, I was taking only online or video classes. There was nothing Online, but I could go and watch the classes on video and make it up. And I just like midterms. I had to be in Europe for some kind of convention that I was speaking at and then finals. I had to be out in Silicon Valley doing some deal. And so I spent about three days having my schedule annulled, going from various dean offices to dean offices and thinking there's probably better use of my parents money than doing this anymore. And so I let them know. But ultimately where I was going with engineering was taking me towards learning some really, really technical things. But at the same time, it's like I negotiated an investment and a venture deal from Novell with the CEO of Novella, who was one of the most experienced and best leaders in Silicon Valley at that time. I'd gone out and set up distributorships in different parts of Europe. I been on the Today show with Grant Gumbel. We'd done all these other things.

00:50:44 - Scot Wingo
So you're basically out there past that, getting an MBA in the real world.

00:50:48 - Chris Evans
Yeah. Everything that I was learning, I always loved learning. And it turned out the things I loved learning had more to do with these business systems. And also early on in the process, it became clear to me that the people I was working with were actually, they were better coders than me. My niche was to understand the technology well enough to be able to talk to people who didn't understand technology about it and translate both ways. People who have an urgent need or have this need and they don't even know that there's technology that can solve that problem. And you have technologists who understand the technology, but they don't know what the. They don't see the needs. And I felt like they're really good.

00:51:29 - Scot Wingo
At talking to people.

00:51:30 - Chris Evans
Yeah. What energized me was more imagining the possibility, knowing what's possible and communicating that in both directions than it was getting into the coding. So really the additional math and the tech learning that would have come out of engineering was not directionally. What I realized was energizing me.

00:51:47 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, cool. So it's 92. You've been kicked to the curb by your best friend. Well, yeah, you're wandering lost in the desert. Where, where did you go from there on the, you know.

00:51:58 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

00:51:59 - Scot Wingo
So DaVinci went on its path and sold in two years. But you're out there alone, all your friends, pretty much everyone, you know, is like not really wanting to hang out with you because.

00:52:08 - Chris Evans
Well, I wouldn't say that I think that we were all. I think the way that it wound up was gracious and that I. There was a lot of goodwill from the da Vinci team and I was.

00:52:19 - Scot Wingo
But you couldn't just go hang out in the office.

00:52:21 - Chris Evans
I think I was gracious. I think I was gracious on my side. But I wound up for a little while, I wound up doing some consulting work and it was, some of it was having to do consulting work for some people that I treated like I thought they were idiots, which was a great character building thing for me, being dependent upon people that I otherwise was kicking around. And they were amazingly gracious with that, which is something I'm thankful for. But pretty soon I saw an opportunity in the publishing side. Microsoft had been putting out in their boxes they'd been putting little booklets of add on apps. So it's like if you have Microsoft office, here's 29 little add on things that can make Office even better that they physically would put in boxes like this.

00:53:12 - Scot Wingo
And now they'd be in the cart. We'd call them upsells, but they're all done physically back then, so.

00:53:18 - Chris Evans
But they were other people's products. It was, it was more like a magazine, you know, that was where they were just telling you, you know, here's some other things, here's how you can get more, you get more out of your office. I wound up getting. Making friends with Pioneer Software, which was another one of the local startups, Richard Holcomb and his team. And they were selling a database tool that Microsoft was publishing. And it was basically a tool that allowed different databases and products that access databases to talk to each other. Interoperability stuff.

00:53:52 - Scot Wingo
We've had Richard on the pod. It hasn't been published yet.

00:53:55 - Chris Evans
Okay, great.

00:53:55 - Scot Wingo
But he remembers this.

00:53:56 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And so I thought, well, what if we published a little magazine? So when somebody got this component that they could see, well, what report writers and software development tools and databases can actually use this thing. And it was at the time my wife and I were starting to build a family and have kids and I just wanted something I could do out of my basement for a while so I could be around. And what it looked like was if I took. There was about 70,000 units a year that Microsoft was going to ship. So I had, I was, I had a book that had. That was going to be seen by 70,000 people who had bought a product so they could make inner database products work together.

00:54:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it kind of came with Excel. If I remember they shipped Excel so they could also send stuff to the Excel base.

00:54:50 - Chris Evans
And so part of this I went to these other companies and said, hey, I'm building this thing and I want. It's going to go in all the Microsoft boxes. And I also want, if you want to be a part of it, you just have to give me $3,000 a page, write me the copy that you want. You're going to give me the text that you want written about you. It's all going to be laid on a page. We'll have a photo of your product, we'll have a screenshot, we'll have some text of what you want and then contact information. So you're going to send me all those things, you're going to give me your money, and you're also going to give me 3,000 names from your own customer database.

00:55:25 - Scot Wingo
Okay.

00:55:25 - Chris Evans
And I'm going to add those names with everyone else's, and this is going to go to a group of people who have already bought a product like yours or that you're interoperable with. And so we wound up doing like 150,000, 180,000 units overall. Now, the biggest magazine within this segment of database stuff was maybe about 35,000. I was delivering a product that had massive circulation, really well qualified. And you know, kind of the strange thing is that I was bringing nothing myself to the party. Right. I was just being the middleman that allowed, that enabled this thing to happen. I knew nobody that was buying database products myself.

00:56:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, but sometimes it takes a middleman because they couldn't work with together because they probably would be like, not our core thing.

00:56:12 - Chris Evans
Yeah. So there's an old folktale about stone soup where the soldiers stroll into town and they. And you know, nobody wants to feed him. All the doors are shut and they start in the middle of town making a pot and throwing rocks in the pot. And the villagers get curious and they're like, well, what are you making? It's, oh, we're making a delicacy from our town, stone soup. And they start tasting like, well, this is almost right. But you use a little carrot and then somebody from the village shows up with some carrots and next thing you know, there's potatoes and chicken and everything going in the pot. And the whole notion was that they, they got a bunch of people interested and they collectively made the soup, even though all they had to bring were rocks. I kind of felt like that guy here. But as long as once I had, I think I needed 15 people to say yes. And I was at that point profitable. And every page I sold after that, I was about 80% margin making 80% profit on every page after that. Nice. So about three times a year I would just work the phones until I got as many people as possible in and then I had all the content they were giving me. So I just had a design artist lay that stuff out, had a printer, be able to print everything. They knew how to do that. So it was really something I could do completely out of my basement and be able to run it. And so that went well for several years. And then the Internet started showing up web pages and I realized that this path, the path I'm on has an end to it. I've kind of recognized sort of from my time at DaVinci, sort of keeping the eye on where is this going and does it have a future and what does that future look like? And I realized that this publishing doesn't necessarily isn't going to go very far. But the idea of being the crossroads where people are looking for products that can work together will work well on the web. So it's like, okay, now what I want to do is I want to be the dot com page that people go to to find all these database tools that work together. If I do that and if I can do that successfully, then in a couple years someone's going to buy that property from me and I can do turn around and do the same thing. Be the crossroads for dentists or people who sell tires or sort of anything else, just rinse and repeat across these different markets. All just sort of being the first place somebody goes to to find all the products in a space before moving on. So we're starting to build this out and at that point what I expected was that, oh, I just have to find the tool for being able to lay out quickly a website and then the back end tool for managing who's coming to the site and tracking how often they're back and circulation, all these other things. And then I can't find anything. I wound up having to pay somebody like the next version of my DaVinci system, some local consultant who writes software to write this webpage for me. And it's like, well, this doesn't do this and this and this. It's like, yeah, nothing does. Like, you gotta be kidding me. And then I called, you know, friends of mine from back in DaVinci days who are now running big websites, like, you know, Ziff Davis who's running all the PC magazines and everything else, saying, okay, how are you managing your content? How are you managing your advertising? How are you managing your tracking who's coming to your site and how often they're coming back. And they were like, oh, we're having to write all that stuff ourselves, it's like a nightmare.

00:59:31 - Scot Wingo
And HTML just writes, you know, and.

00:59:34 - Chris Evans
And he said, but wait, but listen, if anyone else tells you they're using something, will you call back and tell me what they're using? Well, you hear that a couple of times and you think I'm on the wrong side of this question.

00:59:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:59:45 - Chris Evans
And so had hot software started yet?

00:59:49 - Scot Wingo
Because they were like gonna eventually poke around in this.

00:59:51 - Chris Evans
They, they were, they were early getting started, but they weren't focused specifically on, on this. Yeah, what you a publishing business. And most, most of the websites that were ad supported were, you know, coming out of guys who were making magazines. A magazine is a three legged stool. You've got, you have to make content, you have to do sell advertising and you have to have circulation. And each one of those things has got its own management process. And so I was thinking, okay, I'm going to build a software suite that focuses on those three things and I have this customer base that I know is for it. This time I actually got funded. Duke had an entrepreneurs conference every year in February. And this would have been February of 96. It was just a couple months before my son was born. And I'm speaking at a panel and Mitch Muma speaking at a panel. And it's crazy how these things go. So we know each other but we haven't done business together. Mitch is within or south at that point, the heavyweight venture funder locally. And he says, well, what are you doing these days? I said, well, I got this magazine that is aimed at people doing database software and working together. And I'm looking at bringing it online and he's nodding and saying, that's nice. And I can see between his eyes sort of this disappointment that he wished I'd said something that he could consider funding. And I said, you know what, forget I just said all that. What I think needs to happen is there needs to be a software platform for all these guys who are taking their products to the web. And he's like, that sounds interesting. Let's talk this week. So I spent a couple of days building a business plan around this. We spent a couple of months. This is crazy. He was doing due diligence on this idea the same time I was developing, writing the business plan and doing my own due diligence to see is this something I want to throw my life at? You know, they agreed that it was something fundable. I think we did like 250k with another 250 if I got something done.

01:01:44 - Scot Wingo
And we could precede what we had a little bit of a seat, a little.

01:01:48 - Chris Evans
Little toe in the water. But for me, I opened my check account with my venture check, which is something I never expected to do. Pulled a team together, and we were, you know, we were focused on these three areas to build.

01:02:02 - Scot Wingo
This was called asip.

01:02:03 - Chris Evans
We called this exhibitor. And where you come up with a name, dot com. Names were starting to disappear. And there was a. There was a day where I thought, okay, I can spend the next three or four days failing to find a name that I can get the.com for, or I can just start in the A in the dictionary and get to the point where the first word I could stand putting my company after that had an open dot name. My company on it, had a dot, had the dot com available. I would take.

01:02:30 - Scot Wingo
Interesting.

01:02:30 - Chris Evans
And that was exciting.

01:02:32 - Scot Wingo
Whenever you're alphabetically listed, it helps.

01:02:35 - Chris Evans
Yeah. Oh, it does. And that was the thing that I. With DaVinci Systems, we knew that we saw in the number of times where reviews, they did it in alphabetical order. So DaVinci email was ahead of other mail products that were like, mail this and mail that. We were d. So we had an advantage there. And I thought, well, yeah, if you're going to have a name, you may as well be really alphabetically high. And it turns out that we wound up focusing just on advertising. And so all of my competitors were add this and add that. And being an AC versus an ad was like. That was really. That was a really good choice to have made people.

01:03:13 - Scot Wingo
Thank goodness it was available.

01:03:15 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it was.

01:03:15 - Scot Wingo
If you'd gone through the ads to the. You know.

01:03:17 - Chris Evans
Yeah. If I gotten a little bit further down. But it turned out that it worked. It worked well. So we started the company. We spent the summer building out software and just kind of developing something I wanted to. I had a target. There was a conference in San Francisco that I wanted to be able to launch the product at, because I was just worried. Right. Right now there almost was nothing out there. I wanted to be one of the first ones out and be able to get there.

01:03:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. It was probably one of the Internet conferences. Like.

01:03:46 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

01:03:47 - Scot Wingo
It's funny to think about this in hindsight, but we used to have, like, computer conferences. Like, let's all get together and talk about computers.

01:03:52 - Chris Evans
Yeah. For a day.

01:03:53 - Scot Wingo
That would be nonsensical. And like, back then, there was, like, Internet trade shows.

01:03:56 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And if you wanted to create buzz, you Needed to show up at one of a few places Moscone. And I saw, I thought I could get there. And so we had this team working all summer to produce something that we could at least demo we get. So August of 96 was really rough. So the day of my first company board meeting with exhibitor. So Don Raney, I've invited in Mitch Muma, who's my venture capitalist, is on the board. So this is those two and me, I'm getting ready to walk into the board meeting and my secretary tells me that my father in law is on the phone. And I'm like, did you tell him I was about to go into a board meeting? And she said yes, but he said he needed to talk to you anyway. Now this can't be good news. My father in law is the least imposing person on the planet. And if he still wanted to talk to me. And I get on the phone and what he tells me is that he found his wife had passed away that morning in her sleep at 56. He was waiting for the ambulance to come and get her. But I had to go home and tell my wife. And so I, you know, I left the meeting and yeah, so I, you know, there was about five minutes to drive home and I thought these are, these are my. The last five minutes of. My wife doesn't know that she doesn't have a mom.

01:05:22 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:05:24 - Chris Evans
Yeah. And that was, I mean, that was, that was rough. And I mean, well, all kinds of deaths suck, but death, where you do all your grieving after the fact, sucks hard. Yeah, but, yeah, but right, like right after that is when hurricane Fran hit. And so like, feels like two days after the funeral, Hurricane Fran hits, knocks off all the power. There's flooding coming in. I still am supposed to go to San Francisco. I can't leave my wife and my two kids, one of them two months old now, alone in a house with no power.

01:06:01 - Scot Wingo
Your wife's probably in the grieving process. Yeah, it's like the universe doesn't want this company, doesn't want you to go to San Francisco. Sometimes you get those feelings.

01:06:09 - Chris Evans
And there was about an hour where the water was rising on both sides of 40. It had already got 40 was already underwater west of us. The only thing I could do is get to my folks house in Atlanta where I could leave my wife and kids with them and I could fly out of Atlanta to the conference. But I had to. Basically there was a curfew at 6. I had to be in the car on the road within a couple of hours. For them to be able to be gone, me to get out, everything else. But we did it. We got on the road, we drove until like 2 in the morning to pull into Atlanta so that she can stay with them and I can get out to California. But it worked out, really. Being there was perfect. Besides, we met with some of the companies with some of the largest websites in the world were there, and they were looking specifically for something that would solve these problems. Yeah.

01:07:04 - Scot Wingo
And to put it in perspective, this is. The dot com bubble is forming. So you're starting to get this. This is pretty early, but you're starting to feel this irrational exuberance where.

01:07:13 - Chris Evans
Yeah, I mean, it was funny. I remember. So one of the, like one of the founders of ebay, not Pierre, but one of the, like a Stanford professor. I don't remember his name, but he was like, I started this company called ebay. I said, really? What's that? It's like, oh, we sell some stuff online. It was just this like really sort of cash conversation. Like, you know, what restaurant do you work at kind of thing. Yeah. But just on a place. These things were just starting to show up. What I also learned about that time was I was trying to do a suite of three products, but I could never get past the ad management part of the conversation. It turned out that there was such an acute need for ad management that everyone wanted a product that would just do that. And so I thought we would call.

01:08:03 - Scot Wingo
It Ad Server today.

01:08:05 - Chris Evans
Yeah. So imagine what happens. So imagine you're Sports Illustrated and you decide, oh, there's an Internet thing. My board's gonna ask me about it. Let's go ahead and start. Let's launch sportsillustrated.com. so we throw $5 million, whatever, at it. We put a guy, a sales guy, VP of sales is making a half million dollars a year.

01:08:25 - Scot Wingo
Who?

01:08:26 - Chris Evans
All he knows is he can take a bunch of people to lunch in Manhattan and get them to sign ad contracts. And he's a rainmaker.

01:08:31 - Scot Wingo
He can do that by page and magazine.

01:08:33 - Chris Evans
Yes. And so you put this guy in a website, he has no idea what a website is, is not interested. All he's there for is to get people to sign documents saying, okay, I'll buy this. But what he's selling them are things that the website can't deliver. Right. Oh, I. I told him, of course you could, you know, deliver them only to people who are like, at this time of day or only people coming from these sites or only on these certain pages and having no idea whether it's possible or not, that's not his job.

01:08:59 - Scot Wingo
How are we going to measure this thing too?

01:09:00 - Chris Evans
And you know, so he, you'd wind up with these contracts that the company couldn't recognize the revenue on because they couldn't deliver it the way the contract was written. And so they had this urgent need to be able to meter and be able to send out ads. And this was just, you know, very early on when you're doing ad supported again it was like just this space where it was a wide open area. It could have been anything. Right. You could have done ads by the half hour block, like television, right from 8 to 8:30 everyone's going to see your ad that comes to this page. Could have done it that way, could have done it lots of other ways. There was this notion of I can get really precise in this but you didn't have people in a business that necessarily thought a lot about that way. What I wound up doing was coming back from that conference, we pulled everyone who was everyone started working on just the ad component. We had to get that to something that we could actually ship as soon as possible. And don't worry about the other stuff, we'll get to it later. And so there were urgent needs and so we wound up in by that first anniversary. So June of 97. Yeah. Wow. June of 97. We had seven of the largest ad supported sites in the world running on our software. And it was some of them ad engines. Before there was Google, there were three or four search engines rather Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, some others. Dogpile. Yeah, so we had a couple of those running. We had cnet which had a reputation for being technically well ahead of everyone else. So if they were using it, it was kind of proof to other people that it was a good product to use. And we wound up capping it off in June. At the end of that first year we brought all the Microsoft websites. Msnbc, msn. Msn, yeah. They had a whole suite of websites where they were trying to get hard into this business and they chose us over our competitors to be the product they were going to be.

01:11:13 - Scot Wingo
Well, MSN was money because whenever Internet Explorer was the number one browser, whenever it opened it would load, auto load msn. So it had like the highest page count.

01:11:22 - Chris Evans
Exactly. So you had. Yeah, they were funny. When Google first showed up, everyone was like, the world needs another search engine. Here's who's stupid enough to invest in. That was kind of where things went. And obviously Microsoft was going to win because they were in everyone's box, their browser was coming in dos. Of course it was going to win. So having that was really key. So we really had this great position in running. We had some worthy competitors, but they were. None of them were big companies. And this was part of the reason. Something I liked about this was that the problem that we had in creating DaVinci email was that ultimately we created a product that you could predict a company much, much larger than us was going to want to get into that product. And we really had no way of defending it. There was no way we could keep them from taking that territory. Yes, we'd chosen a very fertile, important, strategic piece of land, but we had no way to defend it. And so we were just sort of. We were improving it for the sake of somebody else who was going to eventually move in with this kind of product. Nobody was ever going to buy a million copies. What I thought about with Microsoft is Microsoft can't afford to make a product they're going to sell less than a million copies of. And so I could safely play in a product where you were selling fewer copies. We did it on a subscription basis, so they had to keep paying us to use it. So we were able to generate a good sort of recurring revenue stream off of it.

01:12:56 - Scot Wingo
Early SaaS, before we knew to call it that.

01:12:57 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah. So we had. We played out that way. But it was sort of on this line that made it not so attractive to giant companies to want to come into that space.

01:13:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Also by being. We had this at channelvisor, by being this intermediary, it makes it. You have to be. You're Switzerland. And that keeps some of the big guys out because Microsoft, at that point in time, ultimately they couldn't do their own ad thing because they didn't want people to think they were setting the price. It helped to have an independent piece out there.

01:13:28 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it did. And there were. So there were.

01:13:30 - Scot Wingo
Which kept some of the big guys from coming in a way for a while.

01:13:32 - Chris Evans
So there were a couple of companies. So Net Gravity was a Silicon Valley startup started about the same time as us. Hummer winblad funded them. This is the first time I learned that venture capitalists aren't Switzerland because they would run interference. I would go out to Sand Hill Road to try to raise money for Exhibitor. And what I eventually came to realize is that was that Hummer winblad was basically shooing people away from us because they wanted to have a winner in terms of where that was. Yeah.

01:14:01 - Scot Wingo
If you invest in that company we're going to crush it and you'll get a zero. We had a double click around yet.

01:14:07 - Chris Evans
Yeah. DoubleClick was also around and, and they were.

01:14:11 - Scot Wingo
They're kind of like the New York guys.

01:14:12 - Chris Evans
They were based in New York and this is. And this is something that was very serious. So when they were from the south. But they moved to New York when they started Doubleclick because they knew that it was strategic to live in New York.

01:14:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:14:26 - Chris Evans
And I thought I would never, I would never do that if I moved to New York. I would miss my wife terribly.

01:14:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:14:32 - Chris Evans
You know, because she would not be coming. And I thought, okay, these are people I'm competing with that are willing to do things beyond what I'm willing to do. The culture at Exhibitor was also different. I think with Da Vinci, it really was kind of this. Everyone is around all the time. You know, it's like half frat house, half company, and almost a badge of honor to be at 10 o'clock and still be people around. With Exhibitor, I had a couple of young kids and I, I did not want this. I did not want dysfunction where people felt they had to be there all the time. They knew what I was counting on them to get done this month, this week, this quarter. And if you did those things, then go home, be with your kids, enjoy your time, whatever. I mean, yeah, if you're here because that's what you love, that's fine. But it was, I think, much more balanced. And I've gotten some of the best feedback I love from the employees that I had during that time and the team I had was that it was the best and healthiest workplace they felt like they'd been in. You had this really high growth and sort of that energy that comes from really chasing something that's exciting and right in front of you, but not in a way that is sort of all consuming, you know?

01:15:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So we're gonna. I think we have to do a two parter here. Oh my God. This is good stuff. I love hearing these, these old stories because this is like what founding companies is about. So tell the asipitor story. Kind of like in some bullets. So you guys started and then you raised a lot more capital.

01:16:04 - Chris Evans
So we raised. So we raised the first money out of Inner south and then we went. Eventually raised another 3 million. But it was hard and scrappy to be able to get there. We didn't actually raise it until January of 98. I pretty much spent all of 97 trying to raise this money. And we had we had, you know, if you. Part of my strategy was that there's. We want. We wanted. We didn't necessarily need to be the biggest, we needed to be the second or third.

01:16:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:16:38 - Chris Evans
Because anyone deciding what ad management software they were doing, somebody in their company, that's their career decision. Whatever they decide, whatever basket they decide to put their company's eggs in, if that software stops working, the whole company stops making money. Right. So it is a really, really critical thing. You're never going to pick one thing. You're definitely going to give two or three choices to your boss, saying, I've looked at these three. So as long as we're in that group, we're going to get everyone, we're going to get looks from everyone, and we just have to scrap and fight to be able to get our wins. And if you have seven of the 20 largest, you were at least number two mathematically. Right. So having that was a very good place to be.

01:17:21 - Scot Wingo
And when you're riding a boom, a boom like that, it's like a wave and, you know, let's say Net Gravity ends up being number one, well, they're going to get taken out by someone and then everyone's going to want number 2, 3, 4, 5.

01:17:33 - Chris Evans
So.

01:17:33 - Scot Wingo
So there's this very domino thing that happens as these markets form.

01:17:37 - Chris Evans
And so. And there were a bunch of lessons that we learned in that. But as it plays out in January of 98, so we just raised money and Net Gravity, it turned out, did file for IPO. DoubleClick, our other big competitor, filing for IPO. My board was saying, okay, this market is starting to pop and fire off. You need to figure out what you're. What you're doing. And you know, so at kind of.

01:18:02 - Scot Wingo
Like what your revenues were company size still relatively low.

01:18:06 - Chris Evans
Low seven figures. Yeah. Million. Maybe a couple million. But we had. And this was the, the thing that I recognized was that we didn't have. In order to go public, I felt like what you needed to have in your hand was you needed to have a certain amount of revenue, you needed to have a market presence and you needed to have a market size. And we had a market presence. We had a massive market presence within that space. Our market size was limited because we were selling commercial software and all the IPOs were, what if you dis. Intermediated the big word at the time? What if everyone bought their cat food and dog food through you? Or what if everyone bought their garden tools through you or whatever.

01:18:49 - Scot Wingo
Or more consumer.

01:18:50 - Chris Evans
And everyone was like, oh, you'd be Doing billions of dollars almost overnight. And they watched this happen with ebay. They watched other groups of this happen. We were never going to sell a billion dollars worth of ad management software. So what I needed to do was I needed to find another company that didn't have market presence but had that market size story and whose revenues I could add to my revenues to be able to make a case for an ipo. And so I went out and basically started thinking about, okay, what companies could I pair ourselves with where I would upgrade these three lines, upgrade to something that got me jacks are better, basically, in each category or something good enough. The one that was obvious to me was a company called Engage. They were building behavioral profiles. The first company that had this notion of what if we could look at people across different websites and get this idea of, oh, that guy, he's a skier and that one's a golfer, and that one's looking at going to college, and that one's got mesothelioma or what.

01:19:55 - Scot Wingo
This guy's thinking about buying a car.

01:19:57 - Chris Evans
Yeah, this guy's thinking about buying a car. So what if you knew that about them and could sell that information to the next website they're going to? What you're saying is, what if you could make a penny for every ad running on the Internet? That's. That's a lot of pennies. That's. That's your. That's your billion dollar market Superman 3 business model. Right. So, but the thing was that they had written software to do this, but until they had people using their software, they didn't have any vision. Right. You had to be participating in their network to get a look at it. Yeah, they were trying to make stone soup going back to that story, but nobody was bringing the.

01:20:33 - Scot Wingo
Hiring an ad server is a perfect.

01:20:35 - Chris Evans
So, yeah, it felt like, okay, if you, if you combine their market potential and story with our existing customer base, if we basically integrated their features into our software and added it to our customers, then you had this massive mass market story. You had the market presence, you had the combined revenues, and you could start writing the S1 today. The thing was, Engage was owned by a company called cmgi, which was a big kind of a mutual fund play of Internet startups. Dave Wetherill was the guy running it, really savvy guy up in Boston, and several of his big portfolio companies were using my software. And so we had had some conversations, we'd even talked like a year earlier about acquisition, but he felt like his stock was way undervalued. And I Felt like we hadn't really shown what we were capable of enough to get the value I wanted to capture.

01:21:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:21:30 - Chris Evans
But unlike with da Vinci, we had. I knew what I wanted to have happen, basically from the time I started Exhibitor. I knew that if we could sell it for this much or more, that that was going to, you know, that. That I should do it. Right. There was. There was no sort of I want to pass this on to my children kind of fantasy. Yeah. It was. This is here to do a particular thing, and everyone here knows it, and this is what we're going for. So.

01:21:56 - Scot Wingo
So you learn from your mistakes.

01:21:57 - Chris Evans
I learned from my mistakes. And another important thing is that it can be very valuable to have a good relationship with the CEO's receptionist or admin. And so Shannon, who was Dave Wetherill's admin, I called up and I said, can you get me a meeting with Dave? And she said, yes. What's it about? I said, I'd rather tell him what's about when I get there. Do you. I mean, can I ask that favor from you?

01:22:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:22:24 - Chris Evans
He's like, yeah, okay. So I fly up to Boston to meet. To meet with Dave, and I think I'm just going in, sitting in his office. I get there, and there's like 12 people around the table.

01:22:36 - Scot Wingo
And they guessed what you were going to talk about.

01:22:39 - Chris Evans
Well, maybe, but it's like one of them. So the guy on his left is like, yeah, here's my CEO I just hired last week. And here's my other CEO that I just hired this week.

01:22:48 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:22:48 - Chris Evans
It's like, did either one of you know you were not the only CEO being hired? And clearly they didn't. Right. So this is a weird situation, but I basically said, you know, look, I. I'm looking at what's going on in engage, and clearly you can't get traction because you don't have what I have, which is the market presence. But I think if we put these two. These. These things together, we could write the S1 today.

01:23:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:23:10 - Chris Evans
And he says. And he. He pauses for a second and he says, I'm disappointed I didn't see that before you did, but I think you're right. And I wasn't really. I should have thought several moves beyond that because I just thought, you know, what. What if he thinks he's right? But it'll probably take him a while. But he was, like, ready to go. And he says. And he says, you know, well, what do you. Eventually it's like, so what do you. You know, obviously, we'd have to buy you. So what do you, what do you think you're worth? And now I'm thinking, okay, I, I just raised money at like an 8 million post. And so if I can get everyone sort of 3x at least return back or better, nobody's going to complain about what I did. I said, obviously there's a lot to work out, But I think 40 is a good starting place. And he nods and he says, I thought that's about what you'd say, which is like, damn it, I'm at 60.

01:24:12 - Scot Wingo
Putting out the first number.

01:24:13 - Chris Evans
But it's, but it worked out well. And actually one of the things I tried to build in was because it was such a fast exit. Sometimes with venture funds it's not like having a quick exit. You're still counted as having that money be invested for three years, even though you might have flipped it in a few months. And so I tried to negotiate 10% of the equity essentially going on to the residual company. And so that being basically I'm going to give you your money plus a multiple back and then bring you along for the ride beyond it. I got that for the employees. I wasn't able to get that for the investors. But it was still just the flight home was like, did that just happen? It was just kind of amazing how quickly it came together.

01:25:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So this is legendary in the Triangle because CMGI then exploded and like.

01:25:07 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah.

01:25:08 - Scot Wingo
And evidently the escrow, every deal has a little escrow hold back in addition to your 10%. Like the urban legend is the escrow ended up being worth as much as the company that sold.

01:25:17 - Chris Evans
So if you. So back before there was one of the first like community venture groups here was tig. Yeah, Triangle. Yeah. So one of the last, right after I'd sort of finished closing on the money I needed, I'd already had this TIG thing written. And so I did a pitch and some people lined up afterwards and they sort of wrote checks to me at the end of the meeting. If you had written a 25k checked to me then and you held onto the stock for two years, which was a holding period a little bit less than the holding period that we had.

01:25:59 - Scot Wingo
So people got stock and.

01:26:00 - Chris Evans
Yeah, you basically got CMGI stock. Had you held onto that stock for, for a two year period, it would have been worth a million bucks. Yeah, that's pretty good. CMGI stock basically split. It doubled every quarter.

01:26:12 - Scot Wingo
It just went asymptotic.

01:26:13 - Chris Evans
Yeah, it was, it was at a time.

01:26:16 - Scot Wingo
If you didn't sell then and you held on like another two years, maybe.

01:26:19 - Chris Evans
It'Ll be worth less. Actually, not weeks, not years. It. They were the fastest growing stock on NASDAQ up to the time that the Internet bubble burst in spring of 2000. Y2K was propping it up because everyone was pouring money into updating their systems. And then people sort of stupidly assumed that their sales would continue at the same rate the quarter after Y2K as it was leading up to it and didn't. And then there was sort of this massive fall off in all directions. So it came back down to earth pretty quickly. But yeah, it. At that time, it was a real bonafide success in the area and generated a lot of excitement.

01:27:04 - Scot Wingo
It was legendary. Also there was a thing in the triangle where aside from you and Richard, it was pretty common for the CEO to kind of like, you know, a tech CEO to be, you know, kind of step aside and like bring in like, you know, Kip Fry would always come in and like be the adult supervision and like he did that to open side.

01:27:20 - Chris Evans
Well and Kip was part of. I brought Kip on a part of my team as well.

01:27:23 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, but he didn't like, you know, take over.

01:27:26 - Chris Evans
No, he did.

01:27:27 - Scot Wingo
He didn't.

01:27:27 - Chris Evans
And it was, it was a little, it was a little dicey for there for a minute. When I first brought him in, there were other investors on the board who wanted to. Wanted him to replace me. Yeah. And you know, Kip was not. He was like, look, I, you know, I came on because of you and I have your back and you can trust me. And he sort of walked them back on that. And it was really. We had a special relationship. The only thing I regret about Accipiter was that it just went too short. I had some of the best people I've ever worked with in my life. And it was 20 months from the time that I'd started the company to the time it was done. We merged with nk, so CMGI bought us and then they merged us with Engage, which they own nearly all of. And Engage had their management structure, they had their own management team. And so every one of my senior people reported to somebody in Boston and so they never met as a team again. Yeah, for me, that's how acquisitions go. Yeah. And for me, you know, it was, it was odd. So I, I didn't think it was gonna, that I was gonna finish then, but Engage had just hired a new CEO, so one of us was going to be the. Was going to run the combined company. And if I was running it then the guy who thought he should have my job was going to be working next door to Dave Wetherill up in Boston. Right. And I was not going to move to Boston for this because, again, I would miss my wife terribly. So I knew I didn't want to move up there. And if I didn't, then ultimately there was going to be somebody up there who wanted my job more than I did. Yeah. And so I just sort of said, hey, I'm happy to help out whoever I want. I really, you know, I would support this guy being CEO. Paul Shout. He did a good job. He's continued to do a lot of things in high tech up in that area and I think it worked out pretty well, but. It did. It's tough, you know, being the other guy. I was being as helpful as I could, but there was just going to.

01:29:34 - Scot Wingo
Be a trust barrier last about a year and then.

01:29:36 - Chris Evans
Yeah, yeah. And so it's sort of, you know, I helped out and then it was like, okay, I think I'm done now.

01:29:41 - Scot Wingo
Cool. Well, there's a lot more to the Chris Evans story, but we're going to have to get that in the 2.0. But I'm glad we got to celebrate da Vinci's 40th. Congrats on that. And then, you know, there's a little bit of a redemption story and then you start your second company and you've learned all these lessons and.

01:29:57 - Chris Evans
Yeah.

01:29:57 - Scot Wingo
Catch that wave. Yeah.

01:29:59 - Chris Evans
Yeah. Thank you very much. It's been great going over those memories with you.

01:30:02 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. And then we'll have to have you on There's. That's not the Chris. That's not all this Chris. There's a lot more that you've done, so we're going to have to, like.

01:30:08 - Chris Evans
Spread it out so much more. Chris Evans, more than. Yeah. Anyone besides me.

01:30:12 - Scot Wingo
Well, thanks for sharing all that, Chris. It's good to hear all the stories.

01:30:14 - Chris Evans
Great. Thank you very much. For more tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener times substack@tweener.substack.com for more tweener content, check out tweenertimes.com thanks. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle tweenertalks.