Why you should beware of one-sided partnerships or ‘unrequited love’

Photo credit: Andrii Yalanskyi

If there’s only one passionate party in a relationship, it’s unrequited love.

Here’s how I learned that the hard way.

Meeting the Dartmouth football team

After Rocket Science, I took some time off and consulted for the very VCs who lost lots of money on the company. The VCs suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in sales automation in Seattle.

In my first meeting with the company, I was a bit nonplussed when the management team started trickling into their boardroom. Their VP of sales was about 6’3″ and two more of their executives looked about 6’5″.

I remember thinking, “There’s no way their CEO can be any taller.  He’s probably 5’2″.” Wrong. Brent Frei, the Onyx CEO, walked in and he looked about 6’8″.

I jokingly said, “If the software business doesn’t work out, you guys got a pretty good football team here.” Without missing a beat, Brent said, “Nah, we already did that. We were the Dartmouth football team front defensive three.”

Oh.

But that wasn’t the only surprise of the day. While I thought I was consulting, Onyx was actually trying to recruit me as their VP of marketing.

At the end of the day, I came away thinking it was a smart and aggressive team, thought the world of Brent Frei as a CEO, and knew Onyx was going to succeed (despite their Microsoft monoculture).

With an unexpected job offer in hand, I spent the plane flight home concluding that our family had already planted roots too deep to move to Seattle. But in that one day, I had learned a lot about sales automation that would shape my thinking when we founded Epiphany.

I know a great customer

A year later, my co-founders and I had formed Epiphany. As other startups were quickly automating all the departments of large corporations, our first thought was that our company was going to automate enterprise marketing departments.

It’s only a month of work

Unrequited love

Lessons learned