Santa Cruz Design and Innovation

This past Friday night, Plantronics hosted the first public meeting regarding the Santa Cruz Design and Innovation Center. When I received the invite back in October, I really had no idea what to expect - but I am always interested in reaching out to my community to see what's new, especially as it relates to design and innovation. What surprised me was the pent up demand that Santa Cruz has for events like this. There were easily 350 people in attendance and talk of of over 100 that were turned away at the door due to the event being over-capacity.

Ken Kannappan, Plantronics CEO, led off the formal part of the meeting essentially stunned at the turnout. Ever the example of modesty and graciousness, he said a few words and passed the stage to Ed Porter, one of our city council members and the chair of the committe. Noting the countless people in the audience to acknowledge for helping to put this together over the last 18 months, it was handed over to Darrin Caddes, the VP of Corporate Design for Plantronics. Darrin did a terrific job of launching the part of the event aimed squarely at the designers in the community. His tempered style set the tone of appreciation for everyone there.

Lastly Chris Chapman, Director, Automotive Design at BMW stepped up with 176 slides - however they were nearly all automotive artwork, photos of clay models, classic cars, and design teams, giving us a peek into the daily lives of auto designers. He was truly a delight to hear.

Like everyone else there, I was very pleased to see such a active involvement in Santa Cruz for something so fresh. There is a serious goal to raise Santa Cruz's stature with respect to all kinds of designers. Having lived here for 22 years, I am well aware of the talent here - and creating a catalyst like this is just what the design community needs. I can hardly wait to see what's next.

What's next?

Happy New Year!

As I am now in the midst of wrapping up my work at Krugle, I am beginning to explore what's next. Krugle was a great experience in that I was able to engage in a wide variety of roles: VP of Product Development, VP of Sales and VP of Operations. Imagine roughly two years of 12 hour days duct-taped to the front car of a not-quite-finished roller coaster: Screams of laughter, excitement, and occasionally terror.

It was indeed an adjustment from those years in the CEO chair, but I felt lucky to experience the breadth of responsibility and reach in the organization; I learned a lot. I was also fortunate to work with an extraordinarily bright team of people with endless energy and great ideas. Everyone was willing to pickup tasks as necessary regardless of whether it was their responsibility and there was always a culture of customer-centric product improvement.

The company exhibits one of the key traits of great startups: the nimbleness required to shift strategy and resources in order to support the right ideas at the right time, namely the rapid buildup and execution for a commercial product to serve enterprise in just a few months. Given the continuing influx of brand name pilot customers, the Krugle Enterprise Appliance appears to be taking off in a big way; a sign that enterprise development groups are really getting the importance of what Krugle is doing as a potentially game-changing play. I am confident that Krugle will be a tremendous success and I continue to be a wild supporter of the idea, the company and the team.

As I consider what's next, I intend to leverage as much of the learning from Krugle as I can. Here are my current ponderings:

• Open Field Software has been on auto-pilot for the last couple of years, so a little bit of attention will go a long way to boosting its revenues.
  
• There's my notebook full of product ideas that I can never resist cultivating. Who knows, I might beginning pitching one of them.
  
• I have begun outreach to my network of executives and VCs to determine if there is that one right business idea that they have seen that has a need for just my skills and experience, preferably as the CEO.
  
• Several people have asked if I would be willing to engage in consulting opportunities for companies that need help in software development leadership, which is always fresh and fun.

Not only am I am looking foward to this time of fresh opportunities to pursue, I am hoping to be a bit more consistent in writing in my blogs (a New Year's resolution I have seen on almost every blogger's list).

ps. As well, I need to remember NOT to delete prior blog entries just because I thought they were a draft - my prior entry for "CEO turned employee (for now)" is simply gone... as was this one for a few minutes.