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Evan founded Critical Domain with his longtime associate, Joseph Jones, a
year after the technology bubble burst. The founding premise was that, in
the post-bubble environment, it made more sense for technology startups to
outsource the first version of their technology to Critical Domain instead
of doing it in-house.
This made sense for a variety of reasons: First, tying a contract and
monetary expenditures to specific milestones along a project schedule forced
the fledgling startup to be very disciplined about what it chose to build,
rather than falling prey to the common mistake of changing direction so many
times that the first version of the product never made it out the door.
Second, it allowed the startup to get to a point where it could prove it's
business model with a real product, before it ever had to accept the cost
burden of a full time development team. Third, using a seasoned team with
established infrastructure and methodology is about 40% faster for the first
project than first building a team and infrastructure and then having them
build the technology.
From the standpoint of Critical Domain, working with multiple startups
allowed a seasoned development team to spread its risk among multiple
opportunities, just like the venture capital community does. As a way of
further spreading risk, Critical Domain also developed a set of e-commerce
building blocks which it sold on an Application Service Provider (ASP) model
to established bricks and mortar companies.
In order to aid in rapid prototyping, Evan built a database driven system
that allowed Critical Domain to create Technical Specifications in a common
format. This same system would then automatically generate a wire frame of
the software to serve as a consistent starting point for the rest of the
codebase. Often, the wire frame only required a few hours of additional work
to get the software to the point that a customer could be shown a proof of
concept walk through.
As Critical Domain's client representative, Evan served as interim CTO for a
couple of different customers in their presentations to investors and
customers. He also acted in a sales and business management capacity. After
a year of dealing primarily with startups, Critical Domain decided to focus
on smoothing out its lumpy revenue flow by shifting its focus to the
smaller, more numerous, ASP customers. It was a constant battle to find
enough time to increase this portion of the business when the majority of
the revenue still came from the time consuming, but financially unreliable, startups.
After two years of operation, Critical Domain found itself at a juncture
where another startup had just defaulted on it's obligations and there
wasn't yet enough recurring ASP revenue to sustain the team. The decision
was taken to sell Critical Domain to another Seattle company on the strength
of Critical Domain's recurring revenues and core technology.
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When Evan joined ThinkShare as a program manager, it was essentially a consulting firm making semi-custom mobile
software for the construction industry. Since Evan had quite a bit of experience with the downsides of being
a software development company, he immediately set out to show how the various custom applications could be
written as a single application. This resulted in the production of a functional specification that
included upgraded UI based on the Windows Mobile Style Guide, a single consistent logical data model,
standardized integration points, and a data flow model that was much more reliable than what had been
previously used.
Evan's next task was the very sensitive political campaign of getting the company to adopt this new
unified product plan and also switch from components built in-house (that of course had to be
supported in-house at great cost) to standard components produced by Microsoft that were more reliable
and were supported on someone else's dime. After this tide was shifted and the development team had
taken ownership of the new product specification, Evan shifted his energies to sales.
Evan contributed to a sales process overhaul that was being effected by Andy Blackstone, a very
capable senior sales process consultant. This was a work in process as Evan participated in sales
calls as a technical salesperson. Over time, the model that was settled on was a very consultative
sales model that focused on process analysis and then subsequent cost analysis of the very involved
enterprise software package that ThinkShare offers. Evan contributed to the closure of several sales
for the software that was being developed based on his original specification.
As soon as the new software was ready, Evan became the deployment "SWAT Team", responsible for the
successful integration and deployment of the software package. Throughout the course of multiple rollouts,
it became clear that the organizational change enabled by the new software was so fundamental that
ThinkShare needed to be responsible not just for the rollout of its own software, but also all of the attendant
process change and interaction with other software systems.
This realization led to the formation of a professional services organization, which became Evan's responsibility.
In this capacity, Evan focused on a systematic mapping of each customer and prospective customer's process and
information flow. This started during the sales activity, and resulted in a blueprint for the configuration of
the customer's new system, a process revision document that detailed how things would change within the company,
and training documentation specific to each user type. Evan was then responsible for shepherding each
through the implementation process.
During this phase, Evan became very acquainted with a wide variety of construction
methods and software packages and often helped ThinkShare's customers with business and technical problems not directly
related to ThinkShare's products and services.
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VacationSpot.com was Evan's first big startup experience. VacationSpot.com (VS) was a dot.com founded by two ex-Microsoft veterans
that focused on "independent leisure lodging" -- all of the properties that were independently owned and didn't have an
outlet on the web. Evan was VS' third employee, and he grew along with it.
Evan was initially hired to make websites for VS' customers. This was quickly replaced with development and program management
responsibility for VS' main portal site. He also built internal workflow tools to support VS' mission. Evan was responsible for
VacationSpot.com through version 2.5. During this period of time, he prototyped a primitive webservice-based link between
VS' back end database, and "Avail", a desktop property management suite acquired by VS and sold to it's customers. He also
oversaw or directly implemented the data mapping and data import of the data from three different competitors acquired
by VacationSpot.com.
After VacationSpot.com 2.5 was out the door, Evan moved to oversee the Quality Assurance teams for
both VacationSpot.com and Avail, as well as the production network, and the Company's IT staff. Evan
served in this capacity until each of the organizations was well organized and underway. He was in the midst
of transitioning back into product development when VacationSpot.com was acquired by Expedia.
At the time of the acquisition, VacationSpot.com had grown to 40 employees and was sold largely on the
strength of the success of VacationSpot.com 2.5. Evan chose not to join the large and largely hidebound
Expedia, and went instead to another startup.
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