No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Prelude

October 15, 1999, was in many ways the best day of my life, yet I was seething mad. We had just sold Pinpoint Technologies, a company we had built ourselves, for more money than we ever thought possible. David Cohen, Bob Durkin, and I were out to dinner with our wives at the Red Lion restaurant in the foothills above Boulder. The final days leading up to the sale had been spent frantically pulling documents from files and sending them to lawyers, staying up until the wee hours of the morning reading draft contract language, and having endless conversations about all of it with our attorney.

October 15 was the date that had been set many months earlier to close the transaction. After going to our office at 6 a.m. to finish some last-minute faxing, David, Bob, and I went to our attorney’s office to sign the documents, a process that we thought would be pretty routine. We emerged 10 hours later, after having had several arguments with the other side about what felt like trivial, last-minute issues, such as the prospect of their viewing our home mortgage paperwork to confirm that we hadn’t pledged the company to a bank.

In the end, the deal got done and we went out to celebrate. At the time I was furious at the attorney for the acquiring company, ZOLL, who I felt was bringing up new, unimportant issues at the eleventh hour. In hindsight, I blame our attorney for getting me worked up about these issues. It was just such a shame that such an important and exciting event caused ...