Founders at Work.pdf

442 Founders at Work
They weren’t saying, “We’re looking for this new feature.” That wasn’t so
common, whereas that would be very common in the computer business. This
was more interpretation of the regulations, and how to take stress out of their
lives.
Livingston: So you became a source of advice for these companies as well as a
source of new technology?
Gruner: Yes, I would say Shareholder.com played a significant role in the late
’90s and up until now, interpreting both the technology and the regulatory environment.
And from 1995 to 2000, the company and I personally spent a lot of
time going to trade conferences, luncheons that NIRI (National Investor
Relations Institute) would host, talking about “What’s the Internet?” and giving
demonstrations, trying to make that less intimidating, explaining it. And then,
starting in 2000, we did a similar thing with Regulation FD and Sarbanes-Oxley.
Not explaining it so much, but showing examples of what other companies were
doing.
Livingston: Did you worry about any competitors?
Gruner: At Shareholder.com we had several competitors. By far our most
serious competitor was also a Boston-based company, called CCBN. CCBN
was a very smart company. They were funded by Thomson Financial, a major
company in a lot of aspects of corporate services, financial services. They were
our arch-competitor.
But at the same time, with the dot-com boom, about a dozen companies
popped up in investor and shareholder communications, funded by venture
capitalists. At one point, by late 1999, I calculated that over $85 million of venture
capital had flowed into this little niche of shareholder communications.
And we were still living on our quarter-million-dollar capitalization and
doing fine. We were offered investments many times by VCs and turned them
down. We just felt growing organically was how we wanted to proceed.
Livingston: You didn’t want to give up control.
Gruner: I did not want to give up control. At the time, I owned about twothirds
of the company, and I felt that just makes life so much simpler, particularly
for me. But I think for everybody else, too, because we would sit in a
conference room, talk about something, make a decision, and be going. We
could make important strategic decisions in an afternoon if we chose to.
For example, we had been pricing our Shareholder Direct service at a fixed
cost of $4,000 a quarter, plus telephone fees and other variable charges of the
Internet. That $16,000 was highly, highly profitable. That was one of the things
that allowed us to grow organically all through the ’90s. But as these new competitors
are coming in—like I said, about a dozen competitors offering websites,
webcasting, conference calls, and all kinds of services, financed by
$85 million of venture capital—they were going in and just bombing prices and
even giving stuff away for free.