Shortly after I had just taken the helm at Pilot Software, I came to work one day and found a three-foot long green crowbar on my desk. There was a Post-it note on it that said, “Use it wisely.” It seemed like a very odd thing to find sitting on my desk.
It turned out to be a message from a guy by the name of Paul Volpe, the first sales person I had hired for the company as we transitioned from being a unit of a bigger company to a standalone company based in Silicon Valley. This transition brought about a lot of discussions about how we wanted to run the business.