It occurred to me in the shower tonight that there is a piece of history in the name, "The Socrates Group" that may take explaining. If you carefully examine my resume, you will see that I was the founder and president of The Socrates Group from 1991 to 1999 it was acquired by Etelos Corporation.

I became one of seven founders of Etelos and stayed with them until September, 2000 when I had to lay everyone off except Ahmad Baitalmal, the finest programmer I have ever known. We had raised a couple million when the Internet reality pie hit everyone in the face in March, 2000. The money dried up overnight and by August, it was clear that a thorough retrenching was in order. I laid myself off with most everyone else, but Ahmad stayed on, along with the three Kolke brothers lead by Danny, the youngest and the one with the passion and leadership that started the whole thing.

Danny is a pretty amazing fellow. He is a world class piano player, and a man who simply doesn't quit. He and his brothers Ray and Desmond hung on and Etelos is back with a vengeance. Etelos has had more lives than the luckiest of cats. It started in 1999 as a sales training company. It then mutated into a referral selling tool. Now it is behind CRM For Google and a gaggle of other tools to support the sales process.

We started Etelos in June and I hired Ahmad in November. Ahmad is about 6’6” and was at the time close to 400 pounds. Physically, he is huge, but he is one of the gentlest people I know. He was born in Saudi Arabia and taught himself English by listening to the radio. To listen to him now, you would never know that he is not a native born American.

Ahmad is the genius behind all of Etelos transformation over the years. He created the engine at the heart of Etelos’ technology. Danny is the promoter. He is a low-key introvert who is one of the best salesmen I have ever seen. But most of all, Danny and Ahmad have demonstrated persistence. They simply hung in through the toughest of times and now show all the signs of being an overnight sensation.

I left in 2000 because I could clearly see that Ahmad was more critical to Etelos’ survival than I was. That was one of my best decisions ever, at least for Danny and Ahmad. But now, seven years later, I have changed the name of the business I started three years ago with Dick DeWaard from DeWaard and Jones to The Socrates Group.

Moving back in time, I started The Socrates Group (Version 1) in 1991 after I left Microsoft Consulting Services. I taught a course called “New Architectures For Enterprise Computing” all over North America and even twice in Caracas, Venezuela. I taught at Intel, AT&T, the US Army and I taught hundreds of KPMG’s consultants about advanced computing concepts and architectures. It was great fun and I met thousands of great people.

The Socrates Group was me and my wife, Donna, working out of our house in Redmond. I traveled about two and a half weeks each month and learned my way around just about every airport in America. I learned to evaluate a hotel room in less than 10 seconds. I was a true Road Warrior. I even have the fleece jacket to prove it. I got great evaluations and loved teaching; but after seven years, the travel got quite boring and I longed to roll up my sleeves and dive back into the programming trenches. Enter Danny Kolke.

After leaving Etelos, I walked through the valley of the shadows of the Internet melt-down, the earthquake of early 2001 and the realization that there was a golden (but scary) opportunity in the midst of the chaos of those times.

Donna and I had never felt at home in Redmond. After much thought and investigation and a slap up side of the head from our eldest son, Travis, we realized that Bellingham had all the qualities of the place we wanted to settle down except good paying jobs. We set our sights on unloading our house in Redmond in the middle of a housing slump and chased the market downward through 9/11 and into November, 2001 until we finally sold it for a huge discount over what it was worth a year later.

I had made a practice of coming to Bellingham at least one day a week from June through December simply to meet people. By the time we arrived in our massive U-Haul truck at 10:00AM on January second, 2002, we had a pretty good idea of what Bellingham was like. Donna had a job within two weeks, but it took me six months before I landed a job with Office Systems Northwest. Ron Taylor hired me, but could never quite figure out what to do with me. I wasn’t cut from the hard-core salesman model that were his roots, and I wasn’t very good at (or interested in) fixing computers. I realized pretty quickly that if I wanted to make a decent living in Bellingham, I would have to start my own business.

I stayed with OSNW until the end of 2003 when Dick and I started DeWaard and Jones. When Dick and I decided in the spring of 2007 that it made good sense for me to buy out his shares in the business, I knew that we had to change the name. “DeWaard and Jones” was a pun on DeWaard and Bode (started by Dick’s father), but it wasn’t a very good or useful pun. Most often, people thought were some sort of financial services company.

It took me many brainstorming meetings with Syd Cole and Kate Clark before I finally realized that it was time to return to my roots and revive The Socrates Group, the second time around. So if you wondered about that apparent déjà view in my resume, now you know the story.

Thursday, November 08, 2007 12:32:36 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Small Busines Owner