Berkshire Partners – Memory Leak

I stood at the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) platform pensively waiting for my train to arrive. My brain was lost in thought thinking of whatever was happening that day at my venture backed San Francisco tech start up. The overhead display announced that a train headed for Balboa Park was arriving. The first train horn blows validating what the display was trying to tell us. The train begins to roll by.

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We all began to gather on the markers where the train doors were supposed to open. Everyone was lost in their headphones and we were all invisible to each other. The BART train began to pull up to the platform. More horns blew to make sure folks step away from the oncoming train. You could see in the distance some commuters running towards the platform because they didn’t want to wait the 20 or so minutes for the next one.

I commuted on BART for 10+ years. 1.5 hours one way. 3 hours a day. 15 hours a week. 60 hours a month. 720 hours a year or a complete month a year. Keep in mind that this was before COVID so working remotely wasn’t as in vogue. I needed a break from this commute. I’ll admit that the recruiter had my attention when he told me the job with Accela was 15 minutes from my home.

There were lots of other reasons I took the CTO role at Accela close to 6 years ago.

The CEO and existing executive team — the CEO and the other executives really impressed me. It was a crew that I could really work with.
The investment team — the partners at Berkshire Partners were amazing and didn’t let me down though the years.
The opportunity to transform state and local government — I enjoy transforming overlooked markets. I think that was because of too many years chasing the next sexy thing earlier in my career. Accela at the time was still building installers for state and local government to run in their data centers. The cloud was something still found in the sky.
A big fat mess to clean up — I enjoy cleaning up messes. Accela at the time was one of the biggest messes I had seen. It was a 20+ year old GovTech company with a bunch of non-integrated acquired assets floating around. The joke during the first few months was I would discover new products no one knew about because a customer would call that it was down. Customers hated us. The team was broken. Technical debt was overflowing out of the doors. Data centers were long overdue for hardware refreshing. I used to joke that the architecture was a Polaroid photo from 1999. I said to myself that if I make it out of this mess alive, I’ll be able to write the book about it.

I took on the CTO role responsible for all technical aspects of the business — application engineering, quality engineering, cloud engineering, security, compliance and IT.

Rebuilt technology organization, resourcing model, and software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Rearchitected on-premises software product to highly scalable, cost effective, 99.9% uptime, multi-tenant SaaS platform.
Migrated product out of data centers into public cloud (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services).
Re-rationalized and defined path out of previously acquired companies and technical debt.
Stabilized the business to the point that we were able to acquire companies again.
Rebuilt security & compliance program (SOC3, PCI, GDPR, CCPA, StateRamp)
Represented the company at industry events and with the media.

Fast forward 6 years, it was like a textbook execution on turning around a distressed technology company. In September 2023, Francisco Partners co-invested in Accela.

After the deal much of the executive team turned over and a smaller executive team was left executing on the post-deal plans and waiting for a new CEO to join. It was important to me to follow through on commitments made through the deal and I wanted to engage with the new CEO. I’m proud of what we accomplished at Accela to get a new deal and proud of the all that we accomplished after the deal as we set the company towards the next chapter of growth. I learned so much at Accela and from everyone at the company.