Patrick quinlan rivet software

Until it all comes crashing down. Quinlan has one of those stories. The company was ServiceSelect. He calls it his train wreck. ServiceSelect LLC, founded in , supplied low-voltage wiring and technology that homebuilders needed for the cutting-edge home electronics and entertainment systems homebuilders put in model homes to wow customers.

Homebuyers liked what they saw. ServiceSelect started winning work from homebuilders to handle whole neighborhoods, not just the model homes, in housing boom hot spots, such as Arizona and Nevada as well as Texas and Colorado.

ServiceSelect grew to employees. Quinlan rose in the company management to become CEO between and Retailer Ultimate Electronics bought a company similar to ServiceSelect, seeing homebuilders as a natural extension of its electronics sales directly to consumers. He had champagne ready to mark the biggest moment of his young career when it all fell apart. Lehman Brothers, one of the storied names in Wall Street investment banking, was felled Sept.

Merrill Lynch, another iconic name in finance, announced the same day it was selling itself to survive. The U. Suddenly, a business that wired new homes for high-end electronics was radioactive to investors.

New home construction was gone for the foreseeable future. The idea was to leave the company with zero cash and no bills to pay when Ultimate Electronics took ownership. The new owner would have its own cash and supplier relationships. ServiceSelect had no reason to hold onto anything, Quinlan said. They worried about preserving their own wealth as the U. It all went boom. The financial collapse was an historic moment, one that may never be repeated.

But that would be glossing over things. The housing industry had been slowing for months. Indeed, part of why the deal with Ultimate Electronics made such sense was that merging ServiceSelect with an Ultimate Electronics subsidiary that also wired homes gave the companies better economies of scale to survive a slowdown in home building, Quinlan said.

Executives at startups sign a lot of things. The court case surrounding the liability only concluded in September, five years and two companies later for Quinlan. A year after ServiceSelect closed, Rivet Software hired Quinlan to be its president and lead its high-growth phase.

The Denver company writes software to help publicly traded companies track financial information and file financial reports to regulators in an electronic, searchable format. Its staff ballooned from 40 to more than between and The business cornered the largest market share of among companies selling the reporting technology to big businesses, making Rivet one of the fastest-growing companies in the region.

Rivet seemed to be riding high when Quinlan, and some others close to him on the executive team, left the company at the end of Six months later, Rivet Software laid off of its employees. RR Donnelly had referred many companies to Rivet during its fastest growth days. Our customers are companies like Under Armour, Petco, LinkedIn, and other use our software to manage their government mandated, effectiveness and compliance programs.

The areas we are focused on, are anti-bribery and anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, and import-export for large, global companies with complex, regulatory environments.

We are the first, purpose built software to help Chief Compliance Officers manage their job. That seems like a fairly unusual, specialized area which everyone might not know about—how did you end up focusing on that market?

Patrick Quinlan: Previously, a good number of our executives spent time at Rivet Software, which is also broadly in the compliance area, focused on financial compliance and XBRL. What I really love, is creating software solutions to a regulatory, because it really addresses a need. That gives you a large opportunity to engage a marketplace. We looked at compliance, and saw that this specific area of regulatory compliance did not have any purpose-built software. As an example, Under Armour uses us when they open up a new office located in Asia, or if you are Kraft Hines in Europe, these are things that everyone has to think about.

As a serial entrepreneur, with your success at Rivet — what did you learn there that you are applying here? Patrick Quinlan: There are a couple of things that are true when you are an entrepreneur, which are true here. One, is you have to focus on the customer. You have to build and design beautiful software. You have to create a culture so extraordinary that you can manage all of the ups and downs of building an enterprise software company. Things are never in a straight line, anything is possible, even things you think are impossible.

You have only do that if you build a culture of an organization that can go through that roller coaster ride. Patrick Quinlan: Our first large, global customer was Philip Morris. Phillip Morris is in plus countries around the world, pretty much every country except North Korea, Cuba, and, ironically, the United States.