Keith Cox
Editor’s Note: This is the third of four installments of the Keith Cox Chronicles. When we left off in the previous segment, Keith was working at PageMasters, but the company was just sold to Buzzsaw (click here to read the previous installment).
Buzzsaw was 40 percent owned by Autodesk. We were bricks and mortar, and they were all cloud-based. As they burned through their cash, Carl Bass, who was the president of Buzzsaw, became the president of Autodesk. And he brought Buzzsaw into the Autodesk fold. In the space of about five years, we grew from a 40-person company at PageMasters to over 1,000 employees at Buzzsaw to well over 20,000 employees worldwide at Autodesk.
What we learned at Autodesk is to get on the product roadmap at Autodesk, it wasn't good enough just to have a good idea. Getting on the product schedule required a forecast of more than $1 million of potential revenue. So we went to work.
The exclusive contract with Océ was about to expire. We had received inquiries from KIP, Xerox and just about every other plotter manufacturer out there: They wanted us to create a version that would run on their equipment. We were considering development of the new versions, which led to some tricky situations, since we didn’t want Océ to know what we were thinking.
A few manufacturers dangled potential revenue by sending equipment to our office in the hopes we would begin development. This led to some awkward situations. For example, sometime around 2000 some people from Océ were coming to visit. Normally, visitors would meet in the conference room. On this particular day, a Xerox Max 200 printer was sitting in the room. This was Xerox's attempt to compete with the 9800. The Max 200 could place red print on top of the black and white drawings. As you can imagine the conference room was locked tight and the meeting took place in the lunchroom.
As the exclusivity was just about to end, we were working diligently at making a proposal to Autodesk. We submitted a proposal approaching $15 million in potential sales. We really believed we could produce that much revenue doing controllers for everybody. We finalized the proposal and went to the vice president of our unit inside of Autodesk and made the pitch. Talk about bad timing. The VP said, "You know fellows, that's really good, but you know what? Three days ago, I would've bought that. But I just sold you to Océ yesterday."
Well, a couple months later I was an Océ employee again. Full circle. Isn't that crazy? That gave me three orange tattoos for my career. I stayed with them about a year. My software experience had kept me on the cutting edge of technology, but that opportunity just wasn’t there. However, I had made a lot of friends, and many good relationships. It was by and large a great company. But it just wasn't a good fit at that time for me.
The next stop was with our friend Woody Rush at Plan Express. My growing contact list put me in charge of partnerships. The Plan Express concept was revolutionary: If you sent your print job in before midnight, you could have next day delivery anywhere in the country. What was even more special about Plan Express was the document management system they provided at no charge if you sent your work there. The system would help organize the documents by discipline and most current set. There were plans to add additional document management features. It was a fun place to work because it was fast-paced and exciting.
The way it worked was that we printed all the jobs in the facility right next to the Memphis airport, and everything was distributed by FedEx. In 2004 I worked out a distribution agreement with Mark Beilman at RSA. This gave customers another national option. Let's say you're doing all the Columbus, Ohio work for David's Bridal. You could either have Print Express print the job and ship those prints via FedEx, or you could choose the Key Blueprints option at a negotiated rate for Print Express and they would print locally in Columbus and deliver the next day. Woody envisioned a “Kayak-like” interface. He had the developers create basically a “what if?” dashboard, so that you could compare what it was going to cost using either option.
Also, with the relationship with FedEx, Woody was able to dial in weather as well. Let’s say a customer has a project in Chicago, and they’re expecting to have a snow up there. We wouldn’t send the prints with FedEx because those planes could have been diverted and the package may have never made it. The option was to send it to Mark Luncsford at Best Imaging and have him print it and deliver it in downtown Chicago that day. The customer made the decision. It was just like having Expedia or Priceline. You would go to the order entry page, upload your files, and you would see your options. And that weather component would show up on those options. There might be a blinking red notice that warned a storm front was expected, so delivery could be delayed.
We're talking about 2003, 2004 around there somewhere. That was really cutting edge for the time. I stayed with Woody until around 2007.
Next edition: Keith joins SCP and eventually ends up at Synnex.