"There was an opportunity in each hand," he says. "And we were set up to take advantage of the digital one."
"Companies exist not because some guru started with some great vision," says Rick Cordray, looking back on the decision, "but because some people had some ideas about what they could do, and got started, and worked hard. Sometimes there are big course corrections."
Five months after the decision to go digital, Birck flew to San Francisco with Maerz and Fischer fow what he thought was going to be a routine board meeting. It was unusual for the directors to call a meeting in the Bay Area, and on the way down Birck wondered about the effect of his battle for the analog option. His position was less clear in the new, more narrowly defined Northwest. Everyone agreed that one of his strengths was as a long-term product strategist, looking into the future to see where new markets and technologies intersected. With the company focused on a technology that wasn't part of his background, what role was he now to play?
The night before the board meeting, Birck had a meeting scheduled with two of the lead investors, Jim Lally and Dave Best (of Hambrecht & Quist), in a conference room at the airport hotel. Lally and Best gave the news to him straight: Northwest needed a strong leader who had managed a rapidly growing business already; Birck had not. To attract someone who had, they would have to offer the CEO's job, and they thought it would be best if Birck resigned. He would keep his stock and a seat on the board.
Birck says he was stunned. "Life after Northwest wasn't part of my mental set." He had dedicated three years to the company. He had left a secure job, put his marriage on the line, taken out a second mortgage on his house, given himself a below-market salary (and then, for a while, not even cashed his paychecks), exposed his dreams and naivete to bankers, lawyers, and investors, fought to keep his company committed to its original strategic direction, and given in when he couldn't convince his team that he was right. And now that the company was poised for what all of them hoped would be a period of steady growth, Lally and Best -- the investors he had recruited and trusted -- were asking him to bow out gracefully.
But he said OK. Just like that. "You know when you're beat," he says. "They had all the cards. They didn't come to that room to negotiate.
"Sure I was upset. Wouldn't you be? I could have screamed and stamped my feet, but where would that have gotten me? I had an interest in seeing Northwest continue as a prosperous company. I didn't want attention focused on the conflict."
A couple of days later, he had cleaned out his desk.
Back on the run
"People ask me what I do all day," says Birck from his new office, loaned courtesy of Wayne Kingsley, a Portland venture capitalist who didn't invest in Northwest. "They seem to think I sit here and look out my pretty window." The view is nice -- Portland bisected by the Willamette River, from 23 stories up -- but Birck has more on his mind than scenery.
After he got over the shock of his dismissal, he made the rounds of people he had worked with at Northwest -- venture capitalists, accountants, lawyers, suppliers -- and asked for help in assessing his strengths. Two pieces of advice Jim Lally had for anyone starting a new venture made a particularly strong impression: Surround yourself with the best people you can find, and make sure everyone has the same goals.
As Birck set out to define his new company -- its products, he says, will be "cousins" of Northwest's -- his top priority was recruiting. So far, he has signed up four people, all of whom are "gainfully employed" and expected to remain so until the rest of the key players are in place. The five meet one evening a week to work on a business plan. Although Birck has talked to enough potential customers to feel sure his idea is a good one -- and enough venture capitalists to think he can get the backing he needs -- he will take the idea no further until the team is complete.
In fact, if he doesn't get the kind of team he wants, he intends to drop the idea. He doesn't want to be what Jim Lally calls a "decathlon champion entrepreneur" -- a Nolan Bushnell-type who starts a company and then goes on to the next event. This time, Birck wants to build something he can stay with for the long haul.
Sometimes, he says, his wife asks why he wants to put himself through the hours and the hard work again. It is for the same reason he runs, he tells her. Other people pound themselves into the ground for the cardiovascular benefits or the epinephrine high, but Birck started running so he could participate in the 1983 Cascade Run-Off, a 15K Portland road race that attracts top runners worldwide. Although he was so slow as a boy that his high school baseball teammates called him "Possum," after watching a wave of 7,500 people running one year, Birck decided he wanted to compete.
"Joan Benoit ran here and won," he says. "There are bands along the course. People cheer you on. How many times in your life do you have a chance to participate in a world-class event? It's like Mount St. Helens. I'm glad I was in town when it blew up. I like being out there participating with everyone else."
