Now serving as chairman and co-CEO, Klemp is as committed to staying atop Drypers as Pitassi was to leaving. "I'm one of these types that will wake up one day and realize what I was missing. I'm the one who lost a marriage over chasing this dream," he says. "My heroes are the captains of industry--the people who made something from nothing to be a part of commerce. There's not really a stopping point there."
Indeed there isn't--not for Pitassi either. True, he manages to spend more quality time with his children than most fathers: Tuesday and Thursday afternoons accompanying his daughters to swimming, Saturday mornings watching them at their piano lessons, Wednesday afternoons playing with his son while his wife takes the girls to ballet, reading to or making up bedtime stories for all three each night. And while statistics (albeit fuzzy ones) suggest that the average father spends roughly an hour and a half per day with his children, Pitassi expands that time with the kids to at least four hours on weekdays, as well as 75% of his weekend time. But achieving that often forces Pitassi to override his strong impulses. He's got to be vigilant, for instance, about forcing himself to stop reading business plans. "Some of these things I love, even if they don't make any sense," he says.
Other activities take practice to do well. "It's hard to sit down on the floor and play little games with your children when you're used to solving complicated business problems," he says. "My mind is still going through the motions of what got me where I am." In his former life, Pitassi went 12 years without a vacation; he routinely called his wife at 6:30 every night, telling her he'd be home in half an hour, only to return around midnight. Now he rarely misses family dinners, and he takes at least four vacations a year. "He has just become more involved in our lives," observes his wife, Elaine. "And isn't that what it's all about?"
Is it? Her husband's answer isn't as clear. To be sure, he loves what he's doing. "There's no way I'm going to miss out on time with my children," he states emphatically. "When my daughter asks life questions like, 'What is God?' (or 'heaven' or 'death'), I want to be the one answering her." He adds, "Getting down on the floor and looking into a child's eyes, that's so valuable. I never knew that while I was building Drypers."
At the same time, Pitassi can't pretend that he's lost any of his attraction to building a business. "I love solving difficult business problems. They're like puzzles to me," he says. "A company's trying to build something, and it's running into a wall. Why isn't it working? I love new products, I love strategic planning, I love the visionary stuff, I love setting up the infrastructure of companies. You've got so many columns to hold up the company; now where do they go? I love all of these fundamental things." Almost as quickly as his enthusiasm builds up, he begins looking for a verbal antidote. "I don't think I can make a mistake by making my family my first priority," he says. Shades of Pitassi the Capitalist shine through as Pitassi the Family Man tries to explain his decision. "This is the point in my life when I'm going to practice this; who knows, it may help me in business someday," he says.
That day may come sooner than it sounds. In June 1996, 18 months after he left Drypers, Pitassi found himself engaged by a new set of questions. Maybe he didn't have to shun business entirely. A bigger challenge perhaps would be to reenter the growth-company universe on his own terms. "Can you be successful without being compulsive about work?" he asks. "Can you be involved and supportive from a distance?" These are the challenges he set out for himself. "I want to get the thrill of the experience but not lose sleep over it at night," he explains. "I want to play in the entrepreneurial sphere but go when I want to go."
What he wanted, of course, was to start a company.
He told me to slow down, not try to jump in there and grab it all--to go public at $50 million, instead of $15 million, for example," recalls Kevin Eldredge, 32, CEO of RapidFire Solutions, a restaurant software company in Hillsboro, Ore., and one of the fastest-growing companies in the state. "It is not what I expected to hear from someone like him, so it means a lot more to me." That is one of the more salient lessons he's learned from Pitassi, whom he meets with periodically for "companionship and real advice. I can get more out of a quick lunch with Dave than almost anything I do."
"We talked about family, about life, not what you'd consider typically entrepreneurial things," says Rayvon Reynolds, 36, an Atlanta entrepreneur with whom Pitassi is working. When he met Pitassi through YEO, Reynolds had had a fail-proof idea for a business sitting in his files for three years but couldn't muster the energy to jump back into the entrepreneurial fray. Several prodding phone calls and meetings with Pitassi later, Reynolds is now "putting together one of the biggest deals I've ever done--and I'm having fun," he exclaims. He gives Pitassi credit for "reigniting the emotion. I'm just flat-out a happier person when I'm building something," he says. "When you're an entrepreneur and you're staring at a mountain juncture but not climbing it, you're pissed off. But if you've got your emotion, you rip through things other people wouldn't touch."
