>>> "Greetings, all! I bet Bruce never figured there was as much support as has been expressed in the last 24 hours. I haven't had time to read all the E-mails this morning, but I've read enough to know that the response is overwhelmingly in favor of trying to make something positive happen -- for all of us." --Tom Danner, Advanced Multimedia Concepts
With amorphous plans swirling in the ether, Haven's rescue effort needed an organizational white knight. One appeared almost immediately, in the person of Tom Danner. Danner had used Wizard for eight years to manage order flow and inventory for his data-storage company in Redmond, Wash., so he was among the recipients of Holmes's farewell message. "I couldn't believe Bruce would do that," says Danner. "But my first concern was for him, the employees, and the users. I wanted to coordinate the line of communication."
Danner's second concern was a touch less selfless. A serial entrepreneur who had founded four companies, Danner detected in Haven's dark skies a glint of opportunity. His plan: to raise money from fellow users and build a whole new company on the foundation of Haven's employees, intellectual property, and customers. Danner's own investment would be approximately $100,000. He figured he could count on Wizard users for an additional $300,000, based on informal pledges that had surfaced in the barrage of E-mail messages.
But Danner fretted that any resuscitation effort would prove futile if the 400 E-mail addresses listed in the "cc:" section of Holmes's note fell into competitors' hands. (Only about a third of Haven's customers were included in the original E-mail. The rest found out something was wrong when they called Haven's offices and found that the lines were dead.) Already the vultures were circling.
>>> "Haven and Dydacomp have been competitors since the earliest days of PC-based mail-order systems. We're the logical choice to continue your operation." --Dave Kopp, Dydacomp Development Corp.
The day after Haven closed its doors, Dave Kopp, the president and CEO of Dydacomp Development Corp., producer of a Wizard competitor, had sent Haven's customers an E-mail message that had a sales pitch embedded with hot links. Danner knew there would be further attempts to storm Haven's user citadel, and he wanted to erect some obstacles. So he quickly persuaded his fellow Wizard users to move their conversation to eGroups, a free Web-based forum where they could communicate without giving away the farm. The forum, dubbed HavenWizards, was launched on August 16 -- that same day.
Next, Danner took all the action -- briefly -- offline by telephoning Haven's stunned employees to gauge their interest in a company revival. He reached many at the office, where they were packing up their belongings and -- in a few cases, at least -- continuing to offer technical support without pay. "From the minute Bruce sent that E-mail, Tom was on the ball," notes Russ Horton, Haven's director of sales. "He said, 'Listen, I think this thing can still work. If you're up for moving ahead, I'd like to work at making that happen."
The employees were eager to make it happen as well. "I'd turned down two jobs because I wanted to be a part of this new company," says Joe Purcell, director of technical support and the father of seven children. Technical-support specialist Kuhn says: "When I heard there was the promise of a new company, I wrote to Tom immediately. I wanted to go back and finish what I started."
>>> "Monday morning I sat down to my E-mail expecting a load of justified vitriol, and instead was overwhelmed by kindness and good wishes .... A users group led by Tom Danner, someone I view as immensely capable, is creating a new company to carry on the work of Haven Corp. ... I will not be a part of the new company." --Bruce
When Holmes finally resurfaced on August 22, in message #209 of the HavenWizards forum, he put to rest both his customers' lingering concerns for his well-being and their questions about who would head up the new company. Danner was the undisputed leader. And he knew what he needed. "We had to get the source code, the intellectual-property rights, and access to the customer database," Danner says.
More easily said than done. The next several weeks were grueling as Danner carried on protracted negotiations with Holmes, whom he describes as often hard to reach, emotionally drained, and, of course, nearly 2,000 miles distant from Danner's home base in Redmond. At the same time, Danner was running his own company and trying to nail down financing for the new organization.
Distracted as he was by the exercise in on-the-fly company building, Danner still worried about Wizard users' defecting to competitors, who had the undeniable advantage of existing. He viewed HavenWizards -- where Wizard watchers traded technical advice, resource information, and news -- as the perfect circling of wagons. Consequently, he continued to moderate the forum and post daily messages, even when life became almost unbearably hectic.
Danner's faith in the forum's cohesive powers proved to be well placed. Conventional wisdom would have predicted that the longer Wizard users went without technical support, the more susceptible they would be to outside pitches. But as time wore on, the HavenWizards grew increasingly protective of both their forum and its nascent project. When one member tried to set himself up as a reseller of a Haven competitor's product, the rest of the forum voted him "off the island," Survivor-style. "I was pissed," says Peggy Glenn, owner of Firefighters Bookstore, in Huntington Beach, Calif. "One of our own was working to resurrect the company, and along came the piranhas."
>>> "I think when the dust settles, this will be one of the great stories of belief of customers in the current and POTENTIAL products of a supplier in trouble and how they got together, fought off the circling sharks, and emerged with a commitment to support the current product and resources to produce new ones." -- Charley Kehoe
Then, in late August, events took an unexpected turn. Smith-Gardner & Associates Inc. (recently renamed Ecometry Corp.), a $50-million publicly traded provider of enterprise software based in Delray Beach, Fla., approached Danner with an offer to buy or invest in what remained of Haven. Once again, HavenWizards played a crucial, if unconscious, role. Smith-Gardner president and chief operating officer John Marrah, who had spent hours lurking in the forum, says that the passionate customer support he witnessed there was "absolutely one of the deciding factors" in moving forward with an offer for Haven. "It really helped us make our decision very quickly and easily," he says.
