Tuesday August 15th,2006
Hot startup unveils plan
The same week that Onyx Software Corp. disappeared from the public markets, the founder of the Bellevue company is taking the wraps off another startup that he hopes will transform the way business people organize their work.
Brent Frei, who founded Onyx in 1994, is just starting to talk about Smartsheet.com -- a year-old Kirkland company that he created with former executives from Onyx, Concur and Captura Software.
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Frei, an executive vice president at Intellectual Ventures, is serving as chairman of Smartsheet and devoting about five hours per week to the startup. It is backed with about $1 million in angel financing and led by Mark Mader, a former vice president at Onyx
Frei drew parallels between the new company and Onyx, a maker of customer relationship management software. The company was sold Wednesday to private equity firms for $92 million.
"It was time for the next one," said Frei, whose fiancee, Maria Colacurcio, is serving as marketing director at the six-person startup. "The thing we did well at Onyx was that we built a better mousetrap in a market that people would have said was pretty well-defined and pretty crowded. I think we really have got that in spades this time."
Plenty of other companies sell project management and collaboration software, including Microsoft Corp., eProject and 37 Signals, which makes Basecamp. But Frei, 40, said most people still use Microsoft's Excel to track their work and manage projects.
"As I surveyed all of my colleagues out in the world, everybody basically used Excel and everybody hated using it, because while it was perfectly flexible in tracking line items, it was extremely difficult to keep up to date who had the current version of the file, it didn't track any history and there was no way to automate the tracking of things," he said.
That's a big reason why Frei -- who discovered the need for the Smartsheet service as CEO of Onyx -- started working on the problem last summer. Smartsheet, which takes its name from the idea of a smarter spreadsheet, tracks what people do on teams through a hosted Web service. It combines the best of Excel, Outlook and Web-based calendars in a productivity tool, one that allows managers to keep tabs on projects or recent initiatives as they change, Frei said. He described it as providing "an autopsy for a project."
About 25 companies are testing the service, including Cingular Wireless and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. It costs between $250 and $2,000 per month depending on the number of users. In "stealth mode" for the past 14 months, the company plans a full launch of the service later this month.
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