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A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a guy in Miami. Here’s how the conversation started:
- My phone rings.
- me “Hello, this is Kevin”
- Miami guy “Kevin Merritt?”
- me “Yep, Kevin Merritt”
- Miami guy “The same Kevin Merritt who once knew a guy named Neal Kaskel?”
- me “Um, uh, yeah” (this is weird, I’m thinking)
- Miami guy “Eureka! I’ve been hunting you down for weeks”
- me “uh oh”
- Miami guy “Are you the guy who made some software called Prospector?”
- me “Well, I led a team that built it, but yes Prospector was my baby”
- Miami guy “Great. I want to buy it. Can you sell it it to me?”
That odd conversation went on like that for another 20 minutes. Miami Guy wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when I told him that Smith Barney now owns Prospector and it’s not for sale as far as I know, not to mention 10 years out of date. He had to have Prospector.
Prospector is an application we designed and built between 1997 and 1999, when I ran IT for a 400-person investment bank. Smith Barney bought the company in 2001, in part because they thought Prospector was pretty cool and could use it in other parts of the company.
On the surface, Prospector was a multi-dimensional customer relationship management (CRM) system. It reflected our role as an infomediary (information intermediary) doing mergers & acquisitions (M&A). We didn’t buy a company and then sell it to a bigger company. We introduced sellers to buyers and then facilitated a deal being consummated.
Miami Guy recently started his own M&A firm. News traveled 3,000 miles from California to Miami. He heard that Prospector is unequivocally what you need to run an M&A firm.
The amazing thing about Prospector was that to its users it was a CRM system, but to its developers it was a platform for modeling, organizing, manipulating and analyzing data. No one on the dev team knew anything about CRM or investment banking, yet the people who used it thought it was the best CRM system you could ever invent for doing M&A. We didn’t create a malleable platform because we were smart. Rather, we built a platform because we really didn’t know what the app needed to do. We did what seemed natural – we delegated functional specification to business people.
Bringing this post back into context and 2007, blist has its roots in Prospector. We’re developing an innovative platform for modeling, organizing, manipulating and analyzing data. Want to track applicants or sales leads? blist will be good for that. Want to share your favorite recipes with friends? blist will be good for that too. Want to create your own VC done deals database? Yep. blist will be able to do that too. As importantly, you won’t need a DBA or even anyone in IT to get the job done. blist is for you, whether you’re from Miami or not.
You know that the product you’ve built is truly great when it people want it long after it has lived its life.
I am sure Blist will be as big a success!
[...] and I began working together in January, 1997. He was the biggest contributor in building Prospector, which as I’ve shared previously, was an application from whose DNA blist has evolved. In [...]