Why did Sequoia choose Jive to win the space?

Sequoia has a very good handle on the market, and they saw the opportunity in the same way we did - companies were stuck between too much structure (Sharepoint) and too little structure (hundreds of point solutions), and were willing to pay money to have an integrated, community collaboration system for their employees and their customers.

So when they met Jive, and found a company that had real customers, solid revenue, profitability, a motivated team, a great product, and a track record of execution, it was a perfect fit. We want to win as much as they do, and will do what it takes to get the right people involved.

Why Sequoia?

Hands-down, these guys have one of (if not the) best track record of any VC (Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, etc.). They brand themselves as "the entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs," which in our experience seems to be true. There's a lot of operational experience in those walls and they work very hard for their companies. What else?

1. Smart Growth: They allow us to see the world through a longer-term lens. Instead of making decisions in the interest of short-term profitability, we now have the ability to make investments that support our larger goals, such as acquiring a key technology or investing in remote offices.

2. Recruiting: As the growth continues, making sure you get the right people on board is paramount, and a good investment partner can attract great talent.

3. Partners: We've done a great job building relationships with the likes of SAP, Oracle and IBM, but there's a lot more opportunity out there. Sequoia not only knows the right people, but is well-connected to the rapidly changing needs of those potential partners.

4. Mgmt assistance: We've got a great management team in place, but having such a stellar set of coaches helping you out makes a big difference. These folks have seen these challenges many times before, but are still open to creativity and not treating the business plan as a formula.

5. Advisors/board: As we build out the board and advisory board, they can help think through and attract the right folks.

6. Guidance: If we ultimately decide to take the company public, or if the company were to get acquired some day (not in the plans), these guys are the ones we want to have in our corner.

What will change?

Not much. We still have the same values and team. We're still laser focused on solving business problems and creating value for our customers. We've proven that we can grow this business profitably, so there's no "shoot the management team" attitude that a lot of VC's have. And we're still looking very hard for great team members.

What this does mean is that we're going to get a lot more focused on the long-term goal of winning the market, as well as building out the infrastructure to support our rapidly growing customer base. This means investing in international offices (where we already have a lot of customers), building out the infrastructure for support and sales, adding much needed engineers to our R&D team and building out the marketing to make sure we're continuing to meet our customers' demands.

Was it a hard choice?

Definitely. We are proud of our heritage as a bootstrapped company. It's helped to shape a culture of discipline and customer focus, and it's always fun to say that we never raised a dime. Plus, there's a few folks in this office that are a bit suspicious of VC's. And for good reason - there's a lot of bad ones out there who destroy companies in the name of selfish interests or bad management. But this situation is different for several reasons:

• One VC: not a bunch in the room arguing for their own needs.

• Minority stake: they're along for the ride, not driving the ship.

• Great firm: these guys didn't get where they are by forcing bad decisions.

In short, we couldn't be happier with the outcome. We are ready to take this company to the next level, and look forward to a productive relationship with Sequoia.

For those of you in Portland or the surrounding area, you may want to check out the Putting Collaboration to Work conference. We'll be there along with some product and program management gurus. The event is on June 8th and looks to have some interesting sessions and speakers.

We just released Clearspace 1.0.4 (download, README, changelog). Like version 1.0.3, this is primarily a bug fix release. We fixed 23 bugs and made 6 improvements. Two of the most requested minor improvements were added to the 1.0.4 release, those being the ability to set a global theme, and the ability to completely disable guest access in Clearspace. We are now focused on delivering the external version of Clearspace in the coming month, so keep your eyes peeled.

I'll be giving a quick Clearspace demo at the Under the Radar Conference at the Microsoft campus on March 23. We'll have a little booth there to casually chat or if you'd like to see the demo, stop by the Mercury room from 10:45 to 12:15. We're in the "Team Work" session with our friends Atlassian. 

The conference is filled with a lot of interesting companies doing really smart things. We look forward to learning a lot and meeting as many as possible.

!http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/red_hat_logo.thumbnail.png!Now that the beta of Clearspace is public, we wanted to share some news that we've been sitting on for a while. Incredibly, the folks at Red Hat purchased Clearspace and became our first customer back in December while we were in Alpha. And even more cool is that they actually purchased it for a very cool project. Their involvement along side our alpha development really helped further focus us and provide another point of external feedback. A big thanks to them. They're a great team working on very cool stuff.

!http://jivesoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/clearspace_logo.png!Well, maybe not completely clear but we do plan to share as much as we can about our new soon-to-be released product,   Clearspace. It's the biggest and most ambitious undertaking we've tackled in the history of the company and it's been our consuming behind-the-scenes project for over a (very long) year. Now that we're at the end of the road (launch is very early 2007), we thought we'd blog a bit about how Clearspace was conceived, how we got here and some of the final touches we're up to. All this, of course, while still keeping the meatiest details a surprise.

The idea for Clearspace actually came from our customers, who through their conversations with our sales, marketing, professional services and customer support teams had been asking for many different collaborative feature additions to Jive Forums and Knowledge Base. Some of these were very specific, others borrowed from a lot of the collaborative elements of completely different point solutions. At the beginning of last year we took a big step back and realized that the sum of what was being requested was a completely new, much more comprehensive product.

So, a year ago we faced very tough decisions. Up to that point we had planned to address our customer requests through a combination of improvements to our existing products and/or building a couple of totally new products. Our big decision was was whether to build three products or one. The more we talked about it the more we recognized the massive benefit that could be realized by a single, unified, flexible architecture-- sort of like that quote from Lord of the Rings--"one ring to unite them all." (ok, it was really "rule them all" but that's too harsh.)

To help guide us, we reached out to our top 20 customers for advice. We exposed all of them to the ideas, listened to their one-on-one feedback and had them score some simple surveys. Amazingly, strong, consistent results drove home a very clear message: Develop a single product, built from the "people connection"-side of collaboration, that would help teams work together but didn't require companies to do a rip-and-replace of what they had already invested in.

That's how Clearspace was born. Keep your eye here to find out more about Clearspace and what we're up to.

We released version 5.0.5 of Jive Forums this week. Typically, minor releases like this are bug fixes only  (speaking of, here's the changelog), but this time we couldn't resist putting in a new feature. Forums now features an advanced email integration which makes it possible to reply to watch notifications by email. Simply read the watch update you get, type a reply and send it. A few seconds later your message will be posted to the forums. We've implemented it in a pretty secure way so we can verify that an email coming from "you" can match up with your user account in the forums. This has been a heavily requested feature so we're pretty excited to release it.

Also new this release are 4 new translations: German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

What else is new? We've got a swanky new product tour (check out the entry about email watch replies).

And finally, KB 1.7.5 and a new build of the Integrated server are out as well.

Not a chant you hear too much but we certainly were doing it around the office today when we found out that we earned a place on the 2006 Inc.500 list as the 443rd fastest-growing privately held business in America. The full list will be put up tomorrow on their website and we'll show up on page 177 of the September issue (we got an advanced copy).

Next year we hope to break the record for the fastest climbing privately held Inc. 500 winner ever. Look out #1!