After starting my career in telecom, I went to work for Cisco in 1996 and finished my first full year #1 in the Operation. I enjoyed my patch—which involved hunting new business in verticals that Cisco largely ignored. My initial territory was Associations and Non-Profits…and later included law firms and labor unions. While Cisco was a dominant player in the data networking sector, clearly I was the underdog in my territory. Many of my competitors had already saturated this segment of the market. However, after a couple years—I had many of the top law firms standardizing on Cisco gear, and I took down significant wins at National Geographic, NASD/NASADAQ, and AFL-CIO. Because my manager and I had a contentious relationship, I decided it was time for a change and took on a new position on the AOL account team. It wasn’t long before I realized that nurturing one account wasn’t my strong suit, and decided the money in and of itself was not enough to keep me interested. I resigned from Cisco and decided to take my first sabbatical. After 10 years of slugging it out at big companies, I decided it was time to do something entrepreneurial. I cashed out my options at Cisco and used some of the proceeds to fund my time off and research the startup market.
After 5 months of research, I joined Sonus Networks as the first Sales Director covering the Eastern Region. John Chambers, the CEO as Cisco, was convinced that VoIP was the next big thing at the time…and research showed that Sonus had first-mover advantage. This was 1999, and technology companies were well received on Wall Street. I was awarded 28,000 options with a strike price of $1.20 a share when I first joined Sonus. Fortunately, employees were given the option of buying all their shares up front, which I proceeded to do for $33,600. This could have been a big mistake if the company failed, as my options would be worthless. If we succeeded, the rewards would be significantly higher in that taxes would be based on 15% capital gains instead of ordinary income. Within the first year of joining the company, the Board voted to split the stock 3:2 and again 5:3 a short time later. After these splits, my 28,000 shares would grow to 70,000 shares and Sonus went public in May of 2000. The stock price IPO’d at $23 a share, and exploded to $270 – $280 in the coming months. Not bad for an early stage company with annual revenues that were trivial and had yet to turn a profit. In fact, we were the 3rd best IPO of the year, trailing only Krispy Kreme donuts and some pharmaceutical company. The stock would again split 3:1 post-IPO and my options grant swelled to 210,000 shares with a strike price of around 18 cents. The executives were selling their shares in regular installments such that it wouldn’t create an alarming effect within the market. They wanted to convince employees that the stock was undervalued, but I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid. Each month, I would sell all my vested options in an attempt to diversify my portfolio. This proved to be the right decision as the stock went into a dive following the tragic events of 9-11 and the subsequent telecom meltdown. I could only watch as Sonus shares fell to 20 cents a share.
