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 Last week, OVP hosted what has become one of my favorite annual events – our 7th Annual OVP CEO Night. It was great to be invited as a CEO in the early Accelerator days, and now great to host as the newbie partner at OVP. This year, we had the added bonus of welcoming Adrian Hanauer, General Manager of the Sounders FC, as our special guest.
An interesting and unexpected speaker from a seemingly unrelated
industry is one of the hallmarks of CEO Night. Past
speakers have included cycling legend Greg Lemond and famed restaurateur Tom Douglas. Combined
with creative themes for the food and beverages, this is what
differentiates CEO Night from just any other networking event.
This year we held the event at the Institute for Systems Biology’s
(ISB) new offices in Fremont. This is a very nice venue hidden
(literally, for those of you who drove around Fremont searching that
night…) on N. 34th St. under the Aurora bridge. We chose this venue to
highlight our long-standing relationship with both the ISB and its
co-founder Lee Hood – ISB is the anchor institution for Accelerator,
and Lee Hood is a technical advisor to OVP and member of our OTAG, the
OVP Technical Advisory Group.
Apropos to the current economic climate, we scaled back
significantly for this extravaganza, this year sticking with pizza and
beer as opposed to the usual high-end wines (and their winemakers) and
catered hors d’oeuvres of previous years. Pizza was cooked on-site by
Veraci utilizing their portable wood-fired oven, and the beers were
Pyramid’s collection of recently renamed brews.
Once everyone had found their way to the event and networked for
a while, our venerable partner Chad Waite got the evening’s program
kicked off by introducing the keynote speaker. In his preamble, Chad
revealed himself to be a real “footie” maven, recounting the numerous
times that he has managed while in England or Spain to attend
Tottenham, Arsenal, Barcelona, etc., matches. (Chad is one of a number
of us at OVP who are international soccer fans…) Then he revealed that
one of the ways he is able to obtain such rare and valuable ducats is
through a friend (and former OVP portfolio company CEO) who owns the
Starfire training facility in Tukwila, home to the single most
successful Seattle startup of 2009 – the Sounders FC.
For those of you who are not Major League Soccer (MLS) fans, the
Sounders FC has just last week completed perhaps the single most
successful season that any first year expansion team has pulled off in
virtually any major U.S. sport, let alone MLS. And in the middle of a
home-and-home aggregate goals series between the Sounders and the
Houston Dynamo, team co-owner and General Manager Adrian Hanauer joined
us at OVP CEO Night to keynote the evening by telling those in
attendance about his experience at the helm of such a successful
startup.
Adrian recounted many of the important steps along the way to
building the Sounders, and despite his self-deprecating insistence to
the contrary, it is unlikely that anyone in the crowd of 100+ local
senior executives from venture-related organizations doubted the
ingenuity, preparation, and hard work that went into their breakout
first season. Admittedly, Adrian did credit fortune and timing as
contributors, but as all of us know and knew as he told the story, such
luck is largely the by-product of planning and execution as opposed to
blindly bouncing off of trees in a forest. The Sounders are clearly no
exception to this maxim.
Sadly, the denouement for the Sounders came days later when the
Sounders were undone in Houston when one of their former players, Brian
Ching, scored in overtime to lift Houston to a 1-0 victory and bring
the Sounders remarkable first season to an end. For the attendees of
OVP’s CEO Night, the evening closed only as the embers cooled in the
pizza oven and the ice melted in the beer coolers. A fitting end to
OVP’s 26th year in the venture business, and 7th year hosting the
annual CEO Night.
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