Leading in the Face of Adversity
John Livingston, CEO of Absolute Software became the second recipient of the Spirit of Ole Jensen Award for his resilient attitude in his struggle to keep his company alive and ultimately make it one of BC's top success story.
The Spirit of Ole Jensen Award was created in 2005 to recognize CEOs who demonstrate exceptional perseverance and positive spirit in the face of great personal or business adversity. This award was inspired by Ole Jensen. Ole was a dedicated ACETECH supporter and Board member, and a longtime CEO who had faced more than his own share of adversity in building his business.
In May 2003, Ole was diagnosed with ALS, a rapidly progressive and fatal neuromuscular disease, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Throughout his two year battle with ALS, all those who supported Ole were moved by the tremendous spirit with which he faced the disease through its relentless progression.
The ACETECH Fellows who visited Ole through the later stages of his struggle recommended to the ACETECH Board that a perpetual award be created to recognize his indomitable spirit and perseverance. In late January 2005, Ole was honored as the first recipient of the Spirit of Ole Jensen award. In May of that year ALS claimed Ole but for those who knew him it never claimed his spirit.
2008 Recipient
Throughout his career with Absolute Software, John has shown the kind of attitude celebrated by the Spirit of Ole Jensen Award. John's present success is easy to see as his company is listed on the TSX. These days his market cap is nearly $600,000,000. On the T-Net index only Apsreva, PMC-Sierra and MDA rank higher. His path however has been filled with obstacles and challenges that could not have been overcome without exceptional perseverance and can do attitude demonstrated by John over the years.
Like most founders, his start with Absolute was not straight forward. In the early 90's he was an instructor with BCIT, and became acquainted with Absolute and their intriguing product Computrace. The product lives deep within the PC and allows the PC to be located(among other things), if the PC is stolen.
John ended up consulting to the company, and then pulled together some personal money to buy a small stake. Later, and with little technology business experience at all, he scrounged enough F&F money to buy a more significant stake, and became the CEO.
The product was a long way from complete but worked after a fashion with Windows 95 and 98. But it failed completely when NT was released. Since then almost every major operating system upgrade has provided daunting technical problems. However, he soldiered on and even was able to raise significant sums of money in the late 90's.
He tried various paths to market, but it became clear that an OEM play was the way to go. But getting the big PC manufacturers to install such an exotic utility backed by an essentially unknown company took exceptional persuasive skills.
His financing program reached a pinnacle with an IPO in March of 2000, literally days before the crash. A less modest man than John might brag about the exquisite timing. However, John still sweats a bit when he recalls how close they came. They launched at over $5/share. You can imagine his shareholder relations challenge as he rode the wave down with the rest of the industry to well under a dollar. His stock languished in the pennies range for nearly four years. It finally started to move in 2005, and hit $40 late last year. After a 2:1 split and a general market correction it recently traded at $13, providing the nearly $600 M market cap. But the company did have a multi-million dollar war chest and guaranteed survival for at least several years.
Of course many people bailed out after the crash, beating on him as they did so, only to beat him up again as they missed his stock price rocketing up over the past several years.
His business model has also presented him with a huge challenge, especially in the public markets as nearly all of his revenue is subscription based. Once the subscriptions roll in, the cash and revenue look great, but it takes years for this to build up. To John's credit he never tried to be aggressive with his revenue reporting, and toughed it out, avoiding the large "corrections" that many tech companies have faced.
John has also risen to the challenge of taking a company through the many different sizes that growth brings. Managing a 20 person company is different from its 80 person successor as management changes to leadership and the staff become increasingly professional. Evolving to over 200 people brings comparable but different challenges especially dealing with increasing complexity of technology, markets and company structure. John has worked through all these transitions and has shown great skill in navigating from a tiny to a substantial enterprise.
John is a great example of someone with limited business experience who has raised money, overcome technical challenges, determined the best way to Market and actually executed this, hired and developed people and developed his own CEO skills in the heat of battle. All the while retaining the respect of his board, staff and investors.
