$4.5B Exit- Christopher Lochhead, Mercury Interactive

Christopher served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive which was acquired but Hewlett-Packard in 2006 for $4.5 Billion. He has co-founded marketing consulting firm Lochhead, was the founding CMO of Internet Consulting firm Scient and served as head of marketing at Vantive, a CRM software firm. How did Christopher get involved with Mercury Interactive? (2:12) Chris joined the company when it was approximately $350 Million in zie. So it was already a 6 figure company. The interesting thing is that they took it to $1 Billion. They repositioned the company around a whole new category and they set a whole new agenda for their space. They crushed a bunch of their competitors by doing that and that increased their market cap materially. Eventually, Hewlett Packard gave them an offer that they couldn’t refuse. Chris started as an outside advisor for the company for a little over a year. Chris considers that his ‘dating’ phase with the company. After that and he ended up coming on board in the actual company, Chris considered that the ‘marriage’ stage. He built a great relationship with Amon Land and the CEO and the rest of the executive team. There are certain times in your life where you meet a group of people and you just know. Chris felt very comfortable within the culture of the company and so quickly fit in and helped propel the business upward. He felt like he just fit in instantly. How did Christopher approach things when the big influx of cash came in from exiting Mercury Interactive? (7:05) Chris decided to retire. He started his first business at 18 after being thrown out of school for being stupid. He found out at age 21 that he was dyslexic and suddenly his education experience finally made sense to him. He started his first when he was 18 but he started many companies at the start of his career. He was living in Canada and his second company turned out to be a wonderful exit. With that exit, he moved to Silicon Valley. He sold his boutique consultancy at the time to a Silicon Valley tech company that was already public and became their head of marketing. At 28 years old, he was living in Silicon Valley and he was on the entrepreneurial path. By the time the mercury exit happened, Christopher had been working non-stop from 18 to 38. The end of Mercury was super challenging and Chris go to that point in his life where he thought he might as well hit the reset button. He went through a divorce, moved to Tahoe. He had purchased a vacation home in Tahoe several years prior. He did what some people do, but backward, he did not have time in his 20’s to go and backpack Europe. He always had this dream of being a ski-bum and so he moved to his ski-house in Tahoe and is now what he considers a Ski-Bum. What was something that Christopher had to ‘break’ to grow the company to where it was for the exit? (20:15) The company’s economic buyer for the company at the time was a sort of community audience. An extremely well-known company, with its software quality managers, or leaders within large organizations, people were depending on the size and already existing success of the company to keep growing it. However, Chris says even though they had a good economic buyer involved who was spending $40-70,000 with the company in order for them to execute the vision of a new category. The category being Business Technology Optimization. They had to go from selling that at a marketing level. Building products from that level to selling to the C-suite, somebody with a board seat who typically reports to the CEO with the gigantic budget. Christopher was not well known to that person and they did not know much about them either. This person knew them as a Niché player. They had to figure out a way to have the moxie to walk into that person’s office and say they have a strategy on how she should run the business going forward. They also offered her the technology to do it and so Chris ended up breaking 2 or 4 levels of the organization to be able to have conversations like those. Mercury Interactive Mercury Interactive is a former Israeli company that has been acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change request, quality assurance, and IT governance. Resources Connect with Christopher: LinkedIn Mercury Interactive: LinkedIn