Thanks and good night.

Let’s get right to the “cut” as a trusted colleague would cite.  After fifteen years, I have resigned from New Dawn Technologies, the company that I helped build with Thomas P. Higgins, to focus on B2B and private sector opportunities.   I have professionally achieved everything that I have set out to accomplish at New Dawn, in the market and to stay longer would be a disservice to New Dawn employees, customers, partners and our new parent company.

Today is a happy day for all including me, New Dawn employees, our supportive parent company, the Daily Journal Corporation (DJCO), and the court and justice market.   Why is a resignation a positive and planned event?  Read on.

When we created New Dawn in 1999, we set out to create a company that would outlive both of us and not merely support a lifestyle. Both Tom and I knew that we would leave New Dawn at some point in the future and strategically lived a culture for continuation.  In order to provide some context on this extraordinary organization a little back-story on New Dawn first before I share a few of these ideals.

Often achieving revenue growth of 30% or more per year, we grew a two person start-up into a $10M+ a year, enterprise level, industry leading software, SaaS and services company.  We were named one of the 5000 fastest growing private companies five years in a row (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012) in the nation by Inc. Magazine.  Today, our flagship case management software product, JustWare, is used in over 380 courts and criminal justice agencies around the world.

In 2012, working closely with Cascadia Capital, an amazing and market focused sell-side investment banking firm, we marketed New Dawn to over 30 companies and negotiated a strategic, all cash sell.  In alignment with his lifelong business associate Warren Buffet, who stated, “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price”, these achievements cited appealed to the investment acumen of Charlie Munger, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and current Chairman of the Board of the DJCO.

DJCO has been in process of evolving from a legal publication business to providing innovative technology solutions to the government sector.  The New Dawn purchase was timed perfectly with this transformation and Mr. Munger’s and DJCO’s Vice-Chairman and Director, J.P. Guerin’s savvy marketable security investments allowed for a mutually beneficial acquisition.

After selling New Dawn, I was retained to serve as the President and in fiscal year 2013, a high performance executive and management team surpassed any prior year’s revenue amount and EBITDA margin.

Choosing the DJCO’s offer to purchase New Dawn was partly based on a core value and cultural alignment with what we built, an alignment with many of the tenants of Berkshire Hathaway’s approach to acquisitions, and much of the rich philosophies that are outlined in Poor Charlie’s Almanack.  This read was presented to New Dawn executives during M&A discussions and was often used as a guide throughout the past year.  It has been a professional highlight over this past year to engage with the brilliant minds of Mr. Munger and the DJCO board.

I am pleased to say that after a year of working with DJCO executives, and staff in our sister companies Sustain and ISD Technologies, I can claim that the combination of these three firms offer a powerful and compelling business proposition to the market, each sharing many of the same cultural values that allowed New Dawn to have years of success.   DJCO’s available capitalization and plans for the future will provide stability, growth and vision for our combined employees, customers and partners, and provides a competitive and unique offering to the courts and justice marketplace.

This success story would only be possible by building a company that is far more valuable and successful as a collective whole, rather than based on the value of any one individual.  To build a company that stands the test of time, adds value to the market and is a productive contributor to a technology business unit we had to live a culture to support continuation.   Including;

• Attain and retain tenured employees.  I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference and listen to Ari Gesher, a senior engineer and Engineering Ambassador at Palantir Technologies speak on Preparing for Catastrophic Success. Palantir Technologies has rapidly grown, offers solutions to public safety agencies and is a significant player in the “big data” industry, distilling large amounts of information for government clients such as the CIA and FBI, and more recently big businesses.  Having burgeoned since 2004 from five people to more than a thousand, Mr. Gesher discussed how it is vital to devote 50% of your time in a hyper or rapid growth company to finding and retaining the best employees.  They are the foundation to success.  Hiring and retaining the wrong people is essentially like building a house on a faulty foundation. It is vital to attain and retain tenured employees that are motivated based on your mission, retained because of your culture and not entirely motivated on how much money they make.  If your employees are only with you for the money, you have already lost.  New Dawn employees are the best in the business.  I have learned so much from many of them, they are committed to a vital social mission, and will provide many years of continued success to New Dawn and DJCO.

• Push decision making down to front line resources.  A successful hyper or rapid growth organization can only succeed with a culture of allowing your front line staff to make decisions based on the vision and goals set by the executive and management teams.  Celebrate and support each employee’s correct decisions, and positively coach them when they make wrong decisions.  A culture of top down decision making is a recipe for stagnation.

• Always hire employees that are smarter than you, and don’t be threatened if they might one day take your job.  This philosophy allows me to turn over my President functions to a long tenured, committed employee who has successfully served in numerous cross division functions, and is already considered a leader within New Dawn.  He was my first Senior Account Executive hired, he was New Dawn’s first product manager and will bring passion and commitment to the position.  New Dawn will formally make the announcement very soon.  I wish him many years of success.

Over the next couple of months I plan on spending time with family, assisting New Dawn and DJCO in leadership transition, assisting a talented, local start-up as a board of director member (making $1.00 per year, thank you), and starting my search to either work for a company that shares as many core values as New Dawn has or starting another company.

So with a stable and committed group of professionals that I am proud to call peers and lifelong friends at New Dawn with a very bright future, I look forward to new opportunities and endeavors and wish all at New Dawn and DJCO the best in its next chapter.