by
Steve Osborne

      "I want to do it all and not compromise anything," says Katrina Garnett, the thirty-something founder and president of one of the hottest new companies in Silicon Valley. "And I want to do it all well."
     That is a bold statement indeed – especially for a gruelingly busy CEO with two young children at home and a third close to the starting gate. But then, Katrina has a long and successful track record of being bold.
     Born and raised on the Gold Coast of Australia, Katrina followed her mother and executive step-father to Hong Kong and Canada in her mid-teens. When she and her identical twin sister were 16, the family landed in New York, where she finished high school and got a degree in industrial engineering from the State University of New York. From there it was on to Switzerland to earn an MBA from Geneva’s Webster University.
     Armed with her diplomas and a bent for science and mathematics, Katrina went job-hunting in 1986. She selected California’s then-troubled Silicon Valley as the site of her launch into the business world, just as a stockbroker would select a temporarily depressed stock in a strong company with high upside potential. She also deliberately chose the company she would work for – Oracle – rather than let just any company choose her.
     After being a part of Oracle’s phenomenal growth for four years, Katrina decided it was time to move to greener pastures. "The corporate culture wasn’t right," she recalls. "I felt that as a woman I could never become a vice president there."
     In 1990, Katrina chose another employer: a software firm called Sybase that was on the brink of going public. Prospects for advancing to the top ranks there looked good –even as a young woman. And the promise of lucrative stock options added to the attraction. Her instincts were right. Sybase went public the following year. And at 32 she became one of the company’s youngest vice presidents ever, managing a 300-person, $150 million division of Sybase.
     The 15-hour days presented a problem, though. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the energy or ambition. She had those in spades. But she and her husband Terence were now proud parents (she had sandwiched the birth of a daughter in between two major product launches), and she didn’t want to sandwich child-rearing into the few white spaces in a brutal schedule that was ultimately controlled by someone else.
     There was one other problem: technical boredom. "It was time to try something new – time to move on," she remembers. "I was stagnating."
     Katrina interviewed for some top positions in the computer industry, but ultimately decided that it was time to do her own thing. She had been wanting to try an idea for "out of the box" software that would bring together different computers systems within a company or from merging companies so that they could "talk" to each other.
     "I figured if I was going to work that hard, I wanted to do it for myself," she quips. "It was risky, but I thought, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen if I fail?’ I’d just go get another job."
     In April of 1996 – just a month after cashing in on her stock options and leaving Sybase, Katrina launched CrossRoads Software, which was later renamed CrossWorlds Software. She and Terence put huge chunks of their own money into the start-up and went to heavy-hitters in the industry to find "investor-partners" for the rest – giants like Michael Dell of Dell Computers and Trilogy’s Joe Liemandt.
     "We now have $10 million of our own money in this company," explains Katrina. "For us, that’s an important statement of ownership and commitment. I also wanted high tech companies to invest to validate our technology, rather than going to the venture capitalists. I went after these investors in a very strategic way. After all, they needed integration, which meant they needed us. It was entertaining to get all these competitors together at investor dinners. We were very deliberate about who sat where. But in the end they all sat next to each other. They didn’t care. It’s a small industry."
     The capital invested in CrossWorlds tallied up to about $50 million, and will soon rise to $60 million to help prepare the company to go public, a move that is anticipated for the near future.
     In the beginning, the investment was anything but a sure thing. Katrina confesses that for the first seven months, "no one even knew we could build the software." She pumped no less than $20 million into R&D.
     The risk paid off. Today, CrossWorlds has a growing client list that reads like a "Who’s Who" of corporate power: US WEST, Siemens A&D, Whirlpool Corporation, Farmland Industries, Primestar, Applied Materials, Inc., Ingersoll-Rand Company, MCI/Avantel, Autodesk Inc., and many others. The company owns five patents so far, and has a distinguished board of directors. Headquartered in Burlingame, California, CrossWorlds’ 200-plus employees do business throughout the USA, and in Europe, Japan, and Australia.
     "We ended 1998 with 32 customers, revenues of $23 in bookings and $9 million in recognized revenue, and an average selling price for product of $923,000," says Katrina. "People are really voting with their dollars."
     In addition to being a rising software visionary and guru, Katrina also has excellent marketing talents. Together with her husband Terry, who is currently one of eight partners at Venrock Associates, the Rockefeller family’s venture-capital arm, she launched a gutsy, $1 million ad campaign. The "Trailblazer" ads ran in W, George, Vanity Fair, Fortune and other top national magazines, drawing heavy flack from some who thought them sexist and irrelevant, but accomplishing their goal of putting a face on the company and creating mountains of publicity. The ads featured a striking photo of Katrina by the legendary photographer Richard Avedon. She was wearing a low-cut Hervé Léger cocktail dress.
     "Sure, we were pushing the envelope," she admits, giving Terry the credit for the idea, "but it was all about getting above the noise level, changing the ground rules, and being controversial enough to get $10 million in free press coverage for $1 in advertising."
     The results? Hits at the company’s Web site skyrocketed from 150,000 to 1.5 million, and a follow-up mailing to about 200 top corporate prospects that invited decision-makers to get on the phone with Katrina pulled an amazing 25 to 30 percent response rate.
     Even though CrossWorlds is past the dangerous newborn stage and well on its way to a healthy adulthood, the demands it places on Katrina continue unabated. She has found that it takes not just boldness but commitment and hard work to fulfill her other and ultimately more important role of motherhood – especially since both she and Terry travel 30 to 50 percent of their time.
     "It’s a juggling act," she points out. When they travel (usually separately for their respective businesses) she and Terry try to take their two children with them (now ages 4 and 1½, or to coordinate things so that one of them is always home. When not traveling, Katrina gets up early, has breakfast with the kids, and returns home between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. to be a mom, which often entails playing Barbies. "It’s a nice way of turning off my job," she muses.
     Sometimes Katrina brings her children to her office, where she has built a nursery next to her own work space. And if she ever has to bring work home, which she tries to avoid, she and her four-year-old can often be seen sitting together working on their own computers, with Terry next to them on his computer. "It’s a pretty sick scene," she laughs, "but that’s what it’s like in Silicon Valley."
     Making sure that the children’s needs are met requires a team effort for this rising computer luminary. "If it wasn’t for my husband, my nanny, my assistant, and my twice-a-week housekeeper, I couldn’t do what I do. I’ve hired people who put themselves in my shoes as a working mother, and we’re all coordinated. For example, my assistant, who keeps my schedule, will look at my calendar and say, ‘You haven’t seen the kids enough; let’s block out some time so you can spend some time with them.’ There’s a real sensitivity there. My nanny’s the same way. Between us, we just figure it out."
     In Katrina’s case, "having it all" doesn’t mean having "everything." She has had to pick her battles, using her resources to make sure she gets all of what most matters to her: her family and her business. Other facets of her life have had to wait in the wings.
     "Things are so crazy right now, we have no down time," she laments. "We don’t have time to exercise. We don’t have the luxury of doing things I hear other people do, like yoga. We don’t get to spend a lot of time together as a couple. Even if we go away we take our kids with us. They go everywhere with us. It’s a lot of work, a lot of complicated logistics, but we feel anything is possible."
     One of those possibilities is their goal of slowing down their pace within five years’ time, shifting their focus to investing and helping other start-ups get on their feet. In addition to having more time to spend with her growing family, Katrina would like to expand her philanthropic activities. She has already created the nonprofit Garnett Foundation, financed with $500,000, which sponsors the Backyard Computer Camp to get teenage girls interested in computer science careers. Her goal is to keep girls from running away from technology careers because they have a "geeky" image. The foundation sends high school girls to summer "camps" on top university campuses where they are exposed to technology careers, get advice of how to handle job interviews, and learn other important skills.
     "We’re just getting started, but it’s exceeding my expectations," says Katrina. Last summer, her foundation took 25 girls to Stanford University for a weeklong camp. "It has been amazing to see the results of the camp," she states. "For example, a couple of the girls went on to Berkeley and Cornell, and both admitted that they would never have considered applying to those schools had they not gone to the camp. This summer we’re going to try to take 150 girls."
     Hard work and good deeds have their rewards, of course. The Garnetts recently bought an estate on 2¼ acres in lower Hillsborough, a stately and prestigious (not to mention pricey) Silicon Valley community. The purchase price was an estimated $3.4 million, and they are in the middle of having major renovations done on the 10,000 square-foot home. The project is so involved that it will be another 18 months before they can move in.
     If her plans roll out as hoped, Katrina’s life will eventually slow down. But it will never be slow. Sitting back and putting up her feet is not in the cards for a woman who enjoys the thrill of growing businesses and children, and still has the energy to fly 360-degree inverted loops in an SP260 Marchetti, speak at Berkeley’s computer science commencement ceremonies, and hop back and forth between her home turf and New York to visit friends in high circles.
     In the end, this "chic geek" (as one magazine recently tagged her) will likely be defined by her own definition of success: "It’s not an economic thing," she states. "Success is a level of lifestyle – having what you want without compromising what’s important. It’s happiness. I like what I do. I never go home and say, ‘I’ve got to quit; I can’t deal with this anymore.’ That’s because my children help me find my balance, like water finding its own level. If I didn’t have them, my work would be so consuming that it would kill me. The kids force the balance."

(Copyright 2000 OsborneWriter.com. All Rights Reserved)

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