$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

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