Book Report – Almost by Hap Klopp & Brian Tarcy

Reading Almost by Hap Klopp and Brian Tarcy is a frustrating experience. Klopp, co-founder and former CEO of The North Face, spent a year deeply immersed in a Silicon Valley start-up called Ardica Technologies. Heard of it? Likely not, I realize, and yet if the team had gotten its act together back in 2009, it could’ve been a wild success. Already five years in existence by that point, the ongoing mission was to create “green power on the go, untethered from the grid.” Imagine clothing (thus Klopp’s involvement) with mobile energy that keeps your coat toasty and your iPhone charged. Who wouldn’t want such a thing? The problem at the core of Ardica – well, other than a silly and meaningless company name fashioned during a beer-soaked Scrabble match – is a distinct lack of leadership. Klopp kinda/sorta directed sales & marketing because of his brand-building success at the clothing giant. Former military commander Dick Martin was in a way the CEO, but he was seemingly never at headquarters, always running around hell’s half-acre trying desperately to raise money. Take two scoops of dual-leadership and throw in a tablespoon of delusional “Apple is interested in acquiring us!” and you have a recipe for failure.

In fairness, their timing was pretty bad for product commercialization. Ardica had completed its initial (known as Round A) raising of capital leading up to 2008 when all the world was a sunny day. The company was nine months into Round B, the phase that typically finances the go-to-market product launch, when all hell broke loose in global markets and even your dumbest, drunkest cousin was talking about credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities. Rather than securing $5M in short order as planned, the team collectively scraped together an amount closer to $2M over a two-year period, burning through cash while trying to hold unpaid vendors at bay. It gets complicated with the legalities of accessing funds before a financing round actually closes, but quick math will tell you that there’s only so long an under-funded start-up can survive when running a twice-monthly payroll of $90,000.

If you’ve ever witnessed a cheerleader or scout outside a store with a can in their hand – you call it begging, they call it tagging – you know asking for money for self-serving reasons is never easy. Now try raising millions of dollars from potential investors when Lehman Brothers collapses and the Dow plummets below 6,500. Your mom, minister, or Roger Waters may have convinced you that money is the root of all evil and yet it’s also at the heart of Round C, the phase when companies typically experience a marked expansion of sales. Ardica still exists, and yet when one visits the company’s website and the eight bios of those currently on the board and/or in management roles, that’s the one word you won’t find – sales. Klopp’s long gone from the team (and surely from some former co-workers’ Christmas card lists since the late summer book release) and he leaves the reader to reflect on a core business principle, namely “keep the main thing the main thing” on a path to doing one thing better than anyone else in the world. Ardica’s team page boasts lots of acronyms, accomplishments, and mentions of Stanford University and yet we’re left to wonder: are any of these guys selling anything?