Gabriel P. Fusco, Sequoia Systems Inc.

• Author: Kristie, James
• Position: The Chairman and the Board

The Chairman and the Board

"Boards come in a variety of flavors," observes Gabriel P. Fusco, Chairman, President, and CEO of Sequoia Systems Inc. And some of the flavors aren't too appetizing. The head of this fast-growing computer systems company based in Marlborough, Mass., was reflecting recently with Directors & Boards on his experience with boards during times of great duress --trying to turn around shaky start-up companies while reporting to boards dominated by venture capitalists and other financial types.

Following a 26-year career in sales and marketing with International Business Machines Corp., Gabe Fusco seized an opportunity to run Iomega Corp., a manufacturer of computer data storage devices. The company badly needed sales and new capital. He characterizes his first six months there as "taking a firehose M.B.A." From sales of under $1 million when he arrived in 1983, sales grew to $126 million when he left four years later, following a disagreement with the board on strategic direction. His tenure with Iomega was his first experience with boards, venture capitalists, and the investment community. The lessons, not all pleasantly learned, he admits, would come in handy again at Sequoia Systems, which he joined after leaving Iomega.

In a conversation with D&B Editor James Kristie, Fusco describes how the "flavor" of the Sequoia board changed from one dominated by the founding venture capitalists to a more balanced board composed of strong individuals with different backgrounds and a shared commitment to the company's success.

"Sequoia was very much an analogous situation to Iomega, only a bit worse. The company was broke and was relying on the largesse of the lead venture capital firm, which was basically funding the company on a week-to-week basis.

Sequoia's product is a high-performance multi-processing, fault-tolerant system in the online transaction processing marketplace (OLTP). With this system, you process a transaction instantaneously when it's made available to the system for processing, as opposed to batch processing -- accumulating data and then processing it once, twice, or several times a day. OLTP is probably the single fastest-growing market in the data processing community, because everybody wants to do everything yesterday, we don't want to do it tomorrow. What I saw at Sequoia was an architecture that could be exploited over a long period of time.

I had four assignments when I got there. One was to take a product that was running behind schedule and get it to the marketplace. The second was to raise some badly needed capital. The third was to find a way to sell this product, because we really did have a great architecture and a great product. Last, but not least, was to create a team that could make this happen...