David Brown - No Vision All Drive: What I Learned from My First Company

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2020 by David Brown. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

Edition History
AuthorHouse (1e, 2005)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
ISBN 978-1-119-63280-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-119-63287-0 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-119-63285-6 (ePub)

Its been 15 years since I first wrote the original foreword to No Vision All Drive, and 26 years since David and I formed the company that would eventually become Pinpoint Technologies. In the original foreword I said that budding or experienced entrepreneurs would gain insights from David Browns book and that people involved in rapidly scaling their company could learn a great deal from this book.

Those sentiments are still true today, but after reading this edition, I can say emphatically that people who read this book will come away with a renewed sense of purpose and actions to take that can improve their organizationregardless of whether theyre involved in government, education, community building, global corporations, or entrepreneurship.

David Brown paid close attention to the people, dates, and issues involved with Pinpoint and sheds light on the ups and downs of creating a sustainable business. And although his account brings back fond memories (since I was there), he provides more than a chronological rendering of the evolution of Pinpoint. In a readable and very entertaining way, David reveals the secret sauce that made Pinpoint successful: the ethos we developed that guided our interactions with customers, employees, and potential acquirers.

I can clearly see the footprint of Pinpoint at our current company, Techstars. What we did at Pinpoint influenced Techstars culture and guides how we treat people, how decisions are made, our commitment to knowing customers, and our relentless execution at all levels of the company. All of these are hallmarks of Techstars today, but they are the heritage of Pinpoint.

Pinpoint was not an autonomous, discrete event with a specific start and end date, but a continuous learning experience fraught with missteps, mistakes, failures... and success. It is the cumulation of all those experiences that have helped to form Techstars, and to Davids credit, No Vision All Drive provides both the day-to-day effort of creating a business, along with the general principles that lead to building a sustainable business.

A realistic understanding of entrepreneurship is missing in most books on entrepreneurship, and No Vision All Drive fills the gap in ways that will help people with ideas get those ideas into a form that generates action and gets results.

David G. Cohen
August 2004
Boulder, Colorado

You hold in your hands the story of the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of amazing people. Between 1993 and 2003, these people transformed Pinpoint Technologies from a flat-broke, shot-in-the-dark concept into a market-leading small business. This business has had a positive effect on the emergency medical services industry and has positively impacted 50 million patients in four countries.

When David Brown started writing the original version of this book in 2002, he began with a simple chronological list of the events that transpired as Pinpoint Technologies evolved over a period of 10 years. This list surprised me and made me realize just how much I was already starting to forget. It reminded me of people who were beginning to fade from memory, names that were no longer on the tip of my tongue, and events that I had recalled out of order. I immediately wanted to support the project to help solidify those precious memories. As with so many other commitments David Brown had made over the years, when he told me that he was going to take on this huge project, I knew it was going to be done and done well.

David Brown does a fantastic job in this book of capturing the very spirit of the company. What glued us all together was our commitment to a balance between having fun and creating fantastic products. A typical example was getting together for a night at the local bar and talking about how to solve a problem a customer was having. Our motto was work hard, play hard, and its impossible to read the book and not come away with that sense.

You will quickly realize that this is more than just another business book. David Brown outlines the reasons we were successful using interesting examples that will provide insight to any budding or experienced entrepreneur. He describes our culture, which evolved naturally and was such a key ingredient in our success. Those subscribing to the conventional wisdom found in todays rapidly growing companies can learn a great deal from this book.

Its not often that the story of a decade of your professional life is captured in writing. Memories fade with the years, but the pages of this book will always remind me of some of the best years of my life. Long after we are gone it will also tell our children and their children a little bit about who we were and what we stood for. For this and many other reasons, I am forever grateful to David Brown.