benchmark said:
What did they do? What kind of business is it?
They make software for car dealers. Their main product is this giant, super-expensive program/database setup that they sell to dealerships to run their whole operation off of, kind of an industry-specific ERP. Then they have a bunch of other smaller add-on products to round out the package. Like they'll pitch the dealer on a website that conveniently displays the real-time inventory they have in the main database product for an extra fee, or this digitized safe that holds all the keys to the cars on the lot and tracks who checked out what key, or the Docupad thing the poster above mentioned, etc. I worked on the team that built and maintained the content management system for the websites. The products they make are actually pretty top-of-the-line, as far as I could tell from my need-to-know view of the insides. But their corporate culture is very 1960s IBM and kind of creepy. It's essentially Initech and everyone there knows it. If any competitors make inroads, they just buy them out and keep selling two "competing" products without publicizing to prospects that it's all owned by Reynolds. My old roommate worked tech support for the key safe products, and he once had a client get mad, cancel the contract, buy the "other guy's" product, and call him right back for support on the new one a few weeks later. Also, most people seemed to think the creepy culture was all from Brockman's ethos, and that the Ohio half of the company which was acquired by him and not built by him was actually a great place to work before he bought it and put his structure on it.