When I next met with Fidelity Ventures, in May of 2000, they were recruiting me to be the CEO of Connected. It was now my turn to give Rob candid feedback on one of his companies. I joined Connected, but recognized that it was a single-product company and needed to expand into other markets. I set out to develop a vision for extending the product line, and Fidelity Ventures was very engaged in this nine month process.

They fostered collaborative working sessions with IT executives from Fidelity, who gave us invaluable feedback that would have been impossible to get otherwise. This feedback, along with many highly involved strategy sessions, led us to pursue a key acquisition. Fidelity actively assisted with the due diligence on the transaction, and that merger helped us realize our vision of protecting all enterprise data.