2008 InfoWorld CTO 25: Timothy Olson, Agito Networks

When Timothy Olson began working on his most recent major project, the object wasn't to help the company -- the project was the company.

As CTO of Agito Networks, Olson had the idea for the company's inaugural product, which provided seamless voice-call connectivity as users moved from cell phones to wireless LANs in the corporate office. He began, he said, by going into an investor's office with a PowerPoint presentation and a compelling story. From there, it was building a prototype, then creating the working product that could go into customers' hands.

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That sequence is commonplace for any vendor. But the unusual part, even for Silicon Valley, is that Olson guided the effort from initial idea to customer-ready product in 20 months.

Olson says that the hiring and team management for the development effort was critical to its success. "We started with a very senior team, guys who had 'been there and done that,' and that was a huge help. They were senior enough to recognize that when we started to build this thing, we had to focus on building the things that were core to our technology, core to our business, and core to our competence -- and then license or use open source for the things where we don't have value-add, so we didn't spend lots of time on things that were already there and where we weren't trying to differentiate ourselves. We made sure we licensed good packages, and I took some risks in how to develop the product."

The risks Olson took were of a form that looked for long-term advantages, even when engaged in a project with a very short time line. One such critical risk came when a senior software engineer brought in the idea of creating a code-generation system to solve the problem of writing software. Olson says, "There were four or five months where we didn't see any new features in the product, knowing that we had to build the code generation, but when the generation product came in, we could suddenly start adding features very quickly. The long-term payoff was huge, and the short-term risk was very high. But I had faith in the guys I hired -- I had to bet that they could really do [what they said]."

That original staffing and management model of many "chiefs" with relatively few lower-level workers around them was possible, Olson says, because the problem and the product were well defined and narrowly focused. Growing the company will require modifying the model. "You want to fill in around really senior guys with young, energetic folks who want to become those guys. You put some more workforce behind some of the brains your original, senior folks have," he says.

Building the development team was as critical to Agito's success as building the original prototype. Now, Olson is ready to move to the next step. "I think it's the evolution of an organization, where you build the technical organization around these very strong pillars. You have to keep reinventing yourself at a startup. You can't rest on your laurels, so I need those guys to do those great things again and again if we're not going to be a one-hit wonder. I see filling in the gaps around the key guys and reusing them again and again as my principle strategies going forward. It's a good formula and I want to keep repeating it."