No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4 Becoming a Real Company

From RightWith to Pinpoint Technologies

We had known for a while that RightWith, which had originated as a joke, couldn’t stick if we were going to be a real company. However, we couldn’t come up with a name that we liked and agonized over it for months.

On one of my trips to Phoenix, a friend of Dana’s, Christie Jenks, came up with the idea of Pinpoint Technologies, with the tagline “We put your fleet on the map.” She even used her computer to design the font and had a little pin over one of the Is.

The name sounded okay, but we agonized some more. David was concerned that everyone would call us “Pinheads.” We even contemplated reserving the 800 number 1-800-PINHEAD to head people off at the pass. In the end we didn’t come up with anything better and Pinpoint grew on us. Eventually, we changed the name. We continued to use the tagline, font, and pin designed by Christie for many years.

Moving to Boulder

In March 1995 I had just finished my last day at TransCare and flew out to Boulder for two days to find an apartment. Then I flew to Miami to help host the disastrous 0th user conference. The following day, I drove up to Orlando to attend Bob’s wedding and I left that night to drive to Colorado.

I spent the first week in Boulder by myself. My job was to find an office and I chose the cheapest one I could find. It had brown shag carpeting, air conditioning that didn’t work (although we didn’t know that yet), and a landlord named Vern who lived ...