Amid Worsening Economy, Software Startups Look to San Diego’s DaggerBoard Advisors for Different Kinds of Help

Dennis Clerke says the kernel of the idea behind DaggerBoard Advisors formed in his mind years ago, while he was still the CEO of Cardiff Software, a business in Vista, CA, he co-founded to automate business forms processing.

“When I was CEO, I’d just get parts of my board members’ time and attention,” Clerke told me. “I remember thinking, ‘I wish I could get more of that time and competency in a more sustained fashion.” After Clerke sold Cardiff Software in 2004 for a reported $50 million, he stepped into another software CEO job. But when that company was sold in 2007, Clerke founded DaggerBoard Advisors to provide the sort of executive advisory services he had once yearned for himself.

Several other former San Diego area software CEOs joined Clerke to found DaggerBoard: Emmanuel de Boucaud, who was a senior sales executive at Cardiff and the CEO of Chatstat Technologies, a Web 2.0 startup; Marc Friedmann, the former CEO of Syntricity and founding CEO of Prisa Networks; and Pamela Coker, who co-founded Acucorp, a software company founded to help customers modernize their COBOL-language computer programs, and which sold two years ago for $50 million.

As you might expect, DaggerBoard specializes in providing its services to software companies. When I met with the firm yesterday, Clerke told me all four members of the team have been through the process of starting, funding, growing, and selling a software company. So they have the range of experience sought by software startups, as well as more mature companies with annual sales of $5 million to $20 million. But Clerke says the key to understanding their business is in the firm’s name, which sailing enthusiasts instinctively understand. “A daggerboard is what keeps you on course,” Clerke says. “It’s the whole idea of an insertable keel,” a metaphor that explains the type of drop-in executive services the firm provides.

What was most interesting to me, however, was when DaggerBoard’s principals explained how their work has changed in the two years since they founded the business.

Clerke says roughly 60 percent of the startup software companies that initially came to DaggerBoard were looking for help in getting venture funding, or in sprucing up

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.