neer, then returning home to work alongside his father at Litco. The older Krach envisioned doubling the com- pany’s size – from five people to 10 – with his son’s help. But, in Krach’s sophomore year, he won one of two Gen- eral Motors scholarships awarded to Purdue engineering students. The scholarship paid for tuition, books, a living stipend – and included a great internship in Detroit. After that, General Motors gave him a fellowship to attend Harvard Business School, which also included half salary. Krach then headed for the Motor City after graduation, stepping onto a professional trajectory that went straight up.


“ What I learned was what he was great at – better than anybody – was moving when he didn’t have the ball. And that stuck in my mind – what you do when nobody’s looking is what matters most.”


It was at GM that Krach learned his real passion was leadership. He spent 10 years with the automaker, becom- ing its youngest-ever VP at age 26. To those inside and outside the company, it looked like Krach was headed straight for the top. But, when Krach turned 30, he decided he wanted to experience a more entrepreneurial environment and left GM to become the number two person at now- defunct Qronos Software. Qronos Software doesn’t show up in many Krach pro- files or employment history lists. That’s because it was, as Krach will tell you, the worst year of his life – a blip on an otherwise untarnished career. “The CEO and I had a different set of values,” he remembers. Those differ- ences were made apparent


on Krach’s first day when she told him there was a board meeting the next day and Krach needed to say X, Y, and Z because IBM – which had invested tens of millions of dol- lars in the company – would be present at the meeting. Krach refused, arguing that what the CEO was asking him to say was a lie. He remembers thinking he had made the biggest mistake of his life in leaving GM. “When I moved out to Silicon Valley I took for granted the principles General Motors stood for and the values that I was raised with – I quickly realized the hard way that this foundation is everything when building a company.”He spent a year at Qronos Software – all the while torn between two fun- damental values: 1) he had never quit anything in his life, but 2) he wasn’t living out his values every day. His values and integrity finally won out on the day Krach’s oldest son was born. The CEO called and demanded Krach leave the hospital to come meet the IBM team at the office. He refused; she became insistent; he quit. “It was a horrible experience,” he says. “But I prob- ably learned more in that year than any other year in my professional career.”


4 | JUNE 2017 SELLING POWER © 2017 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.


Failure and bad decisions are usually the best teach- ers – and the perennially positive Krach used the lessons learned at Qronos Software to propel him to astronomi- cal successes with Rasna, Ariba, and DocuSign – the three companies with textbook-perfect growth typically associated with Krach. Krach is also frequently associated with the term “category creation.” After leaving Qronos Software, he joined the founding team of Rasna, which created a new methodology for optimizing mechanical designs and launched the mechanical design synthesis category. Just before it was slated to go public, Rasna was sold in 1995 to Parametric Technology for $500 million. A year later, Krach grabbed some of his old Rasna colleagues and created the B2B electronic commerce category with the founding of Ariba – where Krach served as chair- man and CEO. At the time, as Forbes pointed out in its 2000 “Top Tech Execs” profile, “Business-to-consumer selling was the order of the day, but Krach was one of a handful of tech executives who foretold the explosion in B2B electronic marketplaces.” Krach has an uncanny ability to look through current


trends, see beyond them into the future, and leverage that vision to transform the way the world works. As the 2000 Forbes piece observed, “Ariba is one of those companies that comes along and creates a sea change in the way businesses and individuals organize themselves or con- duct business. Keith Krach...is the guy rowing the boat.” No surprise, then, that Ariba was cash-flow positive from its second quarter of its existence and grew its revenues 100 percent quarter over quarter for 12 quarters in a row. In 2012, SAP acquired Ariba for $4.3 billion and, today, a trillion dollars of commerce goes through the Ariba net- work – more than Amazon, Ebay, and Alibaba combined. At DocuSign, Krach built the Digital Transaction Management (DTM) category, which allows anyone to securely transact anything, anywhere, on any device. In his six years as CEO, Krach drove DocuSign’s global expansion from 75 employees to more than 2,000 em- ployees, including four acquisitions. The company has become a verb, like Google or Xerox – as in: “Can you DocuSign that form?” Along the way, it has transformed the way business works, exponentially reducing paper usage and speeding transactions. In a 2013 interview for Fortune’s “10 Questions” series, Krach was asked what he sees as his greatest accomplish- ment. At one time, he thought it would be his work as a founder and CEO of Ariba. But, in 2013 – a few years into his role as CEO of DocuSign – he decided his greatest achievement lay ahead of him. “There is no doubt in my mind that, by the end of the decade, every successful company will be fully digital,” he told Fortune. “DocuSign is at the heart of that digital transformation, and we have the opportunity to truly impact the way business is done across organizations of every size and industry, every- where in the world. The potential is literally infinite.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6