Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with Raul Fernandez, President and CEO, ObjectVideo
How do you define entrepreneur?
Risk taker.

What business experiences have you learned the most from?
Understanding why we've won, and even more importantly, understanding why we lost, not just dissecting the ingredients of success but dissecting the ingredients of failure.

What advice would you give to a person thinking about starting their own business?
Understand the completeness of the commitment and the pleasure and the pain associated with success and failure. Understand your own personal strengths and weaknesses and know how to fill out a team around you to fill the gaps.

In talking about the team around you, what role has teamwork and collaboration played in building your business?
My management style is very inclusive and collaborative in regard to decision making. Decisions are made as the result of a collaborative set of discussions with my management team. I don't have all the answers to our challenges, but I can facilitate and add value in terms of thinking of things to consider during the drive to a resolution. However, the end result is a team effort. Many of my team at ObjectVideo were part of my team at Proxycom. When you have a good team you try to keep them together one company after another.

What are your benchmarks for success? How do you judge how you are doing?
Obviously, sales, revenue, profit, and positioning in the marketplace-being ranked or thought of as a market leader-and being looked at as an innovator. Ultimately, you are judged by shareholder return. Risk takers need risk capital, and that risk capital needs to be rewarded in terms of above average returns. As the owner-operator you are aligned in terms of the dollars that you have in the business, the equity, and the sweat equity.

You are involved in a lot of philanthropic and charitable efforts. Some of them are helping young entrepreneurs. Why did you get involved with that and why do you think it is important?
Young entrepreneurs are tomorrow's business leaders. I think the U.S. culture is great because it obviously celebrates success. The United States is very open to failure, but doesn't punish it culturally, and encourages "second acts" or additional attempts to make it. But that ecosystem needs to be fueled by fresh young minds that are energetic and have the passion and the drive to do that. Sharing experiences, your vision, successes, and failures with young entrepreneurs is a way of taking the gift that we've gotten as business leaders and giving some of that back. Some of this is selfish because I want the United States to remain competitively at the top in multiple categories and we are relying on the next generation to keep us there.

Do you think that businesses have a responsibility to give back to the community at large? And what do businesses get out of it in return?
Absolutely. Companies are made up of people who live, work, and play in the community. It is critical that individuals lead by example in terms of philanthropy. Engage in the community and be part of the community. For me, it's through philanthropy; for others it may be through volunteering. Yes, I think it is a critical part of any company's DNA.

What do you think is your most meaningful accomplishment?
Our two beautiful children.

What do you think can be done to improve the environment in the Greater Washington region to better support entrepreneurs?
First of all, re-write Sarbanes-Oxley. If you were to have hatched an evil plot to cripple the ability of young companies to grow up and enter the public market and undermine the United States, you would have written Sarbanes-Oxley. It's truly, evil, evil regulation.

Why do you think that happened? Was it because entrepreneurs didn't have a seat at the policy table?
No. I think it had to do with the reactive, knee-jerk reaction, unfortunately, by politicians who weren't thinking things through. It's funny ... I talk with politicians on both sides of the aisle and everybody agrees Sarbanes-Oxley is horrible and it is killing liquidity in the system-especially for small companies. And yet, nobody is willing to step up and take the lead in changing the law. We're doing this to ourselves. If we do become a second- or third-rate economic power, we've done it to ourselves. We've done it over time and we've done it with a lot of shareholder warning.

What would you like to see at the local level to improve long-term competitiveness for the country?
At the most basic level, we have to fix K-12 education. We have a system in our nation's capital where we have a tremendous number of kids in underperforming schools. We have a school system that does not produce-for the most part-literate levels of reading, science, and math, as compared to other parts of the world. If I don't have employees with that solid foundation, I can't do it.

What are your goals for your current company, ObjectVideo?
Grow it and sell it.

What are your personal long-term goals?
It's a journey. I just wake up every day enjoying what I'm doing, but not necessarily knowing what's going to happen next. It's been fun to run this company as a follow-on to what I did before, but I really am not sure what happens after this. I'm just going to figure it out as I need to.