Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Mover

Risley brings record of successful exits to Digital Reef

By James M. Connolly

Chris Risley has been there before. He knows what it's like to be CEO of a venture-backed tech company.

Actually, it’s now eight such companies as CEO in 25 years, and he notes that only one “crashed and burned.” He counts an IPO, three acquisitions by larger companies and a couple of companies still “growing strong” on his resume. Now, Risley has taken on the lead role at Digital Reef Inc., which offers e-discovery services through a software-as-a-service model. Among the companies that Risley has led are Lexington’s StreamBase Systems Inc.; Metalogix Software of Washington, D.C.; and Redwood City, Calif., DNS security provider Nominum Inc. He still serves as chairman of StreamBase and chairman of the executive committee for Nominum.

He said his mandate from the Digital Reef board is to “build a big company. This is a valuable technology that can let us build a big company. I have to find the right markets to focus on and raise the capital to do it.” With 40 employees in Boxborough, 10 in Europe and two in India, Risley expects to grow the company substantially, particularly with sales, marketing and engineering personnel in Boxborough. He also expects to bring in a round of funding soon. Formerly known as Auraria Networks Inc., Digital Reef was founded in 2006 and is backed by Matrix Partners and Pilot House Ventures.

“Digital Reef will be my eighth venture-backed startup. I was actually suggested to a headhunter by a venture capitalist who had been at a firm where he had seen me work. I took a long time to do due diligence on Digital Reef. After seven other startups you become careful how you allocate your time capital, just like a VC does due diligence on how they allocate their financial capital,” said Risley.

One of the things that sold him on Digital Reef was the man behind the company’s technology, chief technology officer Steve Akers. “He’s both a genius CTO and a gracious gentleman. That’s a rare combination. He’s probably the least crazy of all the CTOs I’ve worked with,” said Risley. Akers developed Digital Reef’s algorithm for sorting through massive amounts of data, and then came up with the technology that allows the company to build out not just a single large grid but a series of grids working in parallel that should help the company scale, according to Risley.

The company delivers its services to law firms and corporations through regional providers of legal services. In a typical application, a lawyer may use the service to scour all of the related emails and documents of key employees who are connected with a legal case, having Digital Reef sort the most relevant materials into folders based on semantic usage.

Risley says that Digital Reef’s opportunity rests in tighter rules about companies preserving communications and documents, as well as in the volume of communication. “A huge portion of e-discovery is email and we’re just sending a lot of email, “ he said.

Another growth opportunity may be in hosting the infrastructure for the service when current service providers don’t have enough bandwidth.

Risley says that his job is to keep an experienced staff pointed in the right direction. “I’m not an authoritarian. We have an experienced management team that knows how to do their job. So I don’t get in their way. I think I’m a coach,” he said.