QuasiPreneur.com

An Austin layoff produces a startup

An Austin layoff produces a startup

By Lori Hawkins | statesman
Thursday, December 11, 2008, 04:20 PM

We often hear about how tech industry layoffs lead to a new crop of startups being created.

I know that the list of Austin engineers and marketers who have left big companies on their own to become entrepreneurs is long. (Among the best examples — Tivoli Systems started by former IBM Corp. engineers and Silicon Labs launched by former Crystal Semiconductor engineers.)

But with another wave of tech downsizing feared, I’ve been trying without success to think of any venture-backed Austin tech company started by the abruptly unemployed.

Now I’ve got one — UnBoundID Corp., which was founded last December by four laid off Sun Microsystems veterans. The company, which sells identity management software, recently landed a major telecom company as its first customer and just raised $3 million from Silverton Partners.

And it wouldn’t have happened if Sun hadn’t closed part of its identity management product division in Austin in September 2007.

“We never planned to go off and start our own company, but when we found ourselves without jobs, we realized this was our time to do it,” says CEO Steve Shoaff, who spent seven years at Sun in roles including technical director and chief of staff for the company’s identity management product division.

After learning that he was out the door, Shoaff’s first instinct wasn’t entrepreneurism. Instead, he began looking for a job by contacting former customers.

“One of the places I called put a bug in my ear,” he says. “They suggested taking Sun’s open source IP and building our own product by adding some some secret sauce. We thought about it and decided yeah, we could do that.”

He knocked the idea around with Don Bowen, formerly Sun director of Identity Integration, and former Sun software engineers David Ely and Neil Wilson, who held a range of senior roles involving identity management software development.

“We talked about it and decided yeah, we could do it,” Shoaff says. “A year later, I can say that getting laid off was the best thing that has happened to me.”

Shoaff also has a new work philosophy: “As my friend puts it, job security is your ability to find your next job, not keep your current one.”

If you want to know more about UnBoundID, check out tomorrow’s Statesman Business section, where I’ll have a profile.