09/19/08

When it comes to innovators, Smartsheet founder and chairman Brent Frei has worked with some of the best. That includes former Microsoft executive and local Renaissance man Nathan Myhrvold of Bellevue’s controversial Intellectual Ventures.

Frei also spent some time working at Microsoft before founding Onyx Software Corp. back in the 1990s. Onyx made customer relationship automation software and was sold for $92 million in 2006. While Frei was building Onyx, the idea for his latest venture, Smartsheet, was hatched.

“The thing that plagued me the most while I was at Onyx was trying to find a way to track whether things are getting done in the workplace,” Frei says. “I knew there was a silver bullet out there, but it took me some time to figure it out.”

That proverbial silver bullet, Frei hopes, is Smartsheet, a software-as-service startup he founded in June 2005. Smartsheet gives small businesses a fast and easy way to collaborate on projects and to share files, even if employees are in different offices or in different countries.
Facing stiff competition from similar products developed by Google and Microsoft, Smartsheet, with its 13 employees, is focusing its products on the underserved small- to medium-sized company niche that the bigger players have so far overlooked.

Frei acknowledges that workplace productivity is not a new problem. He just thinks that he and his team have built a better mousetrap.
“We’re placing a big bet,” Frei says, “that we can go into an old market, where everyone has tried, but not succeeded, and build the killer app.” —J.M.