Adam Stone and the Drawing That Learned to Remember

Adam Stone had already spent years around televisions, satellite dishes and home theaters when a drawing program offered him a different kind of installation. Connect a shape to a database, and the drawing could remember what it represented. A box on a plan could carry information into the next stage of a job. The people doing the work might finally stop having to explain everything again.

That possibility became D-Tools, founded in 1998. It was an unusually practical beginning for a software company: an installer and project manager finding a way to make instructions survive the journey from one desk to another. The screen in the finished room was the glamorous object. Stone became interested in the less photogenic business of making sure everybody had ordered, priced and installed the same thing.

His career makes more sense when followed through those handoffs. First he moved physical equipment. Then he installed it. Then he managed the information around it. Eventually, he built a company around keeping that information together. Each job exposed the next problem. A television, after all, is easier to deliver than a shared understanding.

First, deliver the television

In 1981, Stone began as a television delivery specialist at the Good Guys, the West Coast consumer electronics retailer. He went on to start a business installing large satellite dishes. The venture, Satellite TV Center, caught an early opportunity in satellite television. As home theater developed in the early 1990s, his installation work moved with it.

These were businesses in which the hardware had to work in somebody else’s building. Equipment needed to arrive, fit and connect. By 1996, Stone had left installation to manage the residential division of an electrical contractor. There he encountered estimating, scheduling, blueprints and job costing in their older, largely analog forms.

He already had experience building database-driven estimating tools. Visio supplied another piece: a drawing environment he could understand and connect to data. He began seeing ways to automate tasks that otherwise lived separately. In a later interview, he put the attraction plainly: “I wasn’t a CAD guy, but I understood Visio right away.”

The important discovery was the connection. A picture could become a working record. For someone who had needed to explain wiring systems to installers, that offered a useful escape from repeated translation. Stone launched D-Tools at the 1998 CEDIA Expo in New Orleans, bringing software back to the people whose work had given him the idea.

Give every department the same job

By 2002, Stone was describing the problem as a breakdown between people. His former home theater business had suffered misunderstandings among those involved in projects. Separate applications made separate versions of the truth: the proposal in one place, the equipment list in another, the drawing somewhere else.

D-Tools’ answer was a shared electronic project file. Changing an item in the design could update the related records. Purchasing did not need to study the engineer’s drawing; it needed the correct part. The engineer needed to know what sales had promised. The installer needed plans that corresponded to the agreement.

The distinction sounds small until someone has to resolve a discrepancy. Every manually copied specification introduces another opportunity for disagreement. Stone’s idea gave different people access to the information relevant to their work without requiring each of them to reconstruct the entire project.

There was substantial housekeeping behind that promise. In 2005, RBH Sound joined the manufacturer partner program with specifications, prices and correctly sized shapes for more than 50 products. In 2008, Phase Technology joined a program serving over 2,000 System Integrator customer companies. Partnerships made the library useful one manufacturer at a time. A database still needs somebody to put the right things into it.

A boss with a weakness for process

Inside his own company, Stone applied the same attention to information. By September 2008, he was writing publicly about D-Tools’ customer relationship management system. His executive and management teams handled the main business functions; he spent much of his time improving processes and considering future products.

He decided to publish internal working methods that had previously circulated through employee emails and an internal wiki. Writing for outsiders, he reasoned, would make him explain himself better. Sharing could also help other companies. And if those companies prospered, some might need more D-Tools licenses.

Then came his amendment to the list of motives: “OK, three reasons. Add greed to the list.” It is a useful glimpse of Stone’s voice. Generosity and commercial interest could occupy the same paragraph without either needing a disguise.

The details were wonderfully unceremonious. He described how sales roles worked, how leads were scored and how information should pass to the next person. A post on custom list views examined who should see which records and complained about missing features. He had spent time thinking about something he called custom list pollution. Even office clutter, apparently, could go digital.

The software seller who bought the wrong software

Stone’s enthusiasm came with an expensive lesson. In a February 2009 interview, he described switching from NetSuite to Oasis CRM and connecting it with QuickBooks. The move failed to meet the company’s needs. He estimated the mistake at $200,000, including several kinds of cost.

His response was to do more testing. While volunteering for a nonprofit, he tried Zoho and compared it with Salesforce’s nonprofit offering. He subsequently moved D-Tools to Zoho, describing a six-week implementation and a May 2008 launch. The software founder had become a software buyer with reason to read the small print.

His later explanations show how closely he watched the results. In October 2008, he changed the title of his writing series from explaining the system to deconstructing it. The act of describing the process had prompted him to take it apart and improve it.

Another post celebrated the ability to filter records according to whether a field was empty. In November, he walked through lead conversion, following attachments, tasks, contacts and notes into their next home. These are modest pleasures. They also reveal his working priorities: preserve the information, make the next action clear, spare someone another round of typing.

The customer who became the CEO

One of D-Tools’ early customers was Randy Stearns, founder of Engineered Environments. Their relationship joined software development to the demanding business of installing systems. Stearns became D-Tools’ second paying customer, and years later he would take responsibility for running the company.

The change began in 2015 with a consulting assignment. Stone wanted Stearns to examine the business and identify opportunities. Six weeks later, the assignment had become the CEO job. Stone remained involved while handing over executive leadership.

The reasoning was candid. Stone wanted the company to expand beyond its residential audiovisual roots. Strategy and attracting investment were areas where he valued Stearns’ experience. Handing over the title allowed the business to acquire capabilities its founder wanted it to have.

He was equally clear about the asset underneath the software: manufacturer information, maintained by people dedicated to the task. “It’s the data that really powers our platform.” The sentence brings the story back to the original drawing. The useful thing inside the shape had always mattered as much as the shape itself.

New Orleans, Dallas, and the same unfinished job

For Stone, CEDIA supplied a recurring marker. He first attended its Expo in 1991 as an installer. He launched the software there seven years later. In Dallas in 2015, System Integrator won a CEDIA Manufacturers Excellence Best New Product Award, alongside recognition from CE Pro and Technology Integrator.

The features receiving attention included Mobile Install, which let field technicians receive tasks and service orders through a cloud-powered portal. Information could move out to the job site and return to the project. It extended the same concern that had occupied Stone from the beginning: keeping the work connected as it passed between people.

His technical curiosity continued after the CEO transition. In 2016, he wrote about moving architectural drawings between AutoCAD, Visio and PDF. The article paid attention to scale, file complexity and output quality. Even after building a software business, he was still occupied by the awkward passage of a drawing from one format to another.

That attention also appeared in his advocacy for standardized industry symbols. A drawing has to be understood by people outside the mind that produced it. Agreeing on the symbols is one way of making that understanding travel. Stone kept returning to the places where an apparently simple handoff could become complicated.

A drawing has to be understood by people outside the mind that produced it.On the purpose of a shared technical language

A company that could carry on

D-Tools expanded from residential custom electronics into commercial audiovisual work, security and other integration markets. Its product family grew to include D-Tools Cloud. In February 2026, the company announced another leadership succession: G Paul Hess would become CEO, with Stearns remaining involved in a strategic and advisory capacity.

In August 2026, D-Tools and Portal.io announced their merger. Hess continued as CEO, and Portal founder Kirk Chisholm became chief product officer. The company Stone started now contained several products and another founder’s accumulated understanding of how integrators sell and work.

Those developments belong to the teams leading the business today. They also give Stone’s decision to hand over management a longer perspective. A founder’s work includes creating something other people can operate, develop and change. His original irritation has proved roomy enough to accommodate their ideas.

Follow the career backward and the through line remains clear: the field technician, the salesperson, the purchaser, the customer, each needing a usable account of the same job. Stone found a business in helping the account survive the journey. The drawing could remember. More people could get on with their work.