The launch was two weeks away. The software was full of bugs. A million-dollar marketing campaign was coming, and an engineering executive asked anyone with reservations to raise a hand. Colin Earl, then an engineering manager at a Silicon Valley startup, could see the difficulty. Honesty would be useful to the company and hazardous to the person supplying it. Enthusiasm, meanwhile, required no working software at all.
Earl later called speaking up in that meeting “political suicide.” His lasting objection concerned the arrangement: people could protect their own positions while helping the business make a terrible decision. A company could be staffed with capable people and still organize them into collective foolishness. He began wondering whether a different set of incentives might produce a different sort of company.
That question would follow him through consulting, failed ventures, customer calls and the long development of Agiloft. Its eventual subject was enterprise software, an occupation with limited glamour and ample opportunity for disappointment. Earl found room there for an unusually personal ambition: make the interests of the customer, the employee and the business fit together.
A promising start, followed by the trapdoor
Earl studied engineering at Imperial College London. His career included software development, product management and CIO work, with experience at IBM, General Electric and startups. Mechanical design was an early specialty. Before contracts became his business, he worked on the tools engineers used to design physical objects. He understood the distance between an elegant specification and a thing that actually worked.
His first entrepreneurial efforts supplied a practical education in dependence. Between 1991 and 1995, he developed an optimizer for mechanical designs. An integration and sales arrangement with Computervision offered a route to customers. The first month brought roughly $50,000 in sales. Then came news of an acquisition. The buyer already had an optimizer. Four years of development had met a corporate decision it could do little to influence.
Another company where Earl had worked as a consulting CIO, Highland Digital, collapsed. Developers in Russia who had worked with him were left asking what had happened to their jobs. Earl sought contracting work for them, building a services business with clients including Cisco. Consulting supplied cash, relationships and a way to keep a team working. The route toward a software product would run through paid work for other people.
There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in this beginning. No immaculate founding moment resolves the story. One attempt loses its distribution channel; another employer disappears; useful people still need useful work. The company takes shape through those obligations. Its finances develop the same practical logic: earn money with the work available, then use it to pay for the work you want to make possible.
The customer with a satellite problem
A customer call helped reveal what the team had built. SupportWizard, an earlier product, was attracting large organizations. One caller wanted to track satellite communication errors. Earl wondered why a business of that scale needed his help. Surely it already possessed suitable internal systems.
It did. Changing them was the problem. In Earl’s telling, adding a field required months and political favors. With SupportWizard, the caller had downloaded the software in the morning and added the necessary fields that afternoon. The conversation reached a wonderfully uncomplicated commercial conclusion: “Would you take a credit card?”
Earl had made the product configurable because flexibility seemed sensible to an engineer. The caller supplied the business case. A system’s value included how easily its owner could alter it. Every new requirement need not become a small diplomatic mission to the IT department.
That insight expanded the ambition from a configurable support application to a platform for building business applications without custom programming. The difficulty moved inward: the platform’s developers would have to anticipate and support changes that customers would otherwise pay programmers to make. Convenience for the user demanded considerable work from the builder.
“Would you take a credit card?”
A customer’s response, as recalled by Colin Earl
Four years before production
Focused development of the platform began in 2004. It reached production use in 2008, with existing SupportWizard customer Delaware Investments among the first to move across. Revenue from the earlier product financed the effort. Customers were, in effect, paying for the next generation while using the current one.
The dates matter because Earl was trying to sell speed after spending years manufacturing it. A flexible platform has to handle permissions, records, workflows and changing requirements reliably. An afternoon’s configuration rests on decisions someone else made long before that afternoon arrived. Fast results and slow preparation can be perfectly good companions.
He also learned the limits of an engineer’s faith in the product. Commercial success required a sales organization, implementation expertise, security analysis and evidence a prospective buyer could examine. Those are less romantic than invention. They are also how a promising application becomes something a business can responsibly buy. Earl spoke about them with the attention of someone who had discovered that the remaining work was substantial.
A guarantee with consequences
His answer to the old meeting-room problem appeared in the company’s incentives. Earl described a historical policy under which employees, including developers, received sales bonuses. Alongside it sat a 90-day unconditional customer guarantee. A disappointed customer could cancel without paying. Together, the policies made a sale everyone’s concern and an oversold promise everyone’s problem.
The arrangement deserves a moment’s attention. A developer had a reason to care whether the buyer was satisfied. A salesperson had a reason to check what the product could actually deliver. The refund promise gave the customer some power after the persuasive presentation had ended. A guarantee is considerably more interesting when it changes behavior inside the seller’s office.
One commercial outcome. A reason for the whole team to care.
Earl also described a working week of 40 to 45 hours for staff, with a somewhat longer one for himself. He wanted people to remain with the business. In complex software, continuity preserves knowledge about both the system and its users. This gave an otherwise ordinary desire for a life outside work a direct connection to the quality of the product.
Contracts chose the platform
Agiloft’s eventual concentration on contract lifecycle management grew from customer behavior. People were using its broader business process platform to manage agreements. Earl and Bridget Conrad, his wife and partner in building the company, followed that demand. The software’s flexibility had found a recurring, commercially useful problem.
Contracts offer plenty of material. They must be drafted, approved, signed, tracked and renewed. Obligations continue after the signature. The relevant people work across departments, and their requirements change. A configurable system has something to do at almost every step. Earl’s earlier frustration with small changes that became large projects had found a particularly suitable home.
He retained an affection for smaller customers, too. In 2017 he spoke proudly about small businesses being able to configure software also used by larger organizations. He described a separate application built for a multinational’s process of dissolving overseas subsidiaries. An obscure administrative task could justify software of its own. The spreadsheet, that patient custodian of jobs nobody else wanted, had acquired competition.
Accepting capital, and handing over the chair
In August 2020, Agiloft announced its first external funding: a $45 million growth equity investment from FTV Capital. Eric Laughlin became CEO. Earl moved to chief technology officer, responsible for product development, engineering, security and infrastructure. A business built through self-funding had reached the point where its next choices included an investor and a different chief executive.
Agiloft’s first round of external funding, from FTV Capital.
For Earl, the attraction was the freedom to expand sales and marketing without continually worrying about the cost. His later account of the transaction was practical rather than doctrinal. Independence had given the product time. Investment could give the organization capacity. The decision changed as the company’s needs changed.
He retired from his executive role in July 2022, initially remaining on the board. In May 2024, KKR announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Agiloft, with FTV investing further and JMI Equity joining as an investor. The company Earl had built continued into a different stage of ownership.
Room to learn
Earl died on June 20, 2025. Agiloft’s remembrance emphasized the chances he and Conrad gave people who arrived without software experience. The capacity to learn could count for more than an established résumé. Colleagues remembered a leader who enjoyed debate and believed people could grow into demanding work.
His family remembered a witty, curious person whose retirement included poetry at open mic nights and study of quantum physics. Hiking and kayaking had long offered ways to leave the office behind. These interests fit comfortably beside the engineer: someone could spend years refining a business system and still want questions with less convenient answers.
The old launch meeting remains a useful way to understand his career. Earl had seen what happened when an organization made candor costly. His own business became a sustained attempt to make useful behavior easier: let customers change their systems, give employees a stake in satisfaction, and allow newcomers time to learn. The ambition was practical enough to appear in a refund policy. It was personal enough to be remembered by the people who got their chance.