Don Fornes built an online business by picking up the phone.

At sixteen, Don Fornes had a company with his own name on it and mobile homes to wash. The work offered little glamour, a useful preparation for entrepreneurship. He earned more than a local employer would pay him and discovered the appeal of being responsible for the result. Years later, his next useful discovery would concern people who wanted to buy software and found themselves doing rather too much homework.

His career would take him through investment banking, a software company, a spare bedroom in Montana and an acquisition by Gartner. But the revealing moment in his Software Advice story is smaller than any of those milestones. Software vendors were unhappy with the prospects arriving through his website. Fornes began calling the people behind the forms. The business improved when someone interrupted the clicking and asked a question.

A directory with work boots on

Software Advice took shape in 2005. Fornes had been researching small software businesses with a view to acquiring one, and kept encountering scattered information about niche suppliers. There was an opening for a service that gathered those choices together. His first audience was construction, a market where accounting, estimating and project management could produce a formidable shopping list.

By the summer of 2006, the service was appearing under the RiverGuide name. Its intended customers included companies with annual revenue of $250 million or less. A questionnaire helped narrow the field; product information allowed comparisons across hundreds of features. Vendors paid for referrals. Users could contribute comments and ratings, adding their experiences to the information supplied by the sellers.

The premise had an appealing practicality. A contractor already had a business to run. Conducting a private expedition through every software vendor’s website was an expensive hobby to acquire by accident. Putting choices beside one another made the search more manageable. It also made a promise: the visitor might leave with a decision, rather than a longer list of tabs.

The form could not ask the next question

The first version of a useful idea can still be a poor business. An enquiry on a website might come from someone researching a purchase, someone studying a subject, or someone with little authority to spend. A form made those people look inconveniently alike. Vendors wanted introductions that justified a salesperson’s time.

Fornes and his team made telephone qualification central to the service. Conversations established requirements and helped direct buyers towards suitable products. By June 2013, he reported annual revenue a little above $10 million and no outside funding. His operating rule required a telephone conversation before every introduction.

“We would never make an introduction without a phone call.”

Don Fornes, 2013

There is a pleasing inconvenience in that rule. The internet is excellent at multiplying an action. It is less obliging when the action needs interpretation. Asking another question introduces a pause, a salary and a human being. It can also save everybody from having the wrong conversation later. Fornes had found a place where the extra step was worth taking.

A city that left room in the budget

In 2009, Software Advice moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Austin. Fornes made a decidedly unromantic calculation about the cost of doing business. Office rents, taxes and the ability to hire people affected how much money could remain inside a growing company. A city could be part of the operating model.

By an April 2014 account, the company had reached $15 million in revenue and 75 employees without outside capital. Those figures describe that period, rather than today’s business. Fornes linked the money retained by the company to its ability to add staff. His explanation of bootstrapping stressed careful spending, a narrow initial opportunity and deliberate expansion.

The romance of a startup often attaches itself to a location. The arithmetic tends to be less sentimental. For a service that depended on people speaking to customers, the price of making room for another colleague mattered. Austin offered Fornes a way to keep investing in the work behind the website.

The peculiar glamour of a filing system

Fornes’s management habits offer another clue to the business. He wrote ideas down immediately, gave projects a named owner and learned to delegate. Conference rooms had wall-sized whiteboards. He could also become enthusiastic about a well-ordered corporate filing system, a subject rarely responsible for an overcrowded conference ballroom.

There was tuition behind that preference for practical competence. His first website developer disappeared with the job nearly complete. A succession of development teams followed before he accepted the cost of paying for better work. Asked what he would change, he answered: “I would spend more money on great people up front.”

The remark has more texture than a routine endorsement of talent. A low price can look disciplined until the replacement work begins. A founder who watches every expenditure still has to distinguish an economical decision from an invoice that merely postpones the real expense. Fornes had paid for that distinction in time as well as money.

His broader approach to organization became explicit in 2013. Software Advice trained employees in a set of execution principles adapted from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and agile working methods. Tasks belonged in a central system. Large projects needed actionable steps. Early deliveries created opportunities for feedback, and small successes helped establish momentum.

He also encouraged employees to research straightforward questions before asking a manager. These habits gave a team a way to proceed without making the founder the answer to everything. The filing system and the early delivery served the same purpose: someone else should be able to find the next piece of work and carry it forward.

Hiring for the work in front of you

As the staff grew, Fornes became interested in why different people excelled at different jobs. Working with James Maynard and managing editor Holly Regan, he developed a framework of four workplace types. In a January 2014 essay, he described creative thinkers, specialists, competitive sellers and service-minded colleagues, each with a different contribution to make.

The categories were his working framework for assembling a team. Their practical appeal lay in looking beyond an all-purpose ideal employee. Someone good at inventing a campaign might need a different role from someone who enjoys helping a customer through a problem. A business built around introductions had every reason to care about the quality of its internal matches too.

There is an everyday courtesy in that idea. Hiring involves asking whether somebody can do the work. Managing them well also involves asking which work gives their abilities somewhere useful to go. Fornes’s attention had widened from choosing software to arranging the people who made the choosing possible.

A sale, then another construction problem

Gartner acquired Software Advice in March 2014. At the time, the business had its Austin team and an engineering operation in Córdoba, Argentina. The buyer was an established technology research company, a fitting destination for a service helping smaller organizations make technology decisions.

Fornes’s 2020 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative biography looked back on a business bootstrapped from a spare bedroom in Big Sky to 135 employees in Austin. It also recorded his earlier work at Hambrecht & Quist and Epiphany. The distance between those institutions and that bedroom makes the story more interesting than a straight ascent through increasingly impressive job titles.

Construction returned in a later chapter. Fornes and Austin Merritt joined Garrett Burke at ConstructSecure in 2021. The company subsequently became Highwire. Its concern was the performance of contracting partners across capital projects: assessing firms, understanding risks and helping working relationships improve as a project progressed.

In January 2022, ConstructSecure announced a $96 million growth investment led by Summit Partners. Merritt was CEO at that point. The company described an ambition to extend beyond an initial screening of contractors towards continued collaboration during the project. A supplier’s circumstances could change after the paperwork had been approved.

By January 2025, Fornes was being identified as Highwire’s chairman and CEO as the company discussed its expanded leadership and platform. Veriforce acquired Highwire that October; the acquisition announcement named Kyra van den Bosch as CEO. The chapter had moved on again, with another buyer seeing value in making complicated business relationships easier to manage.

The next introduction

Beyond those companies, Fornes has made room for other interests. His public profile lists varsity heavyweight rowing during his Princeton years, from 1991 to 1995, and a commercial pilot certificate with an instrument rating issued in 2015. In December 2020, he introduced Climate Cloud, publicly connecting his career plans with climate technology.

His more recent profile lists Privet Row and Palm Beach, Florida. A public hiring post seeks a founding engineer for an AI-native financial services platform. The precise product may change; the invitation to help build it is familiar. Fornes is once again looking for the person who can turn an idea into a working operation.

That is the thread worth carrying through his story. An online comparison needs someone to understand the purchase. A project needs someone responsible for finishing it. A promising colleague needs a useful role. Fornes’s career has repeatedly returned to the work between the boxes on the diagram. It is a busy place, and the telephone still has its uses.