Larry Buckley and the trouble with a simple spreadsheet

Larry Buckley had a spreadsheet problem. This was awkward, in the pleasantly human way that a builder’s unfinished kitchen is awkward. The chief executive of DataOceans, a business devoted to making complicated information usable, had been keeping track of his own company’s ownership in Excel. More than 18 years of transactions had accumulated. He hired a software provider to move the records. Six months later, the migration still hadn’t worked.

He nearly abandoned the search. Instead, he asked around and tried Pulley, where a specialist helped move the records into a working system. Employees and investors could see their holdings; equity transactions that once took weeks could happen in days. The telling detail was his relief at having people who understood the problem. His verdict was plain: “The experience has been excellent, driven by the people at Pulley.”

There is a useful entrance to Buckley’s story here. A technology founder became a technology customer and encountered the gap between buying software and getting something done. Anyone who has watched an installation bar reach 99 percent will appreciate the distinction.

Ten years inside IBM, then a succession of beginnings

Buckley spent a decade at IBM before starting a software and consulting business in 1992. Over the following twenty years, he founded five more companies. Their work included electronic procurement, technology investment, a venture technology and sales agency, and an early e-commerce consultancy in the Southeast that was acquired by a global technology firm.

That sequence places him in a particular generation of entrepreneurs: people whose working lives crossed from established enterprise computing into the commercial internet. His career passed through several ways of selling, buying and connecting technology. There was no single fashionable category to remain inside. The categories themselves were changing.

In 2014, the Society of International Business Fellows named him its International Entrepreneur of the Year. The award recognized entrepreneurial effort by a member, giving a formal marker to a career otherwise described by a string of businesses. A prize supplies a date and a photograph opportunity. The more revealing unit of measurement here is the repeated beginning: another company, another customer problem, another set of systems to understand.

The other lane

There is another Buckley whose work happens beside a pool. He attended the University of Notre Dame from 1978 to 1982 and lists swimming among his activities. His volunteer experience includes mentoring coaches and swimmers with the CCOS Swim Team, beginning in 1999, and community swim coaching at Wesleyan High School, beginning in 2004.

Those roles put technique and leadership together. A coach has to make an instruction useful to somebody moving through water. A detailed explanation delivered at the wrong moment may be perfectly correct and perfectly useless. It is an appealing parallel with enterprise software, although a parallel should not be mistaken for an explanation of why he became an entrepreneur.

His company biography adds a few ordinary coordinates: four children, golf, swimming and an allegiance to Notre Dame. They give the professional chronology some company. The schedule contains more than businesses and boardrooms. There are also swimmers to coach and a football team to follow, neither of which can be improved by adding another tab to a workbook.

A business in the space between systems

At DataOceans, Buckley works alongside fellow founders Dave Hickson, the chief operating officer, and Chien Hsiung, the chief innovation officer. The company dates its founding to 2004. Its work sits between the records a business already holds and the communication a customer actually receives.

Consider the distance between an account balance and a useful statement. The balance must come from somewhere. Rules determine what accompanies it. The customer may want paper, a digital message or access through a portal. A payment or another servicing task may follow. Each step looks simple when considered alone. Connecting the steps is the business.

DataOceans builds that connection through customer communications management and digital self-service tools. Its platform brings together information from separate systems and applies business rules to letters, notices, billing and other interactions. The appeal is practical: improve what reaches the customer while continuing to use existing core technology. A fresh coat of paint is welcome. Getting the plumbing connected is the part that makes the room usable.

Taking the conversation south

In January 2014, Buckley and Hickson traveled with Cobiscorp executives through Central and South America to demonstrate their companies’ joint capabilities. Cobiscorp supplied core banking software. DataOceans supplied a customer communications layer intended for integration with the COBIS Ubiquitous Finance Platform.

The arrangement, announced that May, offered a route into Latin American markets through an established partner. It also followed joint work at banking conferences and think-tank events. The sequence matters: conversations, demonstrations, integration plans. International expansion can sound like a map covered in pins. Here, the documented activity was people traveling together to show what connected software could do.

Buckley described the opportunity in terms of exposure to new markets and learning from their approaches. That is a more interesting ambition than simply adding territory to a sales presentation. A partnership requires an entrepreneur to see where another organization already has knowledge, customers and a useful place in the system. The connecting work extends beyond the product.

Permission belongs in the product

Another connection brought Scott Frey, founder and chief executive of PossibleNOW, onto DataOceans’ advisory board. PossibleNOW and DataOceans had already partnered on preference and compliance functionality. Buckley welcomed Frey’s experience in building software around how people want businesses to communicate with them.

This is a small but consequential part of the larger picture. Producing a message and respecting the recipient’s preferences are different jobs. A system can be excellent at sending something that a customer did not want to receive in that form. Preference and consent introduce the person at the receiving end into an otherwise mechanical discussion of channels and delivery.

For Buckley, the advisory relationship put relevant operating experience close to management. It also made the company’s connections more specific than the familiar promise of a broad network. Here was a partner with expertise in a defined problem, joining a business whose own software had to accommodate it. The boardroom connection had a counterpart in the product.

“Today, preference and consent are critical components of the customer communications experience.”Larry Buckley, on Scott Frey’s advisory appointment

An office move with people in the sentence

When DataOceans announced its move to Alpharetta’s Georgia 400 Center in December 2021, Buckley linked the new space to employee work-life balance and the clients those employees served. The move from Norcross accompanied growth and a hybrid working model.

The office included open workspaces and hoteling options, with a courtyard, game tables and nearby places to eat. Office announcements tend to describe square footage as though it were a personality. This one at least made room for the people expected to spend their days there. Buckley also connected the move to employee retention in a public post.

At the time, the company reported serving more than 150 clients and a 98 percent retention rate. Those were company-reported figures at a particular moment, rather than a running scoreboard. Together with the move, they describe an established operation dealing with a familiar problem of growth: making room for more work without making the working day less livable.

The lawyer enters the workflow

In April 2024, DataOceans introduced Compliance Hub+ for auto finance with the law firm Hudson Cook. The collaboration combined communications software with default notice templates prepared by lawyers. The work included notices of intent, right-to-cure letters and post-sale explanations.

A letter in that setting carries obligations as well as information. The words, their version history and the approvals behind them all matter. The product included an audit trail and access to template updates, redlines and legal memoranda. Subscribers could also work with DataOceans client success managers and Hudson Cook counsel.

The limitation is part of the design: customer-specific or customized templates remain the customer’s responsibility rather than receiving the same monitoring and review. That boundary gives the partnership a concrete shape. It joins expertise to an operating process while identifying where the service ends. For a founder whose company lives between systems, it is another kind of interface, with lawyers on one side and the people sending notices on the other.

Making room at the top

Four months later, DataOceans promoted Lee Nagel to president. Nagel had spent six years at the company, including roles as senior vice president of client success and chief client officer. His responsibilities had crossed client services, sales, marketing and vendor relationships.

The new role gave him responsibility for company strategy, direction and growth, including product innovation, client engagement and revenue operations. Buckley remained chief executive. In announcing the promotion, he emphasized Nagel’s knowledge of the business and the value of stronger client relationships.

There is a quieter form of company building in a decision like that. Starting a venture creates an organization around a problem. Continuing to build it means giving other people meaningful authority over what happens next. The titles make the change visible; the responsibilities give it substance. Buckley’s career began with a departure from a large technology company. This chapter concerns how a company he helped create distributes its own leadership.

What the spreadsheet leaves behind

Read across these episodes and a repeated task emerges: make information and responsibility easier to pass from one person to another. A bank and its customer. A software company and its legal partner. A founder and a president. Employees and the records of what they own.

That is an interpretation of the work, rather than a motto to put in Buckley’s mouth. His documented decisions are specific enough to stand without one. They include seeking help after a failed migration, working with partners abroad, coaching swimmers, and backing a colleague’s move into the presidency.

The spreadsheet episode remains an apt place to end because it restores the founder to human proportions. Even a person who sells better systems can outgrow his own. Eventually, somebody has to open the file, understand its history and help put things in order. Buckley has occupied both sides of that desk.