Balloons and banners still clutter the blue walls and bright green pillars of the open workspace at SuccessFactors Inc., celebrating the initial public offering of the San Mateo, California?based high- tech company last fall. It feels like the Silicon Valley of old, except for the legal department. The general counsel of the employee-performance software company isn’t some associate grabbed from the nearest law firm?Julian Ong, 41, worked at Salesforce.com for four years before joining SuccessFactors in 2006.
An informal survey shows that most, if not all, of the 18 venture-backed Bay Area companies that went public last year have GCs with an in-house track record. This represents a shift from bringing outside counsel in-house, a practice that was favored during the dot-com boom. The change makes sense to Ong, who previously worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “You need to make a fairly big mental shift from a revenue generator to a business counselor and enabler,” he explains.
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