Slingshot Technology, Inc. (A)

Slingshot Technology Inc. (STI) is a privately held software start-up founded in 1995 focused on identifying emerging spaces in the IT services industry and partnering with vendors selling promising but unproven technologies in those spaces. The vendors used STI to extend their system development and integration capabilities to deliver on aggressive deadlines, STI gained a steady stream of consulting and engineering work plus opportunities to identify and meet follow-on needs of the vendors' Fortune 1000 customers. Four years after the company was founded with $1,000, revenue had exploded to $1.9 million on the basis of partnerships with enterprise applications development and enterprise application integration vendors. In late 1998, the founder was pondering how to set up an innovative "software factory" to complement the consulting side of the business while ensuring that STI's knowledge assets and intellectual property were protected.