Day after day, Mr. Breier tells his 410 employees that things aren't so bad, and that better times lie ahead. Outside directors remain supportive, he adds, though they have plenty of advice, too. You'll never execute properly. You need to be relentlessly focused on one or two segments. One day last month, Mr. Breier rented an idle movie theater for a 10 a.m. pep rally.
Demand exceeds supply.
And we have too many projects competing for resources. Yet at 6 p.m. on a recent Friday, after most of his employees have left work, Mr. Breier is less ebullient. Sitting in his office, he reminisces about early 1998, when Beyond hadn't yet gone public, and he was just starting to hear about the software company. Mr. Breier worked in Seattle at the time, as vice president for marketing at Amazon. The two men finally met at a resort hotel on the Baja coast near midnight, where Mr. Breier and his wife were staying.