Dean Niebuhr: Welcome. This is part of our series on leadership. Today we have with us Tom Herman. For those of you who do not know, Tom is an entrepreneur. I should say movie star, because I've never been in a movie but I saw the movie Startup.com and it's about GovWorks.com and the turmoil of going through a startup kind of process. He's involved with other organizations now. One of which is helping companies really deal with going through some of the decline and even bankruptcy situations and with his family business which is a very interesting situation dealing with educational environment for high school and younger kids. We're pleased you're here on campus. I'm going to start off asking Tom some questions about leadership and we'll just go from there.

Tom Herman: Thank you Bob. I'm very excited to be here. I've enjoyed my day so far.

Dean Niebuhr: Tell us kind of the story of GovWorks that's not told in the movie Startup.com and some of the lessons you may have learned from GovWorks.

Tom Herman: Well, I would start by saying the movie is about GovWorks and it does tell the story of GovWorks. So there are certainly some parts that were left out. I think, from a personal perspective, it's interesting that you'd ask that because I always felt that the movie didn't describe in a satisfying way for me the story of the technology. GovWorks was definitely a technology company. I spent two years living and breathing the development of a transaction processing engine for state and local government for doing financial transactions for real estate, taxes, utility bills, parking tickets, online permitting and licensing. At the time this was very new stuff that was happening. It was incredibly exciting for me to be exposed or to have the opportunity to develop some new applications for the internet technology that was emerging at the time. I think that's a big part of what GovWorks is for me that's not told in the movie. Another thing which is addressed in the movie is the challenge of balancing work and life. Not even so much work and play, but work and life; family life, home life, life outside of the office. You see, in following the two characters, that the camera is ever-present in Clayle's life. It shows his girlfriend. It shows his conversations with his mom. It shows everything that he's doing; going off to his meditation retreats. It's very invasive. I think that I had: may be lucky for me, but I think I had more of an ability to separate what was happening within the office from what was happening outside of the office. And that's often a challenge for entrepreneurs, figuring out how to focus all that energy that's needed in order to make a start up company successful and yet still keep a focus on a spouse, or children or things that are going outside of the office which are important for a healthy balance in life.