Ms. Fix-It

Donna Novitsky sits in the lobby of oneRev, making sure that no one except the young company's half-dozen employees and a few authorized visitors gains access to its offices. The one-month-old business has set up shop in a generic building in Santa Clara, California (it has since moved to San Jose), and the entryway is pure Silicon Valley minimalism: Worn brown leather sofas squat on drab taupe industrial carpeting. But that shabbiness belies oneRev's goal, which is to revamp the supply chain of the electronics industry. The company has secured funding from Mohr, Davidow Ventures (MDV), one of Silicon Valley's top venture-capital firms -- and something a bit more unusual: a commitment from Novitsky, one of that firm's partners, to serve for several months as its vice president of marketing.

By her own admission, Novitsky is hooked on startups. A 42-year-old tech-industry veteran, she craves the passion and excitement that come with building a new company -- even if that means doing everyday chores like watching the front door. About every six months, she takes a new, practically full-time job at one of MDV's portfolio companies. All told, she has helped a half-dozen companies evolve from ideas on PowerPoint slides into full-fledged enterprises.

That's a rare -- and welcome -- contrast to the way that VCs and entrepreneurs usually interact, notes David Kahn, the founder of InLeague, an online payroll and benefits-management company based in San Bruno, California. "So many venture capitalists see entrepreneurs as people to be tolerated. But Donna doesn't treat me like a big baby," says Kahn, 49, who worked side by side with Novitsky for 10 months last year. During that time, she helped InLeague get its strategy right, first as vice president of marketing and then as interim CEO.

In a world full of flashy starters who can't go nine innings, Novitsky's stock-in-trade is going the distance and taking dreamy entrepreneurs right along with her. Someone with her skill set would be a hot property at any point in the economic cycle. But now that the economy is slowing, and now that the Internet has become a much tougher place to do business, her talents are especially valuable. MDV's other partners regard her as one of the firm's hidden assets: a leader who can take a good company and give it a shot at being great. Instead of just fixing problems after they emerge, Novitsky works to prevent problems from happening in the first place. "I'm not just a fix-it person. I'm a build-it person," she says.

Novitsky guides young companies through the intricate -- and vital -- task of thinking about who their customers should be, how to approach their target market, and when to walk away from an opportunity that might take them down the wrong path. Just as important, she delivers her messages in a sympathetic way, doing her best not to kill the passion of a founder by saying no too often. "You can't let your ego get in the way," says Novitsky of her style of working with company founders. "It's their company and their ideas." Even so, she treats her assignment at each company as seriously as if that company were her only employer. "I wake up many nights thinking about these companies as if they were my own," she says.

Catching the Startup Bug

Novitsky has always thrown herself wholeheartedly into whatever she does. Born and raised in Whittier, California, she was a cheerleader, valedictorian, and student-body vice president in high school. She then attended Stanford, where she majored in industrial engineering, and later earned an MBA from Harvard. In the mid-1980s, she returned to Silicon Valley to work at Sun Microsystems, and she spent the next decade getting a real-world grounding in the high-tech sector. She spent six years in Sun's product-marketing department, where she worked on the team that launched the slogan "The network is the computer." In 1991, she left Sun and became vice president of marketing at Clarify, a San Jose-based company that makes customer-service automation software.

At Clarify, she got her first taste of startup life. During her seven years there, she honed the skills that she now uses at her portfolio companies. "This was the age of $12 million venture capital," she says. "How do you operate on a shoestring? That's when I realized that I'm just a miser by nature." In the case of Clarify, that $12 million (parceled out in three rounds) had to last three and a half years, and the promise of more funding depended on whether the company could become profitable in that time.

She stayed at Clarify up through its IPO, all the while working 80-hour weeks. By early 1998, she was burned out and ready for a change -- especially after she decided that she needed to spend more time with her children. Around that time, she met with Nancy Schoendorf, a managing partner at MDV. Over lunch at Buck's, a Silicon Valley power eatery, Schoendorf listened as Novitsky told her what she wanted to do: marketing, working with startups, perhaps a little consulting. That all sounded fine to Schoendorf. But something that Novitsky said -- "I love the early days of a business" -- led Schoendorf to envision a larger role for her.