Ms. Fix-It

A few weeks later, Novitsky's cubicle at InLeague had been cleaned out. Novitsky herself was spending just a few hours a week at the company. Even so, her legacy continues. "The foundation here is strong because she built a cohesive executive team," says Roxanne Jung, 35, director of corporate sales. "Now, instead of going to her, we turn to one another for help. That's what she's left here."

No Goals, No Company

If life in Silicon Valley were less intense, Novitsky might settle back into MDV for a month or two before taking on a new outside assignment. At the firm's headquarters, in Menlo Park, she has a well-appointed office that she shares with fellow venture partner Geoffrey Moore, author of Living on the Faultline and other business best-sellers.

But Novitsky doesn't see that office as her true work home. In fact, by last December -- even before she had finished her tour of duty at InLeague -- she had begun her next startup assignment. That's when she joined oneRev, the supply-chain company. Such a double-duty stint broke one of her own rules: She doesn't like to juggle her work inside MDV with work at more than one company. But sometimes life doesn't work according to rules.

Just before Christmas, Novitsky found herself revamping a sales pitch so that oneRev could start meeting more customers by early January. The PowerPoint slides that the company had put together a few months before would miss the mark with many potential clients. Meanwhile, there was no time to lose. "I'm a month late," Novitsky admits, "because I couldn't extract myself from InLeague."

Even so, she had already won over Nageen Sharma, 40, president and CEO of oneRev. Sharma says that he was initially skeptical of the venture-partner idea: "My perception of VCs had been that they get into your life and tell you what to do. They change things that they don't understand." But after about five minutes of working with Novitsky, Sharma decided that he was ready for a venture partner.

"She's not a venture capitalist coming down from heaven," says Sharma. "She's just one of the guys." And Novitsky, speaking of the oneRev team, returns the compliment: "These entrepreneurs know their stuff. One is a recognized expert in automating factories. Another has already built a company from the ground up."

So Novitsky will focus on what she knows best: choosing customers, setting goals, marketing. "I ask questions. I want to know what customers care about," she says. And while the idea of goal setting may seem like it's torn from a self-help book, Novitsky remains a stickler on that point. "A company without goals isn't a company," she asserts.

The big goal for oneRev will be selling Sharma's vision. "So often, executives know the benefit of what they are making, but they don't know how to package and price it," says Novitsky. "I don't claim to be the visionary here. I package the vision."

Just knowing that Novitsky is walking the hallways at oneRev brings Sharma peace of mind. "I knew that marketing was going to be a critical element of what we do, but how could I trust someone else to form the basic points?" he asks. "Now I feel extremely comfortable. We're ahead of where I wanted to be. We're already sending out invoices this month."

Precisely what impact Novitsky will have on oneRev remains unclear. After all, the prospects today for companies being hatched in Silicon Valley aren't what they used to be. But Sharma is already responding to Novitsky's commonsense ways. In fact, some of his quips sound as if he learned them straight from her. "The big question now is whether people are willing to write a check for what we make," he says. "We're focused on that. We might not even have a Web site for a year. And we are signing a lease in San Jose because it's cheap. There will be no sign and no receptionist."

That's just the kind of talk that oneRev's (then) "receptionist" likes to hear.

Fara Warner (fwarner@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior writer, is based in San Francisco. Contact Donna Novitsky by email (donna@mdv.com).