I Produced a Musical About Financial Software

The dumbest thing I ever did as a CEO started as a prank on some conference reviewers, and I want to state upfront that it worked out anyway, because otherwise this is just a story about a man wasting his company’s money on show tunes.

Back in 2006, Hyperion (the software company, for those of you who joined my life after the Oracle acquisition) ran a 5,000-person annual conference called the Hyperion Solutions Conference (everyone just called it Solutions). You submitted session abstracts, reviewers picked the good ones, and everybody presented earnest 50-minute talks about budgeting software (I gave several). I submitted a session titled “Eddie and the Consultants: A System 9 Musical.” The abstract was written entirely in 50s and 60s rock songs, and it described the story of Eddie, who wanted to implement Hyperion System 9 in a week, and the girl he was interested in, who just wanted to punch the numbers. I had no screenplay, no songs, no actors, and no intention of doing any of it. I just thought it would be funny to imagine the looks on the reviewers’ faces.

Then they called me.

“Are you actually serious about this?” Now, I can commit to a practical joke, so I said oh yeah, totally, I’m already working on the screenplay, and then I riffed some plot points on the phone that I was inventing as I said them. A couple weeks later they called again: could I actually get people to act in it? Oh sure, I’ve already talked to my employees (I had not talked to my employees), I’ve got Penny from Accounting and Eddie from IT all worked out. Two weeks after that: what would I need to conduct this? I don’t know, a stage? A sound system? I was riffing again. And then they accepted it, and then came the moment where I realized I now had to write, cast, and stage an actual musical, in front of an actual audience, because I couldn’t stop saying “totally” on the phone. (Edward, three separate people gave you three separate chances to admit it was a bit, and your response every time was to invent more details?!? You deserved rehearsals, Edward. You deserved every single one of them, and there were more of them than I have ever admitted to anyone.)

I wrote the entire screenplay in 3 days, sick in bed over a weekend and feeling, let’s say, a bit manic. Every song was a parody. Instead of “Duke of Earl” it was CFO: C-C-C-C-F-O, O-O-O, C-F-O. Instead of the summer of ‘69 it was the Summer of System 9. We hired an actual director, a guy who’d gone to film school (film school!), to direct a musical about financial consolidation software. I flew my employees into our offices for rehearsals, and yes, that means billable consultants got on planes to practice choreography, and yes, I paid for the planes. Tom Myers played Eddie from IT that first year, and I’ve never been able to come up with the name of the woman who played Penny. (You can still recite the CFO song word for word, Edward, but not the name of the woman who played the female lead. Somebody owes somebody a fruit basket.)

Then we got to Las Vegas, and I stood there watching the room fill up. And keep filling up. They ended up canceling the session next door and breaking down the airwall between the rooms, and it was still hundreds of people with a standing crowd 6 deep at the back. For a musical. About System 9. People laughed at the right spots and a few wrong ones, and afterwards Hyperion asked if we’d do it again at the 2007 conference in Orlando, which turned out to be the final Hyperion Solutions Conference ever, because Oracle bought Hyperion and that was that. (I wrote the obituary on my old blog. It was titled “Hyperion Solutions Conference is Dead,” so you can see how much subtlety I was bringing to the moment.)

For Orlando I cleaned up the songs, took the role of Eddie away from Tom, and played it myself, with Danielle White as Penny. In year one, a few characters only existed on video, including Aquaman, so for year two I paid to fly in John Vorhies, Jr. to play him live. [Side note: I no longer remember why a musical about budgeting software had Aquaman in it, and I wrote the thing. I’ve asked myself. I’ve got nothing. If you were there and you know why, tell me, because it’s been 20 years and it’s starting to bother me.] Orlando gave us the biggest room they had, and it was completely packed. So I can honestly say I have written, produced, and starred in a musical that performed to sold-out audiences in both Las Vegas and Orlando, and if I phrase it exactly like that, it sounds like a career, and I never have to mention that both shows were free and the audience was accountants.

We made a playbill. We recorded a cast CD. For a while the entire news section of interRel’s home page was the cover art and one line of text: to request a CD or DVD, email events@interrel.com. (I wouldn’t try that address now.)

Anyway, the show is easier to find than the CD is. Somebody at interRel posted the entire 2007 performance to the company’s YouTube channel back in 2020, all 58 minutes of it, where it had picked up 45 views by the time I went looking. So a musical about budgeting software is technically streaming, and if you want to be view number 46, it’s right there and I’m not going to stop you.

Oh, and I skipped the part that made the whole thing worth it. After the first show in Vegas, I walked out of the session and there was a man standing in the hall waiting for me: the CFO of Overhead Door Corporation, a multi-billion-dollar company (garage doors; you own one of their products and have never once thought about it). He said, “That was one of the strangest sessions I have ever seen at any conference in my entire life. It’s that type of creativity I want out of a consulting company. Why don’t you come out and meet with me?” A week later I did, and interRel won the deal. I did that whole thing on a lark, it cost me a decent chunk of my own money, everybody sensible in my life asked me what I thought I was doing, and it brought in real revenue because 1 guy standing in a hallway liked that we’d done it.

One of you still has a cast CD. Mine are long gone. Edward@Roske.AI if it’s you, and I’m apparently sentimental about my own nonsense now.

Asking good questions, Edward