Jive Software employees walked out Friday with all kinds of souvenirs - microwaves, desk chairs, even a sign right off the wall. The company let all the items go, for free or at a steep discount, as it closed its Portland office for good after the sale of the business last year.

It was a swift and deflating end for Jive, which once had a local staff numbering in the hundreds and helped define an era in Portland technology. Jive alumni are taking stock of their memories, reflecting on the company's setbacks and legacy.

"It's more than just an office closure," said Bill Pierznik, formerly Jive's general counsel. "The way that Jive ran, it was a tribe."

Once Portland's signature technology company, Jive encouraged businesses to begin using social networking tools for communication. It served as a bridge between Oregon's heritage in suburban hardware manufacturing and the software startups now clustered around Portland's core.

On any given night in 2010 you might look up from Burnside and see Jive engineers enjoying beers on the company's top-floor patio, celebrating the opportunity they had created for themselves and the city. Jive was Portland's biggest tech startup in a generation, seeding downtown with software engineers and executives that went on to help lead dozens of other companies.

Yet Jive also showed the limits of ambition, the missteps that come from placing too much emphasis on growth at the expense of sustained success.

Dave Hersh's Jive memento is a tattoo on his ankle, the payoff on a pledge he made in 2008 when he was the Portland company's chief executive. Hersh promised Jive's staff he'd have the roman numeral "Viii" tattooed on him if the company produced $8 million in revenue in the last quarter of the year.

"Everybody else's tattoos are about some spiritual cycle or life thing, and mine's about hitting quota," Hersh jokes. He likes to call it "a tattoo only an MBA could love."

It's a symbol of the camaraderie and enthusiasm that defined Jive during its heyday and, to Hersh, a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when startups lose their grounding.

"We pushed to scale the business pretty aggressively but made a lot of bad decisions along the way," he said.

Jive's closure comes after last year's sale to a Texas company called Aurea, which prefers contractors or employees who work from home. Scores of Jivers left after the deal amid a wrenching shift in the business that culminated with last week's office closure.

Jive Software history

2001

: Founded, in Iowa by Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, who attended the University of Iowa; moved to New York later that year.

2004

: Moves HQ to Portland.

2007

: Blue-chip Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital invests $15 million in Jive.

2008

: Jive lays off a fifth of its staff as it hunkers down for recession.

2009

: Jive adds $12 million in venture backing from Sequoia.

2010:

Longtime CEO Dave Hersh steps down, replaced by former Mercury Interactive chief Tony Zingale; moves headquarters from Portland to Palo Alto; Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins invest another $30 million in the company.

2011

: Raises $160 million in an IPO. At $12 a share, offering values the company at nearly $900 million.

2012

: Annual revenue tops $100 million for the first time; stock peaks at $28.15 in March, then plunges below IPO price in October before recovering. Bloomberg reports business software giant SAP was close to a deal to acquire the company but dropped out off talks.

2014

: Growth slows. CEO Tony Zingale retires, replaced by Elisa Steele. Shares slip under $6, half of IPO price.

2016

: Jive lays off 100 to reposition the company to reach profitability.

2017

: Jive sells to a Texas company called Aurea for $462 million.

2018

: Aurea closes Jive's Portland office.

A decade ago, even as the Great Recession hobbled other parts of the state's economy, Jive was busy demonstrating that Portland companies could win funding from blue-chip Silicon Valley venture capitalists and use that money to build a large company.

Jive's technology used social media tools to encourage collaboration within a business and improve communication with customers. The company established an especially tight-knit culture of "good-natured ass kickers," a term Hersh coined in 2006 that continued to guide the company for years.

Employees embraced the notion of a company that was both congenial and ambitious, a distinctly Portland combination that helped nurture a cadre of engineers and software executives in a city that had few of them before Jive.

"Our best legacy is that talent we were able to grow and then disperse into the community," said Jive co-founder Bill Lynch. "Those people are now senior directors or VPs all over the city."

At Act-On Software, for example, five of its top executives held leadership roles at Jive. That includes CEO Kate Johnson and Pierznik, now Act-On's chief operating officer. Puppet, Cloudability, Jama Software and many other Portland tech businesses have - or had - senior executives who had key roles at Jive.

Elizabeth Brigham moved to Portland in 2012 to work for Jive, her first job in business technology. She worked closely with Lynch and later with Jive's other co-founder, Matt Tucker, and said the company helped her learn the business then gave her the authority to help lead it.

"It really solidified my ability to create a new strategy, take it to market from scratch," Brigham said. She rose quickly to become Jive's director of product marketing, then left for a job in Chicago. She's now head of marketing for a number of products from investment research company Morningstar.

"All of the things I learned at Jive I use every single day," Brigham said.

For some Jive alumni, though, those lessons come tinged with regret. Jive went head-to-head with Microsoft, IBM and other major companies, and for a time it seemed the Portland company might turn into a business software mainstay.

On any given night in 2010 (and for years afterward) you might look up from Burnside and see Jive engineers enjoying beers on the company's top-floor patio.

The New York Times featured Jive in a story on how startups adapted to the recession. In 2011, while Oregon was still finding its economic footing, the company went public in a splashy Wall Street debut (albeit after Jive had moved its headquarters to Palo Alto.) By 2012, the markets valued Jive at more than $1.5 billion.

When it sold last year, though, Jive's growth had come to a halt, and it faced intense pressure from investors. Aurea paid just $462 million for the business.

Jive had long struggled at selling its technology to large organizations, big companies that it was counting on for its growth. And it didn't respond quickly enough to competitors like Yammer, which ultimately sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

Former CEO Hersh traces the company's issues to its first investment round, in 2007. He wishes Jive had waited longer to start raising money and thought more about creating a sustainable, long-term business.

"The way in which we called sales and marketing was based more on (investors') playbooks and what worked for other companies than a reflection of what Jive was. I think that started to permeate the organization," Hersh said.

"I was scared, and I wanted to be really big," he said. "I wanted to win, and so I pushed very hard."

Today, Hersh lives in the Bay Area and specializes in turnarounds for startups like Jive - businesses with solid technology who lose their way in pursuit of billion-dollar dreams.

"I couldn't save my company from it," Hersh said, "so now I save other companies."

Co-founder Lynch said going public put a new kind of pressure on Jive, making it hard to make good long-term decisions because of Wall Street's demands for consistent quarterly growth.

"It made things that became necessary to do a lot harder to do," he said.

After leaving Jive in 2013, Lynch served as entrepreneur in residence with Portland's economic development agency then joined Cloudability as its vice president of products. He stepped down last summer after 18 months and is now developing technology services for nonprofits.

To Lynch, Jive's legacy is about more than an office. He said he sees it in friendships, families and new businesses that endure and thrive even though the company that spawned them is gone.

"It's regrettable that Jive is not still around," Lynch said. "But I'll take what we had, because I can see the contributions in so many ways."

-- Mike Rogoway; Twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699