Founders at Work.pdf

90 Founders at Work
One of those people was Eric Rosenfeld, who was a graduate student in
finance at MIT. As a favor to him, and because it was kind of a challenge, I
helped write a statistics routine that ran on the Apple II that he could use to
analyze data in his dissertation. It took me a weekend. He actually had to
explain the math to me; once he explained it, I understood the math.
Afterwards, we kind of realized, hey, this might actually be useful to other
people if we built a statistics and graphics product on the Apple II. It was called
Tiny Troll after something called TROLL, which was a time-sharing thing
at MIT.
At the same time, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were developing
VisiCalc, also in Cambridge, and when it came out, it set the world on its ear. It
was far and away the most useful piece of software ever done for a personal
computer. It was incredibly innovative. It started generating sales of Apple IIs,
and it was a cut above everything else.
The authors of VisiCalc were Software Arts. The publishers were Personal
Software, which then changed its name to VisiCorp somewhere along the way.
I knew the VisiCalc authors because they came to the meetings of the Apple II
user group that I had cofounded, and that’s where I first saw VisiCalc in probably
1979.
They introduced their publisher to me—this is Dan Fylstra and Peter
Jennings—and they said, “We would like you to take Tiny Troll and rewrite it
and clean it up so that we can bring it out as a companion product to VisiCalc.”
They wanted to have more offerings since they had such a hot product. And I
agreed to do that. I still had a partner, but I think he was probably beginning to
teach at Harvard—anyway, he was otherwise engaged. I was at business school;
I decided, when this happened in November 1979, that I needed to learn about
business because that’s where the market was going to be.
I thought I was just going to clean up this little product over Christmas
break so I could finish my education. I would make some money and that would
be that. And I only thought that because I was totally ignorant about how long
things took. I had no background in computer science. I was self-taught—I was
still writing in Basic. I had no management experience; I was in business school
at the time. In fact, I had spent my years after college as a radio disk jockey on
a progressive rock station. I was a transcendental meditation teacher, and a
mental health counselor at a psychiatric unit of a community hospital. That was
OK, because there wasn’t really a personal computer software industry. It was
still kind of a hobby thing becoming a business, and nobody really took this stuff
seriously, so I wasn’t ludicrously unqualified by the standards of the day.
But I was wrong about how long it was going to take to do this thing. I was
inspired to want to do a really great job by VisiCalc, which was so much better
than anything I could ever write. But I said, “I want to try to do something that
could stand up well.” And I faced a difficult decision because school was starting
again. I took a leave of absence from school to finish the product.
It then came to be the spring of 1980, and I thought I was done, and I wasn’t
done. I didn’t know what done was with software. I had, roughly speaking, an
alpha version of the product—it had some demonstrable features. I decided