Founders at Work.pdf

Mitchell Kapor 91
that I needed to totally rewrite Tiny Troll to be much better, and give it a totally
new user interface, and so on. Based on that misunderstanding of what done
was, I said to the publisher, “What I want to do is to come out to California”—
which was where they were—“and you should hire me to be your new product
manager. I can finish this thing in my spare time. It’s almost done.”
Now why did I want to go out there and be the product manager for the
publisher? There were a couple of reasons. The main one was that I had come
to understand that the big economic opportunity was to get stock in a startup,
and this was a way of doing it. I had a royalty contract—like a book contract—
and they said “fine.” So I moved out to California without my program having
been completed.
So now I had gone from writing and rewriting Tiny Troll, which eventually
was called VisiPlot, to being product manager for several versions of VisiCalc—
not the flagship Apple II version, but the other versions. I worked for the publisher,
for Personal Software, with the Software Arts people. And a number of
things transpired. I was in California for 6 months and had no time to work on
getting my own products finished. But I found it incredibly fascinating to be in
Silicon Valley and learned a lot.
Personal Software had brought in venture capital just before I arrived, and
while I was there they brought in more management. The VCs brought in more
senior management from places like Intel, and I was moved aside. I could see
that my power and my access were being marginalized, which I didn’t like, and
I didn’t feel that the business was being conducted with the degree of integrity
that met my standards. And we had actually never consummated this swapping
royalties for stock. So I said, “You know what, I’m going to go finish the product
that I promised you. Let’s unwind this.” And I moved back to Boston and then
I finally finished the product. It took another 6 months.
They brought it out in the early part of 1981. And it started generating a
huge amount in royalties right away—a huge amount relative to what it was. It
generated about $100K a month in royalties, but I had essentially no expenses,
so that’s a lot of money.
Now, all of a sudden, I had options about what to do next. In the course of
developing VisiPlot, I had come to certain conclusions. And there was one
other factor: somewhere while all this was happening, I had worked in assisting
the VisiCalc guys in devising a way to exchange data between VisiCalc and
VisiPlot. That was important because it provided a way to actually make graphs
out of spreadsheet data, which was an obvious piece of functionality.
Bob Frankston had developed something called the data interchange format,
and VisiPlot was one of the first other software applications to support it.
I’d worked with Bob on that—he played the lead role, far and away. But while
there was a way of moving data between these two programs, it was really
cumbersome. There were no hard drives in those days. Everything was on
floppy disks, which had limited capacity. And furthermore, VisiCalc had a
copy-protected floppy disk to prevent piracy. So if you wanted to make a graph,
you had to boot up VisiCalc, you would make your spreadsheet, and then you
would save a file in this special data interchange format to the second floppy