Founders at Work.pdf

Mitchell Kapor 93
The non-compete was the hinge issue. I’d been thinking about what I
wanted to do next and in fact had hired Jonathan Sachs, who was the person
who architected and implemented the original version of 1-2-3. We had the
basic concept in mind, which was an integrated spreadsheet and graphing program
with other stuff. They bought me out 6 months after we started, which
was in November ’81, and Sachs had started in the summer of ’81. We didn’t
have any code. We were considering a bunch of different ideas. It was still very,
very early, but I knew I wanted the ability to go do this thing.
I also knew the publisher wasn’t going to do the buyout if they didn’t have a
really strong non-compete. But remember, I had done a graphics and statistics
program, not a spreadsheet, and I proposed that they carve out an exception in
the buyout to do this integrated graphing calculator program, betting that they
would be sufficiently motivated to get the deal done that they would look at this
thing and go, “This is a very big ambitious thing. We don’t really think he has
the ability to pull this off. This gets us what we need, and for the sake of getting
the deal done, we’ll sign off on it.” So basically, I told them what I was going to
do, taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t think they would take me seriously,
because I know they didn’t take me seriously. And that’s what actually
happened.
It just goes to show you shouldn’t underestimate people. You shouldn’t
judge from appearances like that.
Livingston: So now that you were free and clear, what were the first things that
you did?
Kapor: Jon had implemented spreadsheets previously; he was one of the few
people. And that’s how I knew him. But he had made the mistake of being in a
business with technical people and no business people. He had been at Data
General, and the first spreadsheet that they implemented was for the Data
General minicomputer. Well, there was no market for that.
And then Sachs and his partner were sort of going, “What do we do now?
This didn’t work.” I forget how I ran into Sachs, but I convinced him to come
workor my fledgling little thing. Remember, I had the royalties. He had some
ideas; I had some ideas; we succeeded in spite of ourselves.
I was so convinced that VisiCalc had a lock on the market that I had to convince
myself that we were going to do something that wasn’t fundamentally a
spreadsheet. Of course, what we did was fundamentally a spreadsheet, but the
self-deception I engaged in wasn’t sufficiently damaging to be fatal. But there
was a big push to call it integrated software, to add other capabilities, to wrap
other things in it.
The galvanizing event was when IBM announced the IBM PC in August
1981. It was very important in the history of PCs because it legitimized the
whole field—because of IBM’s imprimatur. Until then, the personal computer
hardware companies were Apple, Tandy, and Commodore. IBM was the first
“real” computer company to come out with a PC, legitimizing it for the business
marketplace. And that was not lost on me.