Founders at Work.pdf

284 Founders at Work
We said, “Fine.” So we wrote our business plan. John and I had managed
enough projects that we knew what the costs would be to bring out a first product.
We put that together in a plan, gave it to Bill, and he said, “Fine, you can
quit your jobs.” We said, “We don’t exactly have the money yet.” He said, “You’ll
have to trust me.” So John and I quit. Bill loaned us $50,000 just as a personal
note so that we could go out and start leasing a Vax computer to do our work on.
We eventually found the name Adobe Systems and we were in business.
Livingston: How did you choose the name Adobe?
Geschke: We originally started thinking of names that were vaguely associated
with what we were going to do, and we ran into the problem that there were so
many corporations founded in California that it was difficult to get a unique
name. So we thought, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t put too much of what we’re
going to do in our name, because who knows where this will lead?” At PARC,
we literally threw a dart at the map when we were starting a new project and
needed a code name. If it landed on a river or a town, then that was the name
of the project. I was looking at a map of this area and I noticed Adobe Creek—
in fact, it runs right behind my house—and I said, “How about Adobe?” John
thought about it and said, “Fine.” And that’s how Adobe Systems came to be.
Livingston: So you and John quit your jobs at the same time?
Geschke: Yes. My father and mother thought I had lost my mind, because I had
this great job at Xerox, a nice big office overlooking the whole Bay Area. They
said, “What are you doing?” I said, “You know, my ego may get bruised if this
doesn’t work, but I’ll always have a job. If you have a PhD in computer science,
you’re not going to be looking for work very long. This is something to give a try
and branch out on our own.”
Livingston: You were about 40 when you did this. You had a family; were you
nervous about starting a startup?
Geschke: Both John and I were in our early 40s. Maybe my kids were nervous
that I wouldn’t be able to put them through college, but no, I really wasn’t nervous
because I knew I could get another great job, partly from the experience at
PARC and from watching people in the venture world. I knew one founder who
seemed to get more money every time one of his companies failed than the last
time! You fail and people figure that you won’t make that set of mistakes the
next time.
So I never really felt scared. The only thing that would have been hard to
deal with would be the stigma of failing. But I thought we had a reasonable
chance of succeeding.
The first thing we did was find a place, through a friend of John’s who sold
commercial real estate. We got a place over in Mountain View, a few thousand
square feet. We began talking to people about hiring them, and of course we
talked to people we knew. Initially, most were currently at PARC or had
recently been at PARC.
Before long I got a phone call from one of my professors at Carnegie
Mellon, Gordon Bell, who had since left Carnegie and gone back to Digital