Founders at Work.pdf

Charles Geschke 293
it; basically everybody voted for us. In fact, while there was a hiccup in the stock
because of the Apple-Microsoft announcement, our business never faltered.
Livingston: Why weren’t Microsoft and Apple able to make a competitive
product?
Geschke: They were mostly working on speculation of what they thought they
could do. When we were talking to Microsoft and Apple about licensing this
technology from us, we already had working prototypes. They were an example
of what a poor duck hunter does. They were shooting at where we already were,
and we were long past them by the time they were able to bring that product
out. It became basically irrelevant to the market.
Livingston: Was there ever a competitor out there in the early years that you
worried about?
Geschke: There were some. When we got our money for that original business
plan, there were about half a dozen companies who had raised money to do
something similar. Not the same, but similar. Fortunately, the other five all executed
that business plan, and we didn’t. And they all disappeared.
It shows you the power of getting good advice and having the nerve to take
that advice. Because literally, there were half a dozen companies all formed
within about a 12- to 18-month period with venture capital both on the East
Coast and out here in Silicon Valley, all trying to do the same thing. And sometimes,
when they would get up and talk at events and conferences, that would
be pretty scary.
HP continued competing with us with the LaserJet—we could see the
potential that over time, some of their products, especially in the office, would
become good enough. It also became clear that once ink jet technology became
higher quality and lower cost and of comparable speeds, we wouldn’t be able to
put our software on a controller in the printer, because the printers were throwaway
devices. They were just razors and the money was in the blades. So we
began really pushing hard on other products and other market opportunities
knowing that eventually PostScript would fade as a revenue opportunity for us.
Today we still have laser printer contracts with a number of manufacturers—
probably the biggest one now is Xerox, ironically—and several image setter
contracts with the companies who make high-end printing equipment, but
there’s very little business in the desktop market and none in the ink jet business
for PostScript. So while it’s still a profitable piece of our business, it’s certainly
no longer critical. Acrobat and our other retail products and now the
acquisition of Macromedia have more than taken over for PostScript.
So the other lesson is that you have to be willing to move on, even if you’ve
got a real success. That was, in fact, the same problem that Xerox had. Because
the 914, the original copier, was so successful, they couldn’t look at a business
that didn’t have a “b” in the dollar amount. Unfortunately, new businesses start
out small and grow. You have to be willing to make some risky decisions and
invest in them in the hopes that a few of them will succeed. Xerox was not very
good at that. Hopefully they’ve gotten better over the years.