Founders at Work.pdf

Ann Winblad 301
entrepreneurs in the industry. They really were programming on kits—they
were hobbyist programmers in their garage. Because it was a new generation of
people starting and we just happened to catch the tip—even though we weren’t
any different in age than these people of the last year of computing—so we got
some real computer science knowledge and that really did save our bacon and
allow us not to have to restart the company. We were on a steady growth path
from the beginning.
Livingston: Do you remember any major turning points?
Winblad: There were so many things that happened. Sometimes they almost
feel like acts of God.
We were doing all this work for these CADO computer guys. And there
were many things we didn’t know—like pricing strategy or how do you collect
money from people? So I remember one very unsophisticated thing, in that we
had been working with CADO and they said, “We’re going to get all of our
resellers together. Since you’re the big application vendor, come and give a
presentation and pitch them.”
So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in
their 50s and I’m in my 20s, and we had a “blue light special,” where we said, “If
you give me a check today for $10,000, you can have unlimited rights to one of
our modules”—the general ledger or something like that. “But you have to
write me a check today.” These guys are looking at me like I’m goofy and I’m
thinking, “Well, maybe they don’t believe this great offer.” (This is how naïve I
am.) One guy says, “Well, we don’t carry our corporate checkbooks around.”
And I go, “Well, you must have your personal checkbooks?” And they go,
“Yeah.” And I’m thinking, “Oh yeah, how are they going to pay us?” So I said,
“I’m sure your company will reimburse you and, if you want to, put a note not
to cash the check until Monday, but I need the check today.” And the CADO
guys are looking at me like, “OK, what is she doing?”
That day I remember very well . . . it was in the back of a warehouse
because they manufactured these computers and it was a big building in
Torrance, and it was nice and sunny there. They gave me a crate to stand on
because the podium was so large for me. I stood on this crate and started going
through the specifications of our product, and George Ryan, the CEO, said,
“We’re going to take a break now.” And he said, “Ann, after the break, you gotta
jazz it up a little bit. If you’re gonna run with the big dogs, you gotta learn how
to lift your leg.” That really empowered me to ask for that $10,000.
George Ryan was a great sales guy. The fact that he had this young girl there
hustling software and so these guys are saying, “Well, we can’t write a check.”
And I say, “Won’t your companies reimburse you?” I went home with, I think,
like 12 or 15 of these $10,000 checks in my purse. For a young company, it felt
like carrying gold around. We now have $120,000—all at one time! So that was
pretty seminal . . . of course today, things like that wouldn’t work. It was a very
unsophisticated market; we were their only choice. Probably, thinking back,
half the guys wrote the check because they just wanted me to be successful.