Founders at Work.pdf

304 Founders at Work
plywood, but like solid oak. It was beautiful, and it had neon signs. So then
somebody says, “Well, we have to ship it.” Do you know how much it costs to
ship a solid wood booth from Minnesota to Las Vegas?
Of course we didn’t know when you went to Comdex, you had to hire a contractor
if you wanted a plant, a contractor if you wanted anything plugged in; if
you had neon, you had to hire a separate contractor. So our first big Comdex, I
decide to go over early to see how our big, solid wood booth had arrived and
how was it looking and how we all were going to interact in the booth. You’re
walking in the hall and you say, “Well, there’s our competitor’s booth. Gee,
they’ve got all their material lying out already (the night before); I think I’ll just
read it.” So I went from booth to booth and read all the competitors’ offers. I
thought, “Well, they could be in here too; I’m not sneaking around. It’s fair
game.”
So I thought, “I better hustle over to our booth and say, ‘Don’t put anything
out during non-show hours,’ because clearly these competitors are not that
sharp in just laying this stuff around, but they might get sharper in the daytime.”
I get near our booth, and there was a medic there and all sorts of lights
and I thought, “Oh my God, did Betty have a heart attack?” Because somebody
60 seemed like 100 then. It turns out that we had this big tower—a solid wood
tower—and from the wood tower was this neon sign that said “Open Systems.”
It required one of those small cranes to crane it up and connect it. The guy on
the crane, while connecting our neon, had fallen in the tower upside down and
was stuck in there. So the medic wanted to saw our tower in half to get him out.
Betty was basically hugging the tower saying, “That will ruin our booth!”
I was thinking, “Oh God. I’ve already invested more money than I ever
thought in this thing. I shipped this heavy sucker halfway across the planet to
get from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. I’m the only person who’s got a solid wood
booth here—it’s beautiful, but, you know, it’s solid. And now somebody wants to
take a chainsaw to it.” I said, “Is the guy dying?” And they said, “He’s clearly
hurt his collarbone, so he could go into shock and we don’t know about his general
health.” I said, “Can’t you just pull him up by his feet?” Of course, as a
result of this, all of our neon sign had shattered. So they pulled him up by his
feet and got him out of there without sawing our booth in half and now we had
no signage. So we had a solid wood booth, with no signage.
So Betty says, “I’ll just call up and get the neon fixed. We are in Las Vegas.”
It turns out that back then all the neon work was done in Los Angeles. So we
had to have someone build us a new neon sign in real time for thousands of
dollars overnight. It was like, “Man, this is booth hell.”
I could go on and on and on about all these on-the-job training things you
learn . . . We had to shrink-wrap our software to get it into retail stores. Well,
how do you shrink-wrap something? I don’t know. I now know. We had to buy
shrink-wrap machines. Where do you get those? No one knows. So we start
looking in industrial classifieds, and we find a pizza company that had gone out
of business that’s selling a shrink-wrap machine. So we stuck it in a back room,
and whenever we had to ship 100 boxes, we’d go back there and shrink-wrap
them and our office smelled like burned cheese. It would be like, “OK, let’s try