Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 433
to investors. We had a policy that we would try extremely hard to be open and
transparent and get back to every single investor.
There were times when the stock took a bad hit and we would get a couple
of hundred phone calls. This was before email, so you did everything by phone.
Conference calls were just getting started. So we literally would return every
phone call. I remember making phone calls at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night to
some mom and pop in Topeka, Kansas. I’d call and say, “My name’s Ron Gruner
from Alliant Computer Systems. I’m returning your call about our company.”
And the man would call out and say, “Honey, Gruner’s on the phone from
Alliant, get on the other telephone.” And I’d explain to them what was going on.
Incidentally, that was the decade of class action suits. We never got sued,
and I attribute that partly to the fact that we worked really hard to be open and
transparent with investors. I don’t think we gave anybody any room to say they
were misled. But maybe we were just lucky.
Livingston: Did most CEOs call back individual retail investors?
Gruner: I can’t say, but we did. So when I thought about what I was going to do
next, I said, “This whole area of shareholder communications, it seems to me
the individual shareholder is an under-served constituency.” Institutional
investors got a lot of attention by every company, which makes sense because
they’re major shareholders. I felt the middle tier and the small tier were being
ignored, so I thought, “Let me think about starting a company that uses
technology to reach out and communicate with shareholders.” That’s how we
got started.
I really knew nothing about the industry itself, had no contacts. I was starting
from scratch. I hired several consultants who knew the industry well, who
had been in trade organizations or otherwise had credibility. I had them educate
me about the industry and also take me around to opinion leaders in the
industry. We talked about what they’d like to have and the opportunities they
saw, as well as me talking about my more abstract ideas.
Fairly quickly I hit on the idea that, “OK, here’s a specific business opportunity.
We can turn this abstraction into revenues.” Back in the early ’90s, most
companies were still sending out printed quarterly reports. These were glossies,
typically a trifold piece of paper in an envelope, that were sent out a month to
6 weeks after the release of financial results.
Even back before the Web, back in the early ’90s, most investors viewed
that as junk mail, because they could have looked in the newspaper the day
after the earnings were announced and seen what they were. By the time this
thing showed up, it was kind of like yesterday’s oatmeal. It was old news.
So I had a concept and I’ll tell you how I got it. I had a friend who was a
really good programmer, and he told me in the summer of ’92 about a project
he had recently done for the Boston Phoenix, the underground newspaper. That
project was writing a program to do personal ads over the telephone—personal
voicemail ads. People could leave a message saying, “Hi, my name’s Ron
Gruner, I’m single, I enjoy this and that, etc.” This is before the Web.