Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 437
we were, and invited ourselves up to visit him. Then we began to get a feel for
how concrete this technology was. So part of that 4 months was building highlevel
models to test whether or not this could take existing programs and run
them in parallel.
Another part of the time was doing all the competitive analysis in terms of
who the companies were in the marketplace and where they might be going.
We had pretty good contacts with the industry, as well as startups. And then,
being engineers, we probably overengineered the business plan to give it
extremely detailed financials.
At that time, it was just at the point when the personal computer and the
spreadsheet had come out. The first time I saw a spreadsheet, I thought it was
like a miracle. People take it for granted now, but you type a few numbers in the
top left of the spreadsheet, and everything else changes automatically. This is
incredible! This is like giving us a microscope we can study a company with. So
we said, “We can educate ourselves about the financial aspects of a company by
building a P&L, a cash flow, and a balance sheet, and making sure they all tie
together correctly—changing things and see how that affects the company.”
At the same time, over those 4 or 5 months, we were networking with
people that we could bring on board as our initial core development team.
Livingston: What were some of the first things you did once you got the
$5 million?
Gruner: The first thing we did was hire the first four key people: two very
strong software people and two very strong hardware people. They were the
architects, along with the founders ourselves, of the computer system.
We wanted to keep expenses as low as possible, so we were initially in a
small office in a shopping center in Acton, Massachusetts. And we began hiring
people to design and build the product. We spent 2 years doing that. We
wanted to be very selective in how we hired people. We had a process we called
“chemistry, mechanics, and religion.”
Once again, we wanted to build a sense of exclusivity, but also filter people
very carefully. It typically consisted of at least three interviews. Chemistry was
first. We would bring the person in; we would interview the person on a personal
level, and it had to go both ways. Is he or she the right kind of person for
us? Does he or she have the right kind of work ethic, background, all those
kinds of things. The next step was mechanics. There, we would talk about the
specifics of the job. “Here’s the job we have in mind for you. We cannot, by
the way, tell you what we’re doing. We can’t tell you what our strategy is or
what the project is, but your piece of it is going to be roughly this.” At the conclusion,
we would give them a written offer, including compensation, and say,
“Here’s your high-level job description, and, if you feel, after having spent this
much time with us, that you would like to join us, you sign the offer letter; and
then we will then tell you what the project is.” That was religion.
After they had accepted, we brought them in and told them what the project
was about: it’s basically taking parallel processing, which nobody was doing
at the time, and commercializing it. Everybody got really excited about that.