Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Did you have any competitors at that point?
Ron Gruner 439
Gruner: We had one competitor that wasn’t using quite the same technology,
but had moved into our same market, had identified the same opportunity, and
that was Convex Computer in Dallas, Texas. They took a completely different
strategy. The leading supercomputer at the time was Cray Research, and they
said, “We’re going to build a computer that’s compatible with the Cray.” It’s
ironic in that the lead architect on that project was Steve Wallach, who was the
architect of the Eagle computer at Data General.
The Eagle computer was absolutely compatible with the Eclipse computer,
which I had designed at Data General. He built the Eagle to be compatible
with Eclipse and was very successful. He took that same strategy and did it at
Convex. We took a strategy of saying, “Let’s pioneer parallel processing technology.”
They were somewhat different strategies in different approaches, but
we were in a horse race with them and they with us.
We announced the product in the summer of 1985, and it was very successful
for about 5 years after that.
Livingston: Do you remember any stories about the things that went wrong?
Times you thought you were dead?
Gruner: At Alliant, we had dozens of people working and we had lots of money,
so once we got past where we could take a program from a Vax and run it on our
computer, we weren’t too concerned that there was some bullet that could put
us out of business.
We had done enough work with the marketplace. We had a number of key
customers lined up: Bell Labs is an example. The University of Illinois was
going to use our computers in their future research projects. So we could see,
even in early ’85, $10 million of business lined up, and, if we could deliver the
computers, we’d be in good shape. The scares that I had in my career came at
Shareholder.com.
Livingston: OK. Let’s jump ahead to Shareholder.com.
Gruner: Shareholder.com was a whole different kind of thing, because the first
few years there were only three or four people, including myself. We were
delivering news for public companies that was very visible, under scrutiny. If
you screwed up, either by being late or by getting the wrong information, you
were in big trouble. We had a couple of things that scared me to death.
I think the one that was probably scariest, that definitely could have put us
out of business, happened in ’94 or ’95. A very large pharmaceutical company
had decided to go with us. We had everything underway, and they were going to
announce this new service on their annual report. Everything is fine except that
I get a call one afternoon saying, “Ron, we’ve got a really serious problem. The
annual report has come out and it’s got the wrong 800 number on it!”
They were frantic. There were two issues: one, they had printed over a million
annual reports loaded on pallets at the facility, and two, they had a legal
requirement to distribute the reports 30 days before the annual meeting. The
reports and the proxies had to be in the shareholders’ hands at least 30 days