Founders at Work.pdf

Dan Bricklin 77
actually felt good and that I could start describing it to some classmates. One of
them was also an MIT grad and computer person, John Reese. I would tell him
how it was, and he’d say, “Well, Dan, it would be easier if you did this,” and I
said, “You’re right.” There was a lot of feedback that way.
Livingston: Were you nervous to tell anyone about your idea?
Bricklin: No, not those people. Once we started working on it and were in business,
yeah, since we thought it was obviously such a great idea. Though we realized
it takes forever for it to become big in the world. We didn’t think it would
be as big as it is now, because nothing had done that in the past, though we
thought it was real important. But you always do, as an entrepreneur.
Everybody feels that way about what they’re doing. You need that drive. And,
yeah, we were afraid that Texas Instruments would find out about it and they’d
steal the idea. So we were careful; we would have people sign nondisclosure
agreements.
Livingston: The idea of a startup was pretty new. How did you know what to do
first?
Bricklin: There were always startups. A huge portion of the economy in
Massachusetts came from people who got their start at DEC, which started as
an entrepreneurial thing. Then the same thing happened on the West Coast
with Hewlett-Packard and places like that.
But there was this other business, Personal Software, the publishing company,
which was the model that they used of how to do software. This was a different
model of author-publisher. We now know that author-publisher is not a
very good model. We were the poster child of it not being good. But we set up
that way, so when Bob and I made a deal with the Personal Software people
in the fall of ’78 to produce this product and they would sell it, we needed a
business.
We incorporated the business on January 2, 1979, and then we negotiated
the deal with Personal Software. We were developing the product, but before it
was announced we had already agreed on the general terms. The actual specific
contract wasn’t signed until the night before we announced it at Ben Rosen’s
conference. We had our lawyer (a general lawyer) negotiating on our side, and
we had a publishing lawyer on the other side, I think, negotiating, which wasn’t
exactly right for software. Our contract ended up having problems long-term.
But, it actually ended up being the model contract for many, many software
things afterwards, because it did have a lot of interesting stuff in it.
Livingston: So VisiCalc was the first to use the author-publisher model?
Bricklin: We weren’t the first, I’m sure, but in the personal computer software
business, we were one of the first.
Personal Software later renamed themselves VisiCorp. Dan Fylstra, who
was the head of the company, was one of the founding editors or something of
Byte magazine. So he was involved in many ways in the publishing business.
I assume that his lawyers were from that business too.