Founders at Work.pdf

Dan Bricklin 85
available, with any software of the big financial forecasting systems, and all that,
and they’re using VisiCalc to price multi-million-dollar deals! I found out
that investment bankers who were doing real deals were using it. When the
people you looked up to as the pros have switched to your stuff, that meant
something.
And the other was when I heard from Don Estridge, who was the head of
the IBM PC project. Don had told me that, when he was about to demonstrate
VisiCalc to one of the real senior people, the executive said, “No, I know how to
do it. Hold on. Let me do it.” And I think he was demoing on an Apple II.
“Whoa!” Then you realize that you did make a mark, and people did get it.
Livingston: VisiCorp and Software Arts had some legal disputes. Is there anything
important that you learned from that?
Bricklin: Stay out of lawsuits if you can help it. It’s bad for both sides, especially
small businesses. That’s lawyers’ business, to them, solving things through lawsuits.
But it’s very, very expensive. It’s a sport of kings, and it uses up a lot of
time. Unless you’re a very big business that can make it a very small part of what
you do, it’s much better to find other ways to solve things. Frequently, individuals
can do it better face to face. People who are the heads of companies understand
that.
The boards involved there let it happen, and they shouldn’t have, since it
ended up being bad for both companies.
Livingston: And it distracted you.
Bricklin: Distracted? It killed us.
We had just finished negotiating a deal to sell our company, for cash—a lot
of cash—to a major company. It would have changed the whole industry. We
had been approached by H&R Block to buy our company for, I think, $50 million
in cash, plus stock. It was based on the numbers we had. It was kind of
bogus, but whatever. They had a division called CompuServe, and we were
going to be bought by CompuServe. We had board approval from both sides.
We got sued a day or two before the deal was consummated. This was not very
good. I was used to bad things happening at the last moment.
If that had happened, we would have ended up with all the stuff we were
doing over at CompuServe. The world would have been quite different. One of
the pioneers of the Internet, David Reed, worked for us. He would have
worked at CompuServe instead of at Lotus, because it ended up, when things
went down, Lotus bought us out. Thank you very much, Lotus! It was the right
thing for them to do, business-wise. But also it was the right thing for them to
do, and Mitch [Kapor] was very good about that, to save us from bankruptcy. It
was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans.
But we weren’t able to run the business. It killed the deal; we weren’t able
to sell the business while we were in a lawsuit. VisiCorp was in bad shape. Their
legal fees were running about the losses they had every month. It killed
VisiCalc—well, VisiCalc was being killed by 1-2-3 anyway. They thought the
new product, VisiOn, would have saved the day, but new products don’t do very