FAW #21: Charles Geschke of Adobe
How Adobe began
Charles Geschke got his start in 1972 at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He developed a technology called Interpress that would become the precursor to Postscript. It was a language that would make it possible for any computer to talk to any printer. In the fall of 1977 he and his team flew to Florida to put on an “internal trade show” for Xerox management. The demo was a success and management was excited but said it would be a seven-year process to commercialize the Interpress technology. Charles and his chief scientist John Warnock didn’t want to wait that long. The two talked with an acquaintance who was a professor at the University of Utah and sat on the board of a venture capital firm. One introduction led to another and they found themselves in discussions with Bill Hambrecht of Hambrecht & Quist Venture Capital. Bill persuaded them to quit their jobs and take a $50k personal loan to start their company. Adobe Systems was born.
Started out creating the wrong product
This theme will seem utterly repetitive by now, but like almost every other startup in the Founders book, Adobe set out to build the wrong thing. They envisioned creating a computer/printer combo package that they would sell as a complete self-publishing solution. They were approached by Digital Equipment and later Apple, who were both very interested in the printing software they had developed. By this point though, Adobe had raised $2.5MM in funding under the story that they would sell the computer/printer combo package and they were stubbornly clinging to the original plan in spite of two large potential customers begging them for just the software. They went back to their board and received the sage advice from the chairman to ditch the plan and listen to their customers. Q.T. Wiles said, “You guys are nuts. Throw out your business plan. Your customers - or potential customers - are telling you what your business should be. The business plan was only used to get you the money. Why don’t you rewrite a business plan that is focused just on providing what your customers want?” They followed the advice resuming talks with DEC and Apple and soon after closed deals with both.
Creating an industry
Geschke and Warnock had the ambitious goal to not just create a company but an entire industry. The Postscript technology they developed brought desktop publishing capabilities to the masses. For a few thousand dollars you could now ditch the tedious analog method of publishing and produce cleaner output more cheaply and more quickly. Geschke says, “As graphic artists and designers began to learn how to use a computer, we brought out products like Adobe Illustrator. All of a sudden, the whole industry began to move, and within less than a decade the entire printing and publishing industry went from the old analog world completely over to the digital world. That was a tremendous thing to see, and of course it was a huge benefit to us.”
One-trick ponies die young
They realized early in the life of Adobe that having a single-product company was a fragile way of life and sought to branch out their product offering. About this time they were looking for a simpler way to generate the Postscript code that was sent to the printer. Geschke says, “John’s wife was a graphic designer, and one we brought out the LaserWriter, she wanted to get some of her design concepts out on that machine. So John was programming in PostScript by hand to get this output to come out and he said, “This is stupid. I need to build a tool that behaves more like what a graphic artist would expect to have in terms of pen and ink and drawing and so forth, and then let the tool write the PostScript code.” So Illustrator wasn’t originally as much a drawing program as it was a visual IDE for generating PostScript code.
On the value of the customer relationship
At the Seybold conference in San Francisco in 1989, a blow was struck to Adobe as its largest customer (Apple) and their largest competitor (Microsoft) announced an alliance around the TrueType technology that would replace PostScript as the standard for publishing. They did an ad-hoc panel later in the conference to explore the audience’s take on the announcement and the resounding feedback was in support of Adobe - the audience did not want them to go away. This development galvanized Adobe to action on quickly bringing a cross-platform version of PostScript to market and making it available at a low enough price point that it could be an easily-justifiable add-on for consumers to purchase. The takeaway from that conference was a clear affirmation of the importance of the relationships they had created with customers and their customer service philosophy. Geschke says, “That reinforced a message that John and I had always preached inside the company about how to treat our customers. Listen to them very carefully. Understand what their requirements are and what their needs are. Not necessarily do what they asked us to do, but to have the vision to do more than they expected…And that event demonstrated it; basically everybody voted for us. In fact, while there was a hiccup in the stock because of the Apple-Microsoft announcement, our business never faltered.
Adobe IPO’d in 1986 and is still today the undisputed leader in quality publishing and design software.