FAW #5: Dan Bricklin of Software Arts
The right preconditions
Echoing the sentiments of the other stories, the founders of Software Arts who produced the product Visicalc, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston shared the right qualities for starting a company. Both had sets of parents that were entrepreneurs themselves so they had “the gene” for it from a young age and Bob and Dan had been friends during school so they shared a strong friendship and deep level of trust. Dan said: “So even though we came to odds about things, even though there might be a ‘Well, did you do more, or did I do more?’ because we liked each other and had a relationship, we were able to keep that from messing up the business.”
The genesis for the idea
<begin nerd stuff> Dan Bricklin had attended MIT studying computer science where he worked firsthand building interpreters (the engine that translated the instructions in human-readable computer code into executable machine code for the computer to do something useful). He later got an MBA at Harvard Business School where he dealt with spreadsheets using the traditional paper-based approach. It was here that he saw the need for a computer-based tool to allow for dynamic spreadsheets but he did not yet have a grasp on the WYSIWYG interface. He went on to work at Digital Equipment Corporation and while at DEC he was exposed to the WYSIWYG interface for a word processor. He bridged the gap of each of these three key areas of understanding and saw the future of spreadsheets in a visual form that could dynamically calculate data on-the-fly. He enlisted the help of his buddy Bob to begin work on the prototype while he continued working at DEC.
This was a clear case of having had a toe in a couple different ponds and being able to combine key domain-specific knowledge to make a leap of innovation. Coincidently I just today completed training here in Mountain View, CA on a system called “Innovation Games” and was fortunate enough to get a chance to hold a podcast with the founder and author of this program. It is a tool that utilizes collaborative gameplay to extract insights from customers that allow companies to develop innovative products. I’ll be posting that interview in the next few days.
“You’re competing against the back of the envelope”
In creating a new, unfamiliar and potentially disruptive technology, it’s critical that the inventor understand the competition (which in a new space will be former low-tech methods for accomplishing the same task). This notion of “competing against the scratch paper” was an important insight they had because it forced them to optimize every keystroke and every aspect of the usability. If friction of the new way of doing something outweighs the perceived advantages for using a high-tech tool, the potential adopter will flee and return to the trusted, traditional method. In fact, all things being equal, the potential user will stick with what he/she knows rather than transition- the new Visicalc had to equal the ease of use of an envelope and provide the extra advantage of dynamic real-time calculations to lure the new user to adopt it.
We see this all the time in our world- there may be a better way of doing something but if the usablity prohibits the adoption of the more powerful technique, the potential user will flee to an inferior yet attainable solution. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding the original light bulb for JumpBox that Kimbro had while working a consulting gig for a major hotel chain, the twenty-some consultants that were already on the project prior to Kimbro’s entrance were using rudimentary methods for development. In essence there was no development infrastructure because the open source tools which were freely-available for use were too difficult to setup- their usability was prohibitively bad. Good thing for us though because this is at the heart of what makes JumpBox attractive- it eliminates that prohibitive barrier and brings those power tools that had previously been out of reach within the grasp of non-technical people.
Their “midnight run”
Their office had been in a basement near Central Square below street level. The plumbing was bad and with each serious rain storm, the toilets would overflow if you didn’t remember to shut off the water. They forgot one time and came back to an office that was underwater and rapidly filling up. Apparently the water level just missed one of their computers that had the entire codebase (and therefore their life savings on it). Nowadays we have automatic offsite backups but this near disaster nearly obliterated the company.
Working within constraints
Visicalc ran on the Apple II and was fenced by extremely tight resource constraints. The entire program had to fit in 32K of disk space (the screenshot of the application nowadays would not even fit in that space!). So like the Paypal and Apple founders, they were forced to relentlessly optimize their application. This meant there was no room to add a help system. When Lotus 1-2-3 launched it had the luxury of 256K of space to work with which allowed their spreadsheet app to sport various feature enhancements and nicities like sounds and help files. This along with an unfortunate legal battle would spell the premature end of the Visicalc product.
Crippled by litigation
Not all FAW stories had the fairytale multi-million dollar exit for the founders- Visicalc was one of them. They were among the first software companies to operate under the author-publisher model of sales (think of the relationship with a physical book author and publisher). Software Arts had authored the product Visicalc but they enlisted the services of Personal Software (which later became Visicorp) to sell the product. Unfortunately legal disputes arose from a poorly-worded contract between the companies and a deadlock in litigation ensued. The legal battle drained the resources of both author and publisher and allowed Lotus 1-2-3 to pass them by with their spreadsheet application.
Dan’s advice: “Stay out of lawsuits if you can help it. It’s bad for both sides, especially small businesses. Taht’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.”
Even though Bricklin didn’t see a massive payday in the end, he remained surprisingly optimistic: “If we had been able to settle in advance, the thing would have closed, and we would have made a lot of money, and we’d have a bigger house, and whatever. But, you know, as I always tell people, here it is, 25 years later, and you’re still interviewing me. There’s fame and fortune. I didn’t get much fortune out of it, but, on the other hand, the fame has baiscally given me a meal ticket ever since, and I learned a lot from it and my life has been pretty good. All in all, I can’t complain.”
May 9th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
[…] Brady said: “You always hear ‘Never go into business with friends.’ But with the first 20 hires, everyone knew each other. Consequently there was a high level of trust. Everyone was young. It was pretty much everyone’s first job.” Hiring people that knew each other meant there was maximum trust early on and they could focus on the product. Like the VisiCalc story, this allowed them to be very nimble and waste no overhead on formal procedures or establishing trust with new hires. […]