scariest incident we had in these 15 years.
Livingston:Were you a hero with the client?
Gruner: Yes, we were, but we didn’t fall on the sword too much on that. We
basically told them that we got it worked out. I don’t think I even told them we
used a private investigator. We absorbed all the costs. Turns out, there were two
people involved: a client plus a very large stock transfer agent that was working
with the client. Of course, the transfer agent really felt good about that, so they
threw a...

hiring a private detective?”
I said, “Well, let’s try this. It’s an interesting idea.” So I went to the Boston
Yellow Pages, looked under “private investigators,” and found an ad that
appealed to me. I called the private investigator and I said, “Here’s an 800 number.
It belongs to somebody that has a pager. All I need from you is to know the
name and the personal phone number of this person.” He said, “No problem.
It’ll cost you $100.” And I said, “That’s fine. How long will it take?” He said, “It
...

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...

which at the time was a very successful high-end machine, and converted it to
run on our machine. The key question was, “Can we take these off-the-shelf
Vax programs, recompile them for ours, and actually have them (1) run correctly
and (2) significantly speed up as you add more computers?” When we
demonstrated that to ourselves, that was a huge milestone. At that point we
knew. By early ’85, we knew we’ve got technology that works and is viable. And
if we can execute from that, we’ve got a viable company.
Livingston: Did...

edge. And we also thought it was a good recruiting technique in terms of
having people focus on three things we thought were important. First of all,
“Let’s focus in both directions on the people, on the culture, on the environment,
see if that makes sense to you.” Because we asked them some extraordinary
things. We said, “This project is going to take about 2 years, and it’s going
to be a lot of work. Furthermore, we are going to institutionalize it by saying,
‘We need you to work every other Saturday.’”
Livingston:...