Gruner, I’m single, I enjoy this and that, etc.” This is before the Web.
Ron Gruner 433
The Boston Phoenix had personal ads in back, but then they moved in this
thing called voicemail ads. When I heard that, I said, “That’s kind of an incredible
idea.” It generates revenues—people call these numbers and you pay per
minute—but you can also hear the person, you get a feel for what they’re like. I
said, “You know, that concept could be applied to companies. Chief financial
officers and executives could communicate to the shareholders...

And the man would call out and say, “Honey, Gruner’s on the phone from
Alliant, get on the other telephone.” And I’d explain to them what was going on.
Incidentally, that was the decade of class action suits. We never got sued,
and I attribute that partly to the fact that we worked really hard to be open and
transparent with investors. I don’t think we gave anybody any room to say they
were misled. But maybe we were just lucky.
Livingston: Did most CEOs call back individual retail investors?
Gruner: I can’t...

been through that, I said, “I really want to build a strategy that has a recurring
revenue stream.”
The second thing was, having been chief executive at Alliant for 10 years,
about halfway through that process I realized, “As the boss, I’m spending
40 percent of my time on things that don’t directly contribute to getting computers
out to customers.” In other words, raising money, dealing with investors,
dealing with lawyers, those kinds of issues. So I said, “In the next company I do,
I want to be able to spend 98 percent...

strategy because I think it’s wrong.” They said, “We understand that; we respect
you; but you can’t stay.” So I left.
And, unfortunately, it didn’t work out. A year later, the company was bankrupt.
Certainly, at the point that I’d left, I’d left a lot of problems for them to
clean up. The company was not healthy; it was headed in the wrong direction.
So I share a good deal of that responsibility.
But then I was at the stage of, “What am I going to do next?” Here I was, in
my...

buying workstations and personal computers.
At the same time that was going on, the Cold War was coming to an end.
Many of our customers were defense-related. Major customers were large
intelligence agencies in the United States, for example, or other defenserelated
applications. So that market dried up. Revenues turned down very
steeply in the late ’80s.
Livingston: How did your investors react?
Gruner: We had a situation where a lot could be learned about the pros and
cons of using venture capital. Things were going south quickly and badly. We at...