9:30 in the morning, going to a 4- to 5-hour typically boring board meeting,
then flying back that night. And he was in his early 50s at that time. He always
had great insights, and always tinged with a nice touch of humor, too.
Ron Gruner 429
We had other great members of the board. We felt that most of the venture
capital community added a lot of value—also in terms of contacts, we were very
positive about that.
We grew very quickly, and at one point we had a market valuation of...

plan done. We worked very hard on that plan and then went out to San
Francisco and pitched the idea to them. This was John Doerr. He had been
there a few years at the time, but he was just really getting started in his career.
Frank Caufield, Brook Byers, and Tom Perkins—that whole crew.
They liked the idea because they could draw analogies with Tandem
Computer. They looked at our backgrounds, having been in the business, etc.
So we were able to raise money from Kleiner Perkins. The first round, as I
...

growth path from Digital’s Vax line of machines, which were topping out at half
a million dollars.
Our machines provided anywhere from four to ten times the performance
of Digital’s largest Vax, for maybe 50 percent more, using parallel processing
technology. But because this was a very complex technology—obviously all
hardware-based; back in those days everything was proprietary hardware—we
had to raise a lot of money. We took the traditional approach of going out and
raising venture capital.
We knew, even then, having watched how Data General financed itself, that
you...

In 1982, Ron Gruner, Craig Mundie, and Rich McAndrew founded Alliant
Computer Systems to build parallel supercomputers. Their goal was to build a
machine that used multiprocessing to achieve better performance than the
fastest single-CPU machines, but in a way that was transparent to developers.
In 1985, after 3 years of work, they’d done it, and for the next several years
Alliant was one of the leading players in the turbulent parallel computer industry.
But the company lost its way; Gruner left in 1991 after disagreement about
the company’s direction; and a year...

it was everywhere.
Many services that are so commonplace today were all brand new back
then. We were a day at a time. There was massive innovation, and this innovation
has changed the way the world will communicate for decades.
Livingston:Was the innovation technological innovation?
Davis: There was very little technology. We would have engineers in Pittsburgh
come up with an idea and roll it through. We would have product marketing
specialists, management or individual contributing employees come up with
ideas, and the Pittsburgh guys would develop them. We would outsource a...