thing and go, “This is a very big ambitious thing. We don’t really think he has
the ability to pull this off. This gets us what we need, and for the sake of getting
the deal done, we’ll sign off on it.” So basically, I told them what I was going to
do, taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t think they would take me seriously,
because I know they didn’t take me seriously. And that’s what actually
happened.
It just goes to show you shouldn’t underestimate people. You shouldn’t
judge from...

to Microsoft for the principal operating system. And I said, “They’re smart.
They realize they don’t understand this business, so they’ll go to the best
people. They’re not going to have a lot of ego, and this is the way things are
going to work.” Also, they had put a 16-bit chip in the machine with greater
memory capacity. And memory capacity was an enormous issue.
The Apple II had 64K—not megabytes, kilobytes—of memory. It was tiny.
And not all of that was available. Actually, if you wrote programs on the
Apple II,...

advantage of the IBM PC, that integrates the graphing, so you could hit one
button to get a graph”—because I knew people wanted that—“and have a
better user interface for non-expert users”—which we did—“and allow user
customization and user programming”—which we did in the macro language.
So there was a set of ideas that gave 1-2-3 its character, that really made it a
second-generation product, that had sufficient differentiation that was immediately
visible when you demoed it, and that was what gave it its market entr?e.
Being at the right place at the...

it would calculate properly. So it was much faster for certain cases.
Livingston: Was the code tuned to the IBM machine?
Kapor: It was tuned to the Intel 808X 16-bit architecture. And Sachs was also
very, very good. He was just an artist at high performance with limited resources.
I didn’t know how good he was; I got lucky. I knew he was good, but he was a
genius at this sort of stuff. The two of us together was essentially 1 + 1 = 3,
because I had a vision about the product...

good middle management structure. And not recruiting a board that could help
me build the company. Big mistakes in picking a successor, big mistakes in having
an undisciplined product strategy—I was much more interested in having
distinctive, innovative products and thinking about what would make sense for
a product line for our business overall—and big mistakes in expanding too fast
and not having discipline about what we were doing. So I give myself a C or C–
on all that stuff.
Livingston: You guys grew to 1,000 employees before you went public. Did...