were many things we didn’t know—like pricing strategy or how do you collect
money from people? So I remember one very unsophisticated thing, in that we
had been working with CADO and they said, “We’re going to get all of our
resellers together. Since you’re the big application vendor, come and give a
presentation and pitch them.”
So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in
their 50s and I’m in my 20s, and we had a “blue light special,” where we said, “If
...

people out there rooting for you. That is probably part of what you have to
develop. They probably went back to their offices and said the following: “We
got a great deal on this software and this great little company—I think those
guys might be successful—called Open Systems. And this young woman got up
there, and she had the balls—or stupidity—to ask us each to rip out checks for
$10,000.”
It was such a big victory and we didn’t have cell phones at that time, so I’m
on the pay phone in the...

guys, but it was more than time to move out of there. That was another, “It’s
time to really either fish or cut bait here. Well, I guess we’re going to have to
move to a real office now.”
And that does change the real demeanor of the company. Once you start
committing to leases, furniture, a capital budget; it does change the cadence of
a company for the better. You can only virtualize the company for a very short
period of time.
Livingston: Do you remember a time when people misunderstood what...

could look that way. There was the show called Comdex (Computer Dealer
Exposition), which doesn’t exist anymore, and everybody sold their products
through computer resellers and, shortly after that, retail stores like
ComputerLand or BusinessLand. Comdex was the best thing that ever
occurred for us. You could see everybody there. It was pretty small in the beginning;
it was all in the one Hilton Convention Center in Las Vegas. We had some
really interesting experiences there because we had to decide whether we
should spend a bunch of money on a really nice...

tower—and from the wood tower was this neon sign that said “Open Systems.”
It required one of those small cranes to crane it up and connect it. The guy on
the crane, while connecting our neon, had fallen in the tower upside down and
was stuck in there. So the medic wanted to saw our tower in half to get him out.
Betty was basically hugging the tower saying, “That will ruin our booth!”
I was thinking, “Oh God. I’ve already invested more money than I ever
thought in this thing. I shipped this...