breed of cat in financial services. We were a technology company providing
great service to public companies. So we were always viewed as a technologist
kind of company, and many companies liked that. Some didn’t like that so
much. But that was our niche. That was our differentiation. We understood
technology better.
Livingston: Who did you learn from? Did you have any mentors?
Gruner: I had several. I tried to learn and listen to them. The whole founding
group at Data General were really smart people. There were four founders
there: Ed de Castro, who was the president, who was an investor in
Shareholder.com, and who remains a friend after 35 years; Henry Burkhardt,
who was the VP of software; Dick Sogge, the VP of engineering; Herb Richman
in marketing. They’re all really smart guys, and I learned a lot from watching
and listening to them.
Because de Castro was a hardware engineer like I was, I would view him as
my primary mentor during those years. During the ’80s, like I said, we had a
good board of directors. Tom Perkins played a very key role. I think I absorbed
a lot of the wisdom from him by osmosis—just in board meetings, and how he
conducted himself. How he did a good job, I thought, of managing conflict and
disagreements. I have to say I’m surprised, though, by how public he’s let the
internal HP board battle become. Seems to me that it’s been very costly to HP.
Livingston: Was there ever a time at Shareholder.com when you wanted to
quit?
Gruner: No, not really. I really enjoyed most every day. I enjoyed driving into
work, looked forward to it. Every company has its pros and cons. The nice
aspect of Shareholder.com was that it was indeed a recurring revenue stream.
So we had almost no financial worries. We could predict our quarterly revenues
within a couple of percent the first day of the quarter.
The worries that we had came from the fact that we were basically in the
news business. When earnings season came out, we might be doing 50 earnings
calls and webcasts and news releases on the same day. Every one had to be
done on time and perfectly, because an earnings release, for all intents and purposes,
is a legal document. So where we sweated was just managing that
process. It’s like running 50 television stations at the same time.
If you screwed up, it was very visible. On rare occasions we did. We might
get one webcast mixed up with another company. We’d fix it within 3 or 4 minutes,
but it’s extremely embarrassing. And, believe me, chief executives don’t

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