in cash, plus stock. It was based on the numbers we had. It was kind of
bogus, but whatever. They had a division called CompuServe, and we were
going to be bought by CompuServe. We had board approval from both sides.
We got sued a day or two before the deal was consummated. This was not very
good. I was used to bad things happening at the last moment.
If that had happened, we would have ended up with all the stuff we were
doing over at CompuServe. The world would have been quite different. One of
the pioneers of the Internet, David Reed, worked for us. He would have
worked at CompuServe instead of at Lotus, because it ended up, when things
went down, Lotus bought us out. Thank you very much, Lotus! It was the right
thing for them to do, business-wise. But also it was the right thing for them to
do, and Mitch [Kapor] was very good about that, to save us from bankruptcy. It
was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans.
But we weren’t able to run the business. It killed the deal; we weren’t able
to sell the business while we were in a lawsuit. VisiCorp was in bad shape. Their
legal fees were running about the losses they had every month. It killed
VisiCalc—well, VisiCalc was being killed by 1-2-3 anyway. They thought the
new product, VisiOn, would have saved the day, but new products don’t do very
Dan Bricklin 85
well right away, often. It was a precursor to Windows in the days when the PCs
weren’t powerful enough to do it. So for all of its advancing the art of things and
cool stuff they did, it wasn’t its time, and they ended up selling it off to make
some money, and they ended up going belly up. It was bad all around.
What I do realize is there are advantages to selling at a peak. You don’t know
when the peak is. I know people who sold their businesses when everybody
thought you were crazy. “The business is going through the roof; why are you
selling now?” And in hindsight, of course, it turned around. Six months, a year
later, the business started crashing. They didn’t get the peak, but they came
pretty close.
There are some people to whom it’s worth taking the risk, because you risk
going for the big one, and, in a portfolio, that’s good. But as they say on Wall
Street, the bulls make money, the bears make money, but the pigs get slaughtered.
In other words, don’t be greedy. Whether you think things are going up
or things are going down, you can make money going both ways. But, if you are
piggish, are greedy, that’s when you have problems; you’ll be irrational about