it would calculate...
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 and very strong ideas about the feature
set and the user interface, and he was generally willing to let me drive
things at that level. He had the responsibility for the technical architecture and
implementation, but I’m actually quite technical, so I was able to talk with him
to fully understand a number of the issues and limitations and modify the
design in a way that was consistent with what we could actually do. So we had a
critical mass of knowledge between the two of us that neither of us had alone.
Mitchell Kapor 95
Livingston: What went wrong?
Kapor: A number of things went wrong or almost went wrong. I almost ran out
of money. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the only idea that we had. I had done this thing
with some other people called Executive Briefing System for the Apple II that
was like a precursor to PowerPoint. We did some other projects; I had hired
another group of people and basically had spent down the $300,000 that I’d
allocated. It was almost gone and we were nowhere near product, because of
doing all these other things and not having done this before.
I had $600,000 after taxes and paying my partner, and I divided it into two
piles. I took half and said I’m going to buy a house. It was $89,000, the least
expensive house in Cambridge—this was in 1981. I said that I could live on
$40,000 for at least 5 years. So I had the other $300,000 that was my own seed
money, but I almost ran out.
I got lucky in that Ben Rosen at Sevin Rosen decided to invest. He was the
only VC that I pitched (I didn’t understand anything about venture capital).
And that was fortunate, because without him, I don’t know what we would have
done.
Most of my mistakes came after we launched the product, not before—after
we started shipping in January of ’83. I had no significant experience in building
an organization or building a management team. And I intuitively did well
when I was leading the whole team, but once we got past 25 people, you can’t
do that. And so I made a series of classic mistakes in hiring. And not building a
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