strategy because I...
strategy because I think it’s wrong.” They said, “We understand that; we respect
you; but you can’t stay.” So I left.
And, unfortunately, it didn’t work out. A year later, the company was bankrupt.
Certainly, at the point that I’d left, I’d left a lot of problems for them to
clean up. The company was not healthy; it was headed in the wrong direction.
So I share a good deal of that responsibility.
But then I was at the stage of, “What am I going to do next?” Here I was, in
my early 40s, and clearly the computer designer in hardware development was
a dying breed. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, there were lots of people designing
computers, mainframes and minicomputers, and all kinds of things—because
they were all built out of parts. But with microprocessors, there’s only one Intel
and a few other smaller firms like AMD. You only need a few dozen designers.
So that went away.
I said, “I’ve got to change careers.” I had to think about what I wanted to do.
I had some offers to join venture capital firms, which I thought about. There’s
always the role of corporate consultant. But I decided I really enjoyed being an
entrepreneur, and I wanted to go off and do it again.
Livingston: How did you decide what to do?
Ron Gruner 431
Gruner: I had a couple of very clear criteria in my mind. I wanted to build a
business that had a recurring revenue stream. At Data General—and Alliant
even more so, because it sold computers that were in the half million to one
million dollar range to large defense companies, universities, and the government,
who had very sophisticated purchasing agents—we typically generated
80 percent of our revenue the last 2 weeks of the quarter. People don’t believe
this today, but it’s true.
And we were a public company. So if we had to make $15 million in revenue
in a quarter, we’d be 2 weeks from the end of the quarter and we might have
$3 million on the books. We were fairly confident we’d close the other $12 million,
but it was horrible.
I remember one time we got a call on a Friday, the last day of the quarter.
The call was from a very large defense contractor located in Sunnyvale,
California. It was a purchasing agent saying, “Well, it’s 5 o’clock in Boston right
now, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes, sir, it sure is.” He says, “It’s the last day of the quarter,
isn’t it?” I said, “Yes, sir, it is.” He said, “Well, let’s negotiate.”
So we went into extended negotiations with this guy for a couple of hours,
until 7 p.m. our time, until he signed the contract and faxed it to us. Having
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