technology, what was...
technology, what was called parallel processing. There’s been a lot of research
on it. If we can commercialize that, it may be a really good business opportunity.”
That was the core concept of Alliant. That’s how we left Data General,
how we got started. That’s all we knew.
So that’s how we got started with Shareholder.com, the notion of commercializing
technology around shareholder communications.
Livingston: Back to when you started Alliant, when the three of you who
worked at Data General decided, “We’re going to start our own company . . .”
Gruner: Two of us left Data General at the same time. The third founder had
left Data General a few years before that, but we had stayed in contact.
Livingston: You said you spent about 4 months putting together a business
plan. What kind of things were you doing in that 4 months? Were you doing any
programming to test any ideas?
Gruner: No.
Livingston: It seems like a long time, by today’s standards, I guess.
Gruner: Well, it may be by today’s standards, but we worked 7 days a week,
10 hours a day. We spent a huge amount of time at the MIT library doing
research on parallel processing. What we wanted to do was to find a technology
that would allow us to use parallel processing to run existing programs. That
was critical. Let’s say, an existing Fortran program from 5 years before: take
that, recompile it, and then have it run faster.
There were a lot of people doing development in that area academically. We
felt the University of Illinois had the best approach. So we then contacted Dr.
David Kuck, the lead professor—called him up out of the blue, explained who
we were, and invited ourselves up to visit him. Then we began to get a feel for
how concrete this technology was. So part of that 4 months was building highlevel
models to test whether or not this could take existing programs and run
them in parallel.
Another part of the time was doing all the competitive analysis in terms of
who the companies were in the marketplace and where they might be going.
We had pretty good contacts with the industry, as well as startups. And then,
being engineers, we probably overengineered the business plan to give it
extremely detailed financials.
At that time, it was just at the point when the personal computer and the
spreadsheet had come out. The first time I saw a spreadsheet, I thought it was
like a miracle. People take it for granted now, but you type a few numbers in the
top left of the spreadsheet, and everything else changes automatically. This is
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