tower—and from the wood tower was this neon sign that said “Open Systems.”
It required one of those small cranes to crane it up and connect it. The guy on
the crane, while connecting our neon, had fallen in the tower upside down and
was stuck in there. So the medic wanted to saw our tower in half to get him out.
Betty was basically hugging the tower saying, “That will ruin our booth!”
I was thinking, “Oh God. I’ve already invested more money than I ever
thought in this thing. I shipped this heavy sucker halfway across the planet to
get from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. I’m the only person who’s got a solid wood
booth here—it’s beautiful, but, you know, it’s solid. And now somebody wants to
take a chainsaw to it.” I said, “Is the guy dying?” And they said, “He’s clearly
hurt his collarbone, so he could go into shock and we don’t know about his general
health.” I said, “Can’t you just pull him up by his feet?” Of course, as a
result of this, all of our neon sign had shattered. So they pulled him up by his
feet and got him out of there without sawing our booth in half and now we had
no signage. So we had a solid wood booth, with no signage.
So Betty says, “I’ll just call up and get the neon fixed. We are in Las Vegas.”
It turns out that back then all the neon work was done in Los Angeles. So we
had to have someone build us a new neon sign in real time for thousands of
dollars overnight. It was like, “Man, this is booth hell.”
I could go on and on and on about all these on-the-job training things you
learn . . . We had to shrink-wrap our software to get it into retail stores. Well,
how do you shrink-wrap something? I don’t know. I now know. We had to buy
shrink-wrap machines. Where do you get those? No one knows. So we start
looking in industrial classifieds, and we find a pizza company that had gone out
of business that’s selling a shrink-wrap machine. So we stuck it in a back room,
and whenever we had to ship 100 boxes, we’d go back there and shrink-wrap
them and our office smelled like burned cheese. It would be like, “OK, let’s try
to do that after hours so the whole office doesn’t smell like burned cheese.”
Later, we had forklifts and conveyor belts and the whole thing, because we had
palettes of software we had to ship around the country. I never had a college
class on any of this.
Livingston: There were no mentors? People who had gone through it before?
Winblad: It was so new. There were many mentors who had gone through
business—we had a great lawyer. But he’d never built a software company. He

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