you’re not going...
you’re not going to be looking for work very long. This is something to give a try
and branch out on our own.”
Livingston: You were about 40 when you did this. You had a family; were you
nervous about starting a startup?
Geschke: Both John and I were in our early 40s. Maybe my kids were nervous
that I wouldn’t be able to put them through college, but no, I really wasn’t nervous
because I knew I could get another great job, partly from the experience at
PARC and from watching people in the venture world. I knew one founder who
seemed to get more money every time one of his companies failed than the last
time! You fail and people figure that you won’t make that set of mistakes the
next time.
So I never really felt scared. The only thing that would have been hard to
deal with would be the stigma of failing. But I thought we had a reasonable
chance of succeeding.
The first thing we did was find a place, through a friend of John’s who sold
commercial real estate. We got a place over in Mountain View, a few thousand
square feet. We began talking to people about hiring them, and of course we
talked to people we knew. Initially, most were currently at PARC or had
recently been at PARC.
Before long I got a phone call from one of my professors at Carnegie
Mellon, Gordon Bell, who had since left Carnegie and gone back to Digital
Equipment and was running research and development for the company. He
said, “I hear you started a business and I want to come out and talk to you about
what you’re doing.” So he came out and we showed him. We explained our
business plan about building the computers and the printers and putting it all
together in a package and he said, “That all sounds great, but I don’t need computers.
I’m Digital Equipment. I already have a deal with Ricoh for laser
printers, so I don’t need the printers. My problem is that I’ve got several development
teams trying to build the software to interface between the two of them
and they’re getting nowhere. That’s very frustrating to me. Why don’t you just
sell me the software?”—which we had already shown him, the precursor of
what became PostScript—“That’s what I need.”
We said, “Well, Gordon, we raised $2.5 million and this is our business plan
and that’s what we’re going to do.” He said, “I’m disappointed, but if you
change your mind, give me a call.”
About 2 months later we got a call from a fellow by the name of Bob
Belleville, who had been at Xerox and then had moved on to Apple and was
responsible for the overall engineering management for the Macintosh. He
| ← only text, but | said, “I want → |