History of Famous Startups. Adobe Systems

to the spouse

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:15 -0700

to the spouse if it was woman, a bottle of cognac if the spouse was a man, and
then champagne to the employee.
We did that for the first 18 months and then it got to be too much and we
started giving it to them at work. I suspect we don’t do that anymore. Doing
things like that to make people feel like they were part of a community helped
build a rapport inside the company so that our turnover rate has been among
the lowest in the Valley ever since we’ve been in business. Particularly with people
who…

few years later

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:15 -0700

few years later I brought home something that I knew was pretty good. I
showed it to my dad and didn’t say much. He looked up with a big smile on his
face and said, “Now that’s good.” That was a wonderful moment.
Livingston: Is there anything that Adobe does now to preserve the efficiency or
the “startupyness” of a young company?
Geschke: It gets harder as you get bigger. What John and I have tried to do as
chairs of the board is to reinforce to the current CEO, Bruce Chizen, the
importance of innovation and the importance of…

sure where it

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:15 -0700

sure where it was coming from but he knew it wasn’t just doing what he did better
or more efficiently. It was going to come from somewhere else. So I suspect
it was a market that was already looking for a solution and we provided it at the
right time.
The amount of printing has not decreased because of the “paperless office,”
it’s increased. We’re the people (Adobe and the others we’ve partnered with)
who are responsible for all those catalogs you get in the mail. If you think back
25 years ago, you didn’t receive many catalogs. They were…

had seen what

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had seen what had happened with all the other technologies that preceded it.
They never figured out a way to commercialize the Ethernet. They had managed
to commercialize the original laser printer (it was called the 9700), but it
was for mainframe computers; it replaced line printers. Line printers were the
old printers that used to be on mainframe computers, and they were big, noisy
devices that could only print text. The 9700 could print pages that were more
sophisticated. But it was mainframe printing, it wasn’t office printing, and it
wasn’t focused around publishing and the graphic arts. If…

plan, there were

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:15 -0700

plan, there were about half a dozen companies who had raised money to do
something similar. Not the same, but similar. Fortunately, the other five all executed
that business plan, and we didn’t. And they all disappeared.
It shows you the power of getting good advice and having the nerve to take
that advice. Because literally, there were half a dozen companies all formed
within about a 12- to 18-month period with venture capital both on the East
Coast and out here in Silicon Valley, all trying to do the same thing. And sometimes,
when they would get up and…

relationship that we

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:15 -0700

relationship that we had built with our customers. We wanted them to feel that
a) they were given a decent deal and that b) they trusted us to lead them to
where they needed to go. So at that same conference, the organizers decided
very quickly to put an extra panel on the last day and have a live debate over
whether the attendees—and this was all the major players in printing and
publishing—preferred to have Apple and Microsoft take over their future or
whether they wanted to stay with Adobe. Before the panel started, the moderator
got up and…

to Microsoft, we

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:16:14 -0700

to Microsoft, we just couldn’t come to a business deal. The thing that was frustrating
is that it was already proven technology. We could demo it. And we
already had all typeface licenses set up with the major vendors, so you knew
that you would have that requirement satisfied, and, more importantly, we
weren’t going to charge. We were trying to give our customers the same feeling
on both Macintosh and Windows machines, so we wouldn’t be forcing them to
make a decision about whose products to buy in order to use our technology. It
had always been our strategy…

would market primarily

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would market primarily through technical analysts and product research kinds
of people, and not attempt to go to a mass market, because there was no mass
market.
We also had to fight the antibodies inside the company. When we introduced
Illustrator, we realized that the profit margins were going to be very different
because we had to actually package the software, distribute it physically,
build business relationships with a different sales channel—because when we
sold PostScript, we sold directly to the major OEMs, so we literally only had
tens of customers for PostScript. Now we had to get thousands and…

It was introduced

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It was introduced in the winter of 1987. We also had been working with
scanning equipment and photographs. Scanners were still very expensive at
that time and so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the area of photography yet,
but we instinctively knew it was going to come.
We were introduced to two brothers from Michigan: Tom and John Knoll.
They had built a package that would let you work with a photographic image
and change it, modify it, enhance it, do a variety of things. But of course it was
doing that on a Macintosh with 512K of…

that Xerox introduced

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that Xerox introduced in 1981.
Livingston: What were some other major turning points?
Geschke: Well, certainly if you remember back to that time in the office printing
market, HP was in a very strong leadership position with the LaserJet.
When we found out from HP that they wanted to come back and talk to us, that
was a very important moment because we were, in fact, able to sign an agreement
with HP and have them adopt PostScript on their LaserJet printers. That
was a big coup for us as a company. It was at the same time that we…