Deseret News Archives,
Sunday, February 3, 2002

Edition: All
Section: Money
Page: M01
Length: 64 lines

Humble starts, thrilling results

Huge companies like Microsoft and Dell are all the more intriguing when we hear about their first stumbling steps, their difficult early days, their brushes with disaster and the forces of luck and serendipity at work.

We are thrilled to know that Michael Dell first began assembling computers and selling them from his college dorm room. We are delighted to hear that both Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer began in garages.

All programmers are impressed and shake their heads in amazement when they hear the story of Bill Gates' first visit to IBM. Bill and Paul Allen had developed a BASIC interpreter, which they hoped to license to IBM for use on their new PC. Bill had the interpreter with him on punched tape. On the plane to Florida he realized that he didn't have a loader, a program to read the tape into the PC. So right there on the plane he wrote the program and punched it into the tape. Without the benefit of a trial run he walked into IBM PC headquarters in Boca Raton and ran the tape through the system. The loader worked, the deal for the BASIC interpreter was consummated, and the course of computer history was changed.

Of course, the reason for this attachment to the humble roots of the great ones is obvious. It gives hope to everyone else. "So they weren't too different from me," we say to ourselves, "and maybe, just maybe, I can pull off something even one-tenth as big!"

At a recent conference for college entrepreneurs in Chicago, the attendees heard stories from many well-known companies. The theme of every speech was, "Here's what we did, and you can do it, too!"

For example, Jack Goekin, the founder of MCI, told how five friends got together and put in $600 each to try and secure a license for cellular phones to cover the truck route from Chicago to St. Louis. At first, that was all they set out to do, and $3,000 was their total capitalization. Once their application was filed, AT&T decided to try to squash this annoying flea before it was even born. The dispute lasted many long years in the courts. During that time, four of the original five founders quit the fight. But Jack saw it through, and eventually was awarded his license -- not to mention the financial rewards of founding a multimillion-dollar corporation.

Similarly, Yossi Vardi, a successful Israeli entrepreneur who has been involved in the startup of numerous successful companies, told how he decided to help get his unemployed son out of the house and into a job. It seems that his son had created a program to communicate instantly with his friends over the Internet. Vardi told his son he would finance a company to develop this program for commercial use if he would promise to go to work on it. Thus was born ICQ, which was sold to America Online four years later for more than $400 million.

Incredible stories just like these are happening every day all around us. Don't be discouraged if your enterprise seems shaky and small. All of the great ones have been right where you are -- stumbling through those first steps, brushing with disaster and waiting for serendipity to finally work for them.

Craig Earnshaw is associated with the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. He can be reached via e-mail at cfe@byu.edu.

© 2001 Deseret News Publishing Co.