Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980's

Summary

This is part two of a series of stories by Robert Gaskins who helped invent PowerPoint at Forethought Inc. in 1984 (read part one here). It was the first significant acquisition made by Microsoft. We spoke to Robert about building a startup in the 1980s and what life was like negotiating with, and working for Microsoft. After the sale Robert reported directly to Bill Gates, heading up Microsoft’s business unit in Silicon Valley. He managed the growth of PowerPoint to $100 million in annual sales before his retirement in 1993. This post looks at what it was like running a startup in the 1980’s and the differences Gaskins and his team experienced back then compared to running a startup today. Here’s Gaskins in his own words … A different age An early mock-up of a PowerPoint slide Developing PowerPoint in the 1980s was so incredibly different that a description of how we worked in the mid-1980s doesn’t seem to make any sense, unless one remembers that the Internet was completely unknown outside a small research community in 1984. I had access to an ARPAnet connection when I worked at the Bell-Northern Research laboratory in Palo Alto in the late 1970s, but I had no real experience with it—it wasn’t something we used every day. Lots of things about the way both startups and larger software companies worked prior to the web don’t make any sense in the current age. A software startup in the 1980s was a more difficult problem. You had to plan ahead a great distance and “call the shot” accurately, since a considerable investment was required before much in the way of feedback, let alone sales, could be available. Today it’s the fashion to make web services in a very “lightweight” way, to offer minimally viable web products free, and to iterate rapidly as experience is gained with initial web users. Without the web, none of that was possible. The competition As a startup you can get crushed by a 100 pound gorilla before you even realise it sat on you. You have to be nimble e...