I nodded. “It’s going to get worse. Next year the number will be ten times that. The following year you’ll need to hire a secretary simply to handle the calls and tell people NO. The year after that, she’ll need a secretary.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Okay, what do we bring to the table? Well, cash for one thing. Cash that you can use to hire additional programmers, cash that you can use to develop new products, cash that you can use to figure out how to put your products on everyone’s desk,” I answered.
He waved it off. “Everybody offers cash.”
“But do they offer me? I am going to make a guess here. The usual guy you see from the investment companies is a businessman or a lawyer. He doesn’t own a computer, or if he bought one, he either gave it to his kids or to his secretary to try and figure out. I not only have a computer, I’ve been writing code since I was 17. I may not be in the league of what you guys out here do, but it doesn’t scare me off, either. I can understand your business at the most intimate level, and if I can’t help you, at least I won’t hurt you.”
I detected a faint glimmer of interest in this. “So you’ve been writing code? With DOS?”
“Well, DOS is just the operating system. I made myself a little application shell to run programs with. Right now it doesn’t have much use, but I figure in another year, we’ll be seeing computers with installed hard drive memories, and it will be very useful then. I’ll be buying computers for the entire staff then. Right now, it would be a waste of time.”
“How so?”
I smiled at him. “Right now, I am the only person in our company who has probably even seen a computer. The commands have to be typed in at the A: prompt. Now it’s one thing to ask a geek like me to do that, but your average customer is a lot more like the people I work with. I’ve got a couple of lawyers, a stock broker, an accountant, a secretary or two. To really make the computer usable, you need something a little friendlier to the user.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I’m sure you are aware of the research going on down at the Xerox PARC complex.” That was a shot across the bow he couldn’t ignore! Xerox PARC invented most of the concepts in modern computers, from graphic interfaces to the mouse to laser printers. Gates’ eyes popped wide at that.
“What do you know about that?” he asked, half sitting upright, moving from his traditional slump.
I waved it off. “I know what Bob Taylor is doing down there is state of the art, and that Xerox doesn’t have a clue, and that you do. So does Steve Jobs. You know of him, right?” Gates nodded, speechless. “He knows about PARC, too. Here’s a word of advice, free of charge, regardless of whether we invest — pay attention to PARC. The things they are working on will change the world. Buy the patents, invent it yourself, I don’t care, but incorporate what they are doing as soon as you can.”
He sat there for another minute, and then abruptly stood up. “Stay there. I’ll be back in a moment.” Then he went out of his office. Mystified, I stayed in my seat. What was he up to, summoning the Microsoft police?
He returned a couple of minutes later with a piece of paper in his hands. He thrust it at me and said, “Sign this. It’s a non-disclosure statement. Then we can talk.”
I tried to keep my joy off my face. We didn’t have a deal yet, but he was at least willing to talk about it! I read over the paper and signed my name. The Buckman Group had its foot in the door!
I was invited to lunch, which was a little amusing. I was the only one dressed up, so to speak. Everybody else emulated the boss. I did get to meet Paul Allen, who was as wildly bearded as Bill Gates was clean shaven. There were three others, all some sort of senior programmer or executive. Over lunch I was asked about my degrees. These guys were some serious techies and wanted to know my credentials.
One of them, I forget who, asked, “Where did you go to school?”
“Well, when I was in high school, I also took about two years worth of classes over at Towson State. That’s a teaching college outside of Baltimore. Later, after I graduated, I went to Rensselaer, up in Troy. That’s where I officially got all my degrees,” I said.
“So you were going to high school and college at the same time?” asked another.
I nodded. “Sounds crazy, right? I just figured that if the school would pay for college that way, it meant I didn’t have to.”
“What was your thesis on?” asked Gates.
“I combined Information Theory and Topology and examined the effects of a network’s topology on information loss. It probably deals more with the engineering side of the issue than what you are doing, at least for the moment,” I answered.
Allen, who had been relatively quiet up to this point, said, “I’ve heard of work in the field, but it was several years ago. A collaboration of some sort, I think it was something called the Rhineburg-Buckman Equations or something. That stuff?”
I swallowed what I was chewing, and nodded. “I’m the Buckman. Professor Rhineburg was my thesis adviser. I haven’t talked to him lately, probably not for a few years, but I think he is still working in the field. Nice guy, really good.”
Gates and Allen looked at each other, and the other three just eyed me curiously.
After that, I was asked about what I thought of computing in general, and I gave my standard speech about the future of computing, and how it would change the world. I altered it, however, to speak on topics that I knew Microsoft was involved in or would become involved in. I mentioned the need to move beyond the command prompt, to move to a graphic interface, to work with faster and more powerful processors, and finally the need to control critical applications like typing and spreadsheets.
“What about your specialty, networking?” asked Gates.
“I think that is going to be probably the biggest change of all, but not for another generation. It all depends on how fast speeds on the connections can be raised. Right now you have the ARPANet and the NSFNet, but they are limited. It is going to grow from there, but one of the biggest barriers will always be how fast the computers can talk to each other. Worst of all — every time you raise the transmission speed of the network, somebody else is going to increase the size of the file to be transmitted. It’s a never ending cycle.”
I must have impressed them as somebody who knew what he was talking about, even though it was straightforward History of Computers 101 from 2020. After lunch, I found myself closeted with Gates again in his office. I don’t know what else he had planned, but he must have had his secretary reschedule them.
“You mentioned an investment. What kind of numbers did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Let me ask a few questions first, for background,” I responded. He nodded, and I asked, “What are your revenues and income for the last fiscal year? By the way, what is the period for your fiscal year?”
“It ended at the end of June. Our financial results are, of course, confidential,” he countered.
“Yes, but before we ever finalized anything, I would have to have our financial team look at the books and run their numbers. The nondisclosure agreement would apply to them as well, of course.”
“I’d still be interested in the investment size.”
We could dance around this the rest of the afternoon. Screw it. “I’d be willing to put up $5 million, provided the terms were right.”
It was hard to read his reaction, disdain or glee. He simply asked, “What terms would you want?”
“Nothing too difficult. An appropriate piece of the company. We can argue about the valuation, but that’s why I asked about the financials. A board seat. That’s all. We won’t tell you how to run the company. We won’t tell you when to do your IPO. We won’t tell you we have to run the IPO. We just want a percentage of the company,” I replied.