Philip, hello Philip, this is Philip. How are you?
I am well, how are you? I'm sorry I'm running a little late. I really apologize. I had another call before. I'll turn my video on. I'll tell you something: I think it's fashionable still to be 10 minutes late.
Okay, I'm 12 minutes late, so I missed a fashion trend.
No, I think you're even leading it further, you're pushing further.
Oh, I see. Well, I'm glad you're happy because I was not happy with myself. I don't like to be late. I'm a functional person and I think that punctuality is the politeness of all people.
Well, let me just state on the record, I've always found you to be a polite person. I'm going to jump right into the discussion if you don't mind. Tell me when you're starting to record this thing because I'm eating my lunch. I haven't had time for lunch.
You're so funny. I'm going to record it starting now and I will do a little start intro.
So you're... no, you're beautiful. And I will tell you also, I'm recording but I'm only going to do the audio portion.
Oh, you're only going to do the audio? Okay.
Yeah, but I like to see your face when I'm talking and it's been too long. So Philip, welcome to The Look Back. This is the COVID quarantine podcast that's been keeping me sane over the last year or two and allowing me to connect with some people I haven't spoken to in far too long.
Oh great, great. Well, that's great. I'm happy we're connecting.
Yeah, I want to take you back to when I first met you. I think it was in the early 80s at the West Coast Computer Fair. I mentioned it to you in the note I was saying. I mean, you were one of the first entrepreneurs I met. I'm walking through this thing called the Computer Fair where there are hundreds of little companies in San Francisco. I think we were at the... not the Moscone, it was something before the Moscone. It was 1983. I had just arrived in America.
Yeah, I have no idea what I was doing.
Same. I have no idea what I was doing.
And Jim Warren, I think, who ran the show, gave me a booth and let me in. And that's what happened. That's how I got there. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was great. It worked out great actually.
They handed me a reporter's notebook. They said go talk to some companies, find out what's going on, who's doing some interesting things. And I saw somebody who was wandering around. I think you had like a stack of your... it looked like mini booklets maybe that were your compiler tools. C, am I close?
We had two products. Yeah, we had a product called Sidekick, which was a windowing system for DOS, right? And we had a compiler called Turbo Pascal. Right, right. And those became famous. And I had a little booth. It's a funny story. I had a little booth and I didn't have anyone. I already lived in Santa Cruz, this is San Francisco. And so I went into a surf shop in Santa Cruz and tried to... I needed people to man the booth. So I found three lady surfers to come and man my booth. And these ladies manned my booth and they were... because they were attractive looking girls and they were very smart. And all the... it was a geek fest and all the geeks loved them. And they were really smart and it worked out great. They got a weekend in San Francisco out of that. And that's how we started. One was called Theresa Zimbauer and she had a boyfriend who was a journalist locally in Santa Cruz called Tom Bry. And he wrote us up. He was kind of a funny journalist and that kind of started the whole trend.
That's fantastic. I was a journalist for CRN at the time and I wrote a story about you. It was probably not that famous at the time because I was just kind of getting my own grounding on what it meant to be a tech reporter and journalist. And I didn't know what Turbo Pascal and compilers were and all that good stuff. But those products sustained... those were your hits when you were running Borland.
Oh yeah. And we started a company without any resources, without venture capital. And we did the opposite of what people thought. We started selling direct to end users, which was really new. And so we sold direct and sold them for $49.95 at the time, which was really different because Microsoft had a Pascal compiler and Digital Research had one, but they were selling for $600. And both Sidekick and Turbo Pascal were a hit. I'm not sure that people at Computer Retail News liked us much because we were selling direct. But that was something... we love a story. You know, journalism, we just want the story. I don't care if you're... so you cared, but your advertising sales guy didn't. But that show... somebody really important showed up. And it's really funny because his name was Jerry Pournelle. And Jerry Pournelle, you probably knew him as a writer for Byte magazine.
I did know him. I knew his son too.
Exactly, Alex. But at the time, I'm not sure Alex was born, or barely born. And so Jerry was actually... I was a big science fiction buff and Jerry and Larry Niven wrote lots of books that I really liked. And I was starstruck when he came to the booth. And you know, wow, this is Jerry Pournelle, the guy who wrote all those books that I really like. And so we hit it off. And in fact, he invited me to his house and he says, 'You teach me how to program.' So I actually taught Jerry how to write code and he started writing me up in Byte magazine. And that started the company because we didn't have any money to run any ads or do anything else. And he wrote us up and he wrote Turbo Pascal up. And I lived a little bit on his couch at the time.
A couch surfer before you became a real surfer.
So in Studio City, exactly. And I taught him how to code and he was really excited and he started writing code. And that was a big deal for him. And I occupied his couch a little bit. And that was really important. Shortly thereafter, actually, I occupied somebody else's couch in Silicon Valley. I think it was after Jerry, who was really interested in the Sidekick windowing system that we built, which became very popular. We sold millions of copies of that because that was DOS and we were doing windows and multitasking basically using terminate-and-stay-resident programs. And that was Larry Magid, who was writing for a whole bunch of people. And he lives in Palo Alto, still lives in the same house. And I've been there. I remember debugging code all night and working on making things work for Larry and his wife Patty. All night and crashing on his couch and having Patty bring breakfast in the morning. And that was my beginning. So I surfed basically two couches: Jerry's and Larry's. And I think Larry remembers that. Those were interesting days because I had no resources. All I knew how to do was... I'm a mathematician, I'm a software guy, and I had a team of fantastic software guys working with me, young guys, but nobody was paid. So we all had different jobs or doing different things. I had moved from France and I left everything behind me. And so this was kind of the glory days, I would say. But it was kind of living on the edge because you never knew what was going to pay the next bill. But very rapidly, everything became a success and the problem wasn't paying the next bill. It became, wow, we have orders coming in, we better fulfill them. Because it's a good problem to have, but now suddenly we have to... at the time you had to copy diskettes, you have to make manuals, you have to do that. And wow, how do we do that? And so it was really... I had no idea how to do that. But there was a Japanese restaurant at the time where I used to like to go. I had befriended the owner of the restaurant and he had a mail-order salad dressing business that he sold. He made... so he sold the mail order. His name was Spencer Ozawa. And I asked Spencer, 'How do you do that?' And so we got to know each other and he said, 'Oh, if I can do salad dressing, I can do your diskettes and all that.' And so he became our VP of operations and turned his salad dressing business into a software diskette and manual business. And he was really good at it. Running a restaurant and running a salad dressing business is hard operational work. And making disks and manuals is not much different. There's no technology there except running something that makes sense. So that's how that happened. And Spencer stayed with the team until we had a public offering. And when we went public, we brought in different VP of operations because he wanted to retire. He had just bought his Ferrari F40 or something. And Spencer says, 'You know, I've worked all my life in my restaurant and all that. Now I'm going to retire.' And he's happily retired and did great. So he helped build the business for about four years in there.
