Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 3)

SM: In 1984 when you started Sybase with Bob Epstein, what was the funding environment? That was not in the heyday of venture capital.

MH: Most of the venture capital was going into hardware companies. Very few software companies were being funded.

SM: How was your idea of doing a software company being funded?

MH: It was greeted with a fair amount of skepticism. Bob and I originally funded it with our small change ourselves. We were scrambling and using credit cards to pull the company together. It took us a long time and we did not get it funded until 1985. When we finally got funded, we pulled in great firms. It took us longer and it was harder work than we thought it would be.

SM: The term client/server computing came together later, but that is really what you were doing. How did you describe yourselves?

MH: We used “requester/server computing”. When either Forrester or Gartner wrote about us for the first time, they used client instead of requester and we all immediately realized that was the correct terminology to be using.

SM: What kind of adoption were you seeing in the early years?

MH: We got funded in 1985 but did not ship product until 1987, which was our first real revenue year. When we were selling the product we had a pure revenue plan.

SM: Who were your early adopters?

MH: The first was the Picatinny Army Arsenal in New Jersey. There was a person there who really understood what we were doing. Afterwards he remained a great reference. We also had British Petroleum in Canada as an early adopting company.

SM: How did you find your first clients? Your first two clients sound a bit random.

MH: We had contacts from previous jobs. These were people we had some history with. There were a lot of the security agencies who understood exactly what we were trying to do. At Britton Lee we built the ground control station for the Hubble Telescope.

SM: What was happening in your competitive landscape during the same time?

MH: Microsoft was still fairly small. It was in 1988 that Bill Gates called us and told us that he had heard about us and wanted to come talk to us.

SM: Did he want to buy you?

MH: He wanted to partner on the technology. He liked the technology, but Microsoft was going after the low end of the market and we were going after the very high end. We formed a partnership, and he began to use our database technology, which became Microsoft SQL server.

SM: Was that a sizeable technology licensing deal?

MH: It gave us cash. We earned a percentage of their sales. That was very helpful.

SM: What was the next big milestone?

MH: The activity we had on Wall Street. The application between Sun, us, and the people who were going to desktop computing versus terminals. We got into every single firm on Wall Street and we dominated.

SM: Was it the financial services companies adopting databases that gave the industry legitimacy?

MH: They were certainly the leading edge. There were other industries such as oil and gas which did the same thing. Many of their applications were analytic-intensive.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite
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