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

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… Read More Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980’s

For three Christmases in a row, we took off a week for the holidays only after carefully calculating that we had enough money in the bank to pay our payroll taxes, accrued wages and vacations, and minimal severances, since it seemed almost certain that we would have to liquidate early in the New Year. During the development, I came to feel that our actual experience showed that to be mostly wrong; the published products did not pay for themselves, but ran huge deficits that repeatedly brought us close to liquidation and very nearly killed PowerPoint. I’ve listened to BBC Radio 4 interviews with detective-story writers who say that they purposely write stories set in the early twentieth century, so that they can take advantage of an age before mobile phones; but that ploy is only going to work for readers who can remember what that far away time was like.

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