Infinity Software, a Bay Area startup
During college, I took a software development contract with a startup in Emeryville, a bike ride away, on the world’s first color desktop publishing app. It was built in C on the groundbreaking Amiga platform, the first consumer PC to popularize preemptive multithreading and graphics coprocessors. The company had put itself on the map with a hit tennis game whose 3.5 inch floppy disk came packaged in a tennis ball can.
I was recruited by the brilliant Vince Lee who went on to a long career developing games with LucasArts. The project I joined was the startup’s big move into the productivity segment and it ended up preparing me for the next phase of my career. This was the spring of 1988.
The drama of Shakespeare
The product was Shakespeare: The Page Integrator, a publishing app with text and graphics flowing in real time through frame templates laid out on different pages. It was more ambitious than Microsoft Word in many ways, in part because the platform itself was architecturally so far ahead of both Windows and the Mac, like a decade ahead.
Despite the dearth of competition, targeting an emerging platform with a major investment relying on customers paying big money up front for productivity software to a company best known for games seemed like a highly risky business proposition, requiring a level of optimism bordering on hubris. I would not have made the same set of choices (except for hiring us!) Microsoft did much better with its big bet on Mac apps, an effort I would soon join.
We did ship the product, but the startup was in over its head, having taken on way too many products at once, like I had done with the classes at Berkeley the previous semester.
A tragic end, and the next act
One day, a distinguished silver-haired investor I had seen before pulled up in a museum-quality vintage convertible. He silently marched in, looking stern, shut the CEO’s door, and proceeded to yell at the CEO, who looked glum and stressed through his office window. He then marched out, and sped off. Everyone just sat in silence, dazed, and tried to carry on.
Every time I showed up after that, there were fewer people there, plus a new person, an accountant, until in the end, it was just me and the accountant handing me hand-scrawled IOU’s instead of a paycheck. This was my first experience getting stiffed.
But the experience in rearchitecting the document model in C for version 2 of this app, the upgrade that never shipped, prepared me for my next job - at an employer with much better prospects.