Calonius, Erik. Their wildest dreams. Nova Iorque: Fortune; vol.140, art.4, pg.142; 16 de
agosto de 1999.
Their wildest dreams
Fortune;
New York; Aug 16, 1999; Erik Calonius;
Abstract:
Some 13 remarkable achievers were asked to go back to where their journeys began, to
look at the crannies where entrepreneurship sprouted. The places are not grand. Of the
business people profiled, only 2 have an MBA; several dropped out of college. However, all
were dreamers of dreams. The business people profiled includes: 1. Michael Dell of Dell
Computer, 2. David Geffen of Dreamworks, 3. Berry Gordy Jr., and 4. Dave Thomas of
Wendy's.
Full Text:
Copyright Time Incorporated Aug 16, 1999
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
- Arthur O'Shaughnessy, "Ode"
SO THAT'S WHERE THAT PHRASE COMES FROM, "MOVERS AND SHAKERS." A 19thcentury Irish poem about dreamers. It fits the men and women in these pages, all of whom found
an astonishing degree of success in life and none of whom were driven by a grim ambition to
conquer the summits of corporate America-not at the start, at least.
It was the start we were curious about. We asked 13 remarkable achievers to take us back to the
places their journeys began, to look at the crannies where entrepreneurship sprouted. The places
are not grand, naturally. Of the business people here, only two have an MBA; several dropped
out of college.
One, as it happens, was a music-maker. All were dreamers of dreams.
IN HIS FIRST college apartment, Michael Dell found one day that his roommate had piled his
computer parts against the door, suggesting that he move out. And when Dell's parents popped in
one evening, Michael hid his computer supplies in the bathtub. "Where are your textbooks?" his
father asked. "Oh, I left them down at the library," young Michael replied.
Later that year Dell moved into a room on the 27th floor of Dobie Hall at the University of Texas
and tried to act more like a typical college freshman. But it didn't work.
He placed classified ads offering computer upgrades and soupedup IBM PCs at 15% off retail
prices. "People would ride up to the 27th floor with their computers. I'd put in some memory or a
disk drive, they'd pay me, and I'd send them on their way," Dell recalls. The UPS delivery man
was a frequent visitor too. "He was always a bit out of sorts because he had to unload the stuff on
the back dock and haul it all the way up here," says Dell.
[Photograph]
Caption: Room 2713, Dobie Hall, University of Texas Michael Dell
Dell's hallmates didn't seem to mind, however. Michael had discovered Austin's network-TV
feed on the roof of the dorm and had customized it so that everyone on the 27th floor had free
cable TV
Before long, Dell was grossing about $25,000 a month. He had promised his father that he would
take his premed studies seriously, but the computer business was not taking a back seat anymore.
By January, Dell had vacated Dobie for a condo near campus. He finished his freshman year, but
not before incorporating Dell Computer.
"Leaving here really marked the beginning of what became the business," Dell says, looking
around the dorm room with a bemused smile. "It was the determination that I wanted to start this
business as a real business. I had come to the conclusion that the only way to do it was just to do
it. My parents would have to figure it out later."
BETWEEN HIGH SCHOOL and the time he landed a job as an usher at the CBS-TV studios in
New York City, David Geffen says, he had about 17 jobs. "They were just jobs," he says. "I had
to pay the rent:' But when he finally got a job at CBS, "I thought, Oh, God, I love this," Geffen
says. "I got to watch them rehearse TV shows with people like Judy Garland and Red Skelton,
and I was thinking, Well, I'm not talented, what can I do?'"
He got a job on a new CBS TV series, The Reporters-as the receptionist. After studying the
scripts one day, Geffen made some suggestions to the producer. "He fired me on the spot,"
Geffen recalls.
The show's casting director offered a sympathetic ear. "I told her I really loved the entertainment
business, and was there anything I could do? She said, `Well, what can you do?' And I said,
'Nothing. I don't know how to do anything.' She considered that for a moment and said, 'You
don't know how to do anything. Hmmm. You could be an agent."
Missing the joke, Geffen grabbed the Yellow Pages and picked out the agency with the biggest
ad-and that's how he ended up at the mailroom of the William Morris Agency. "In delivering the
mail, you get into everyone's office and you hear them talking on the phone," Geffen says. "It
was the first time in my life that I had the epiphany'I can do this!'"
Moving up from the mailroom, he plunged into the still-emerging world of rock & roll, signing
and managing artists from Laura Nyro to the Eagles. In 1970 he started Asylum Records, and
later, after a turbulent year at Warner Bros. Pictures, he got back on track with Geffen Records.
Eventually he sold Geffen for $700 million and went on to cofound the DreamWorks movie
studio with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
IF YOU'D EXITED THE INTERstate at Brookhaven, Miss., in 1979, you'd have found a tall
young man named Bernie Ebbers bent into a small office above an antique shop on Denton Trail.
"I was in the motel business back then," Ebbers says. "When I got involved in the phone business
in 1985, we moved that business upstairs too." How many employees did Ebbers have? He
thinks for a moment. "Mmm ... five," he says.
[Photograph]
Caption: William Morris Agency, Beverly Hills David Geffen
[Photograph]
Caption: William Morris Agency, Beverly Hills David Geffen
Today Ebbers' MCI WorldCom is the fourth-largest telecommunications company in the world,
with 70,000 employees and revenues of $32 billion.
Raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Ebbers moved to Mississippi after high school. He graduated from
Mississippi College with a certificate to teach gym and science. But after a year in the classroom,
he realized that a teacher's salary was too meager for the family he hoped to raise someday. "I
wasn't anything like an accountant or an engineer," he says. "So I bought a small motel in a small
town about 60 miles from here."
He bought more motels, and then, Ebbers says, "one day a friend came by and asked me if I'd
like to make a small investment in this new thing called telecommunications." Ebbers, two
colleagues in the motel business, and the owner of the antique shop started LDDS, a reseller of
long-distance service. "There was a board meeting at the Western Sizzler in Hattiesburg, and
none of the guys could think of a name. So the waitress came over and said, `Why don't you call
it Long Distance Discount Service?' "Ebbers recalls.
Ebbers became president of LDDS in 1985 and soon led the company through a series of
multibillion-dollar acquisitions, topped by the $37 billion MCI merger, which is one of the
biggest in business history.
"THERE ARE A LOT OF GHOSTS floating around this place," says Intel CEO Andy Grove,
peering into the gutted factory building where Intel began 31 years ago. "What went on here is
something I cherish. But the lesson I learned was, never get involved in another startup. One was
enough for me."
[Photograph]
Caption: 611 Denton Trail, Brookhaven, Miss. Bernie Ebbers
[Photograph]
Caption:
[Photograph]
Caption: 365 Middlefield Road, Mountain View, Calif. Andy Grove & Gordon Moore
It was 1968. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, two of the founding partners of Fairchild
Semiconductor, decided to strike out on their own. They were soon joined by Grove. Union
Carbide Electronics was moving out of a factory in Mountain View, Calif., and Intel moved in,
hiring its first employees and building its first memory chips. The startup was financed by famed
moneyman Art Rock but was still a shoestring operation: The business plan ran three paragraphs,
the chip assemblers wore cotton smocks, and the chips were made using bottled water lugged
into the plant by Intel's first engineers.
"Andy and I have completely different views of the early years," says Moore. "To me, it was
smooth. We grew faster than I thought. But Andy thought it was one of the most traumatic
periods of his life."
Grove concurs. "In a startup you hire a bunch of strangers, you stick them together, and then you
try to do some really heavy lifting. But under the strain there's a lot of infighting," he says.
"There was a lot of infighting here. One of the people who reported to me had a nervous
breakdown, right in front of my eyes."
One of Intel's first successful products was a 1024-bit dynamic RAM memory chip. "It strained
the technology, strained the design, and strained our testing abilities," says Grove. Adds Moore:
"The code name was 1103, and to this day I still get a twinge when I look down at my digital
watch and it says 11:03."
Then when did Intel stop feeling like a startup? "It hasn't yet," says Grove with a laugh.
BRUCE BENT AND HENRY Brown invented the money market fund 30 years ago. The two
started their own investmentbanking firm in 1968, but by 1969 interest rates had climbed to 8%,
the highest rate since the Civil War. "Everything came to a screeching halt," says Bent. "Nobody
wanted to borrow money."
[Photograph]
Caption: Corner of 52nd Street and Sixth Avenue, New York Bruce Bent & Henry Brown
Brown and Bent needed to attract depositors, but federal banking laws limited interest to 5.25%,
and higher-paying CDs were available only to fat cats who could purchase them in lumps of
$100,000 each. "I was sitting at my desk in August 1969, and I looked up at Brown and said,
`Why not a mutual fund?' "recalls Bent. "He said he didn't know anything about mutual funds. I
said, 'I don't know anything about mutual funds either, but I think it would work.' " The idea was
to buy the big $100,000 CDs and split the higher interest among small investors.
"Everyone said it was impossible to pull off," says Bent. "We said we wanted to have same-day
redemptions. They said, 'You can't do that.' We said we wanted daily dividends. They said, `You
can't do that.' We said we wanted telephone redemptions. They said, 'You can't do that: " But
Bent didn't believe them. He began reading the regs carefully. Nothing said it couldn't be done.
When Brown and Bent sent brochures to 144 financial institutions, they were turned down cold.
They slipped $250,000 into debt. "We developed an intimate relationship with the hot-dog man
on the corner," Bent says, "because that's all we could live on. Hot dogs."
At the very last moment, the New York Times came to the rescue with an article lavishly
describing Brown and Bent's mutual fund invention.
The story broke Jan. 7, 1970, and by February the two had received $1 million in deposits. By
the end of 1973 they had their first $100 million, and by 1974, $500 million in depositors' funds.
The Reserve fund became America's first money market fund, and Brown and Bent became the
Orville and Wilbur Wright of one of the most significant financial innovations of the century.
"IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie
Wonder, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, the Temptations, and the Four Tops,"
someone once said, "and you've just imagined a world without Berry Gordy"
[Photograph]
Caption:
[Photograph]
Caption: 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit Berry Gordy Jr.
Gordy, who worked on the Ford assembly line and sold cookware door to door, submitted in the
end to his passion for songwriting and transforming no-names into stars.
As a songwriter, Gordy found early success with hits like "Lonely Teardrops," sung by Jackie
Wilson. But Gordy soon realized he wanted more control. "To protect my songs, which are my
loves, I had to find singers who could sing and record them like I heard them in my head."
At 29, with an $800 loan from his family, Gordy founded Motown. He leased a two-story house
at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. "Everything was makeshift," he says. "We used the
bathroom as an echo chamber"
Gordy borrowed from his assembly-line experience in refining Motown acts. The kids learned
harmony from the vocal coach, steps from the choreography coach, and manners from the
etiquette coach. Meanwhile, Motown's songwriters pounded out new tunes. When it was time to
perform, the kids-Diana, Marvin, Stevie, Smokey, and the rest-piled into the Motown Revue bus
and headed out on the road, competing to see who could win the most applause.
By 1975, Motown had become the biggest black-owned business in America, with activities
spanning several record labels, film, and television. "I had no idea that Diana Ross would
become an industry or that Michael Jackson would become an industry or that the Temptations
would become an industry," Gordy says. "While I say I'm a songwriter and businessman, really,
deep down, I think I'm a teacher, like my father"
AS THE CULTURAL revolution began to sweep America in the early 1960s, Barnes & Noble
Chairman Len Riggio was taking night courses at New York University. Hiding behind taller
students, he stealthily read the classics during business management classes.
Riggio was a book fanatic. During the day he worked at the NYU bookstore. But after six years
as a clerk and manager, Riggio succumbed to the entrepreneurial itch. He raised $5,000 in capital
(60% borrowed), left school, and with a partner started the Student Book Exchange (SBX) in a
nearby storefront.
"This was a time of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, sexual liberation,
changing music," says Riggio. "No one wanted to be told, 'You have to shop at the university
books#ore: " Soon SBX was selling more than textbooks-printing posters and leaflets and
stocking a new wave of paperback books. "There was an urgency about books-a passion to go
out and find the books that people wanted," Riggio says.
SBX succeeded, and Riggio soon opened stores at other campuses. "It was never a matter of
making a lot of money back then. It never occurred to me that I was building a chain," he says.
in 1971, Riggio bought Barnes & Noble and its flagship bookstore on Manhattan's 18th Street-a
limping giant that was losing money. "Barnes & Noble was elitist," says Riggio. "We
democratized it."
Today, of course, the entire book business is being democratized by the Internet; for now, at
least, Barnes & Noble is the establishment, and Amazon.com is the revolutionary. "I see the Web
as greater than the wheel, the internal combustion engine, or nuclear fission," Riggio exclaims.
"I've lived in exciting times over the last 30 years, but this curve is much steeper than anything
before."
"THERE'S A FALSE STORY THAT I went around measuring pockets. That's not true," says
Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot. But Hawkins did retreat to the proverbial garage to
shape a Palm Pilot prototype on his table saw. "I'd take it to meetings," he says, "and pretend I
was looking at the calendar."
The Palm Pilot, of course, has become one of the fastest-selling high-tech devices of the decade,
a product that has generated perhaps the highest level of consumer loyalty and downright
affection since the introduction of the Apple Macintosh some 20 years ago.
[Photograph]
Caption: 17 Waverly Place, New York Len Riggio
[Photograph]
Caption:
Fresh from Cornell with a degree in electrical engineering, Hawkins first worked for Intel and
then for GRiD Systems, designing laptops. But his passion was for what he calls "brain stuff!-the
study of how brains work and how machines might mimic them more faithfully. Taking an
extended leave from GRiD, he developed a breakthrough methodology that would allow
computers to recognize patterns and, hence, handwriting.
Returning to GRiD, Hawkins applied some of these ideas to the GRiDPad, a reasonably
successful pen-based computer. "About this time I had an epiphany,' Hawkins says. "Someday,
everybody is going to own something like this. But it's got to be a lot smaller and sell for under
$300."
[Photograph]
Caption: Garage workshop, Redwood City, Calif. Donna Dubinsky & Jeff Hawkins
To chase that dream, he started Palm Computing in 1992. The whole hand-held computer market
seemed doomed after Apple introduced its now-infamous Newton, but Hawkins kept going with
the help of Donna Dubinsky, a Harvard MBA with a great Silicon Valley track record. Hawkins
insisted that the computer be small enough to slip into a pocket. They worked out the technical
issues, then turned to the financial ones. After being rejected repeatedly (by investors who are
now kicking themselves, they found an angel in U.S. Robotics, which not only agreed to fund the
Palm Pilot but offered to buy the whole company.
Hawkins and Dubinsky have started Handspring Inc., which will create new products under a
Palm Pilot license. But Hawkins says he's still stuck on "brain stuff." "I've figured out what it
means for an organism to understand its environment," says Hawkins with a shiny-eyed look.
"And I think we'll be able to start building machines that will begin to do that:'
SOME PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE been angry had they grown up like Wendy's senior chairman,
Dave Thomas. He was given up for adoption at six weeks-and his adoptive mother died when he
was 5. "When I saw my mother's casket lowered into the ground," he recalls, "it bothered me a
lot." His adoptive father was distant and cold, and there was only one place where Dave felt even
the distant warmth of family lifewhen he and his father sat near other families at restaurants.
By 11, Thomas was out looking for part-time jobs in restaurants. He eventually happened upon
the Regas Restaurant in downtown Knoxville, Tenn. It was run by Frank and George Regas,
Greek immigrants. "You'd walk in, work as hard as you could, and by the time you took a deep
breath, 12 hours was over," Thomas recalls. "I loved it."
The Regas treated him like family, but Dave wasn't able to stay long; he and his father moved on
to Fort Wayne, where Dave landed a job at the Hobby House restaurant. The Hobby House's
owners and staff became his new family, and at 15, Dave finally parted with his father.
One day an odd fellow with a black string tie and trimmed goatee walked in, ordered some ribs,
and began telling Dave about the secret recipe he had in the back seat of his white Cadillac. It
was Colonel Sanders. Before long, Thomas and his partners at the Hobby House were in the
Kentucky Fried Chicken business. By age 35, Dave was a millionaire. He founded his own
chain, Wendy's (named after his third daughter), which now has 5,452 restaurants.
Thomas has a wife, six children, and 15 grandchildren. He has started the Dave Thomas
Foundation for Adoption, which urges corporations and the government to get kids out of foster
homes quickly.
HE CAN'T SPELL, DOESN'T LIKE to read, and admits to no aptitude for high technology. He
named his company after the most conspicuous quality of his hair: Kinko's.
[Photograph]
Caption: Regas Restaurant, 318 Gay Street NW, Knoxville Dave Thomas
[Photograph]
Caption:
But Paul Orfalea, who founded Kinko's in 1970, has become a player in the communications
revolution. Kinko's copier centers provide entrepreneurs with a place to duplicate their
ideasanything from business plans to blueprints-and bind them into impressive-looking
presentations. Most Kinko's stores are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making them the
all-night diners for the Information Age.
Orfalea began selling notebooks on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara
in 1970, displaying his wares on the sidewalk. He also had a little store nearby in the back of a
former hamburger stand, with a filmprocessing machine, a copier, and some school supplies.
"Back then, I didn't know if the business would become a photo store, a stationery store, or a
copy center," he says.
But Orfalea knew he wanted to have a business. His Lebaneseimmigrant parents and their friends
were entrepreneurs. Besides, he suffered from such severe dyslexia that he considered himself
unemployable. "My only aptitude was for my own business," he says.
When Kinko's started, seven million Americans worked out of their homes. But then came
downsizing, and that soon rose to more than 40 million. Kinko's became not only the place to
burnish one's resume, but an oasis for entrepreneurs.
Kinko's stores make a mindboggling 16 billion paper copies a year. The company is also
positioned in cyberspace, with computers and software, high-speed ISDN connections, and
videoconferencing in 140 stores. If a young Henry Ford, Scott Joplin, or Frank Lloyd Wright
were alive today, chances are you'd bump into him at a Kinko's.
[Photograph]
Caption: University of California, Santa Barbara Paul Orfalea
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