Ron Gruner in Font

Encoder Data Matrix ECC200 in Font Ron Gruner

In 1982, Ron Gruner, Craig Mundie, and Rich McAndrew founded Alliant Computer Systems to build parallel supercomputers. Their goal was to build a machine that used multiprocessing to achieve better performance than the fastest single-CPU machines, but in a way that was transparent to developers. In 1985, after 3 years of work, they d done it, and for the next several years Alliant was one of the leading players in the turbulent parallel computer industry. But the company lost its way; Gruner left in 1991 after disagreement about the company s direction; and a year later Alliant filed for bankruptcy. Looking for something to do next, Gruner started a new company at the opposite end of the spectrum: a web-based service business. His experience as CEO of Alliant had taught him the importance of investor relations. In 1992, he founded Shareholder.com with the goal of using technology to automate the process. Shareholder.com pioneered a new, broader approach toward investor relations. Shareholder.com grew steadily, and in February 2006 was acquired by NASDAQ.

Gruner: I ve really had three jobs in my life, starting with Data General in 1969. I moved up from Oklahoma to Massachusetts to work for Data General, which got a lot of visibility in the late 60s, even though it was a very small company. I started as their 43rd employee and saw them grow to over 15,000 when I left in 1982. My background was in computer design. My first half at Data General, I was an engineer doing most of the work myself, and then in the second half I was managing most of the time. Data General was a very entrepreneurial almost Darwinian kind of environment. Ed de Castro and the other founders would try hard to hire the best, most aggressive people they could find, and then let those people go off and oftentimes compete on their own.

The book The Soul of a New Machine characterizes that environment fairly well. It talks about two competing teams the Eagle Team and the Fountainhead Team how they competed internally, and how the Eagle Team eventually won out because they got to market sooner. I was the head of the Fountainhead project. Spending 13 years there was a really good background for me to understand a truly entrepreneurial kind of environment. I left Data General in the spring of 82 and, with two other cofounders, Craig Mundie and Rich McAndrew, I started Alliant Computer Systems. Our mission was to build very high-performance computer systems that provided a growth path from Digital s Vax line of machines, which were topping out at half a million dollars. Our machines provided anywhere from four to ten times the performance of Digital s largest Vax, for maybe 50 percent more, using parallel processing technology. But because this was a very complex technology obviously all hardware-based; back in those days everything was proprietary hardware we had to raise a lot of money. We took the traditional approach of going out and raising venture capital. We knew, even then, having watched how Data General financed itself, that you wanted to generate two things when you re looking for money. One is a sense of exclusivity, saying, This is a very special kind of deal and not everybody is going to get into it. And secondly, a sense of urgency, so you can get people to make a decision. A former boss of mine, Carl Carmen at Data General, knew the VC community pretty well. We brought him in, and another partner of his, Jesse Aweida, who was the founder of Storage Technology Corporation. We didn t call them this at the time, but they were angel investors. Together they put in a couple of hundred thousand to help us get launched and spend 6 months writing a business plan on how to commercialize parallel processing technology. We then contacted Kleiner Perkins, who even then were viewed as one of the premier venture capital firms. We told them that we thought we had a really interesting idea. We weren t prepared to talk about it, but we would talk about it in about 6 months. We thought, having been at Data General and knowing the computer business very well, it could be something even approaching a revolutionary idea. One of the big wins Kleiner Perkins had in the 70s was Tandem Computer. Tandem s gone now, but it was a big hit in the 70s and early 80s. They rethought computer architecture to build what they called Non-Stop Computing. They used redundant computers, so if one computer failed, the system kept running. For transaction processing, it was very reliable. It was really elegant, sexy technology. We thought that we were doing the same thing on the performance side through parallel processing. We didn t want to talk about it until we felt we had it really fleshed out well. So we let Kleiner Perkins know that we weren t ready to talk, but we d contact them when we were.