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Charles Geschke, co-founder of Adobe, dies at 81

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Charles Geschke may not be as famous as many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but he is really a legend of technology and software. With John Warnock, he cofounded Adobe in 1982 and he is an exception in the group of founders as he was in his early 40s when he left Xerox to create the company which developed Postcript, PDF, Adobe, Photoshop and so many more products. He died on April 16, 2021.

I had read about Geschke (and Warlock) in a good number of books and blogged about him here:
– In the company of Giants in November 2008
– A success story: Adobe Systems – John Warnock and Charles Geschke in March 2009

I found yesterday this very interesting short video that you should watch (or read the transcipt below).

Here is the transcript: “when John and I started Adobe we had a sort of simple thought in mind in terms of how we wanted to organize the business

we wanted to build a company that we would like to work at and we sort of used that principle in terms of how we defined the management structure, the operational organizational thoughts that we had about how to put the company together and part of that recognition was that we had constituencies that every business has that need to be balanced

we had our shareholders we had our employees we had our customers and of course the communities in which we operated and if you think about running a business all four of those constituencies are mildly in conflict what’s good for one may not be good for the other and to be successful as a business and to retain the kind of quality employees that you want to have it’s extremely important that you continually monitor how those four constituencies are being served and keep them in balance

a couple other principles people would often ask as they worked at Adobe

well what will it take for me to enhance my career and both John and I would tell them well the first thing you have to figure out is how to fire yourself by hiring someone to work for you who can do your job better than you do and there’s no alternative but to get promoted once you do that

and the second piece of philosophy which is frankly the most critical one building particularly a high technology business is to tell every engineer and every manager that your job is to hire people who are smarter than you are as it’s a much larger population from which to choose and those turned out to in fact have been extremely important in building a business

and again I want to comment that without my relationship with John and our partnership it’s hard to imagine that we could have achieved what we did over the past twenty seven years and we’re extremely pleased with this award and the opportunity to have served our industry

thank you very much

the really cool thing about this award is it’s from engineers we’ve gotten entrepreneur awards before but they’re from business guys and getting award for entrepreneurship from engineers is very very cool

Chuck and I when we started the company weren’t on a get-rich-quick scheme we were frustrated at Xerox and our major frustration is we knew we could invent great technology but no one would ever use it and it would never see the marketplace and I think our major motivation in starting Adobe and continuing with Adobe was to make stuff that people would use a lot of people would use and I think inside of every engineer is that basic need to have your stuff used so that was the primary motivation behind what we did

the other thing in the hardest thing about building a business and keeping a business sustained and going on is continuing to innovate and we’ve never figured out how you institutionalize innovation innovation is a very sort of remarkable thing that sometimes happens sometimes doesn’t but the best you can do is build an environment where people are happy they’re doing an adventure they’re trying to create and hopefully in that process great things will happen”

Triumph of the Nerds

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When I published Start-Up, a friend and colleague told me: “Why do you want to write something about high-tech entrepreneurship and start-ups. Nobody reads anymore. Make movies, videos!” He may have been right. Now that I heard about a new documentary about Silicon Valley and I will talk about this later in this post, it gave me the opportunity to look backwards. Triumph of the Nerds is a 3-episode (50 mns each) produced in 1996.

It is great, sometimes boring, often funny. Its author Robert X. Cringely is also the author of the related and very good book, Accidental Empires. You can watch the videos on YouTube and read the transcripts on PBS. I found Part I, the best. Part II about Microsoft and IBM is more serious, Part III about Apple is in-between.

First I found the best definition of a Nerd: “I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

Then about the semiconductor industry: “Intel not only invented the chip, they are responsible for the laid-back Silicon Valley working style. Everyone was on a first-name basis. There were no reserved parking places, no offices, only cubicles. It’s still true today. Here’s the chairman’s cubicle… Gordon Moore is one of the Intel founders worth $3 billion. With money like that, I’d have a door.” […] “Only Intel didn’t appreciate the brilliance of their own product, seeing it as useful mainly for powering calculators or traffic lights. Intel had all the elements necessary to invent the PC business, but they just didn’t get it.”

“What was needed was a version of some big computer language like BASIC, only modified for the PC. But it didn’t yet exist because the experts all thought that nothing would fit inside the tiny memory. Yet again the experts were wrong.” And here came … Microsoft … and Apple

Steve Jobs: “Remember that the Sixties happened in the early Seventies, right, so you have to remember that and that’s sort of when I came of age. So I saw a lot of this and to me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit.”

Part III talks about how Xerox missed the high-tech revolution and Apple or Adobe used Xerox inventions. The output? “A software nerd is the richest man in the world.” We are in 1996. Gates: “You know, if you take the way the Internet is changing month by month, if somebody can predict what’s going to happen three months from now, nine months from now even today eh my hat’s off to them, I think we’ve got a phenomena here that is moving so rapidly that nobody knows exactly where it will go.”

Yes, it was an Accidental Empire.

There is another documentary Pirates of Silicon Valley but it looks very similar to Triumph of the Nerds, without the humour or Cringely. But the reason of this post, is the recent released of Something Ventured. This I will watch soon and hopefully show at EPFL to students and colleagues.

Here is the trailer: