The Opening Bell (no one told me I had to make a speech)
This week will make it 20 years since I was one of the lucky ones to ring the opening bell for the American Stock Exchange. It was spring of 1998 and our company Sonic Foundry would officially begin trading that day.
The IPO market had been hot in 1997 but it was getting tougher and we knew our window was probably closing. It was a Saturday in New York City and Rimas, Sonic Foundry’s CEO, and I were on our way to meet with Ray Dirks, head of a small firm we hoped would help take us public. When we walked in no one was there but Ray in a large empty office with row upon row of desks. It was like something out of a Wall Street movie. I clearly remember Rimas, my best friend and recent MBA graduate, turning to me and saying “I smell money”. I was thinking something along the lines of “are you sure you aren’t confusing emptiness and despair with money?” It turned out that Rimas had a pretty accurate nose and in a matter of months we would be doing our IPO.
I was required to give some words before the opening bell. I remember trying to be inspiring but realizing half way through that not a single person on the trading floor gave a crap about what I had to say. They just wanted to get to work.
It was great fun. I rang the bell, the market opened, and then we toured the trading floor and watched our symbol SFO appear on the electronic ticker for the first time (we would become SOFO when we later switched to the NASDAQ). We were whisked off to a celebratory lunch and then spent the afternoon in Manhattan continually checking the stock price. There was great joy (and relief) when we actually closed above the opening price.
It had taken us 7 years to get to this day, but it was only a little over 3 years since we had taken our first friends and family investment changing the direction of our company forever. The first 4 years we scraped by through savings, VISA cards, and sales from Sound Forge. Once we decided to take outside investment priorities changed. It suddenly wasn’t just about making the best product we could. It was now about revenue and growth and doing things we thought would make investors happy. It sometimes meant sacrificing long term results for short term gains and making decisions you may have done differently without that added requirement.
I don’t regret going public or our crazy ride during the internet bubble. After all we were able to create many products still in use today, Sound Forge, CD Architect, Acid, Vegas, Mediasite just to name a few. The list of companies and products created by XSOFO’ers is an impressive one. I spent 20 years working with extremely intelligent people building incredible products and making life-long friendships.
But I can tell you that the time I look back on most fondly is 1994. It was the year that Curt left Microsoft to drive across the country to join me in Madison, Wisconsin. The two of us hired a young engineer right out of university, John Feith, and the 3 of us spent all of 1994 writing Sound Forge 3.0. It would be the break out version for us and Macromedia would show up at the end of the year looking to buy us out. We spent that year working night and day, surviving on Glass Nickel pizza, in a mostly empty concrete walled building, with Curt blasting us with Tool and Pearl Jam. We didn’t worry about recurring revenue, or quarterly results. We just wrote code and that made us happy because we knew we were creating something people would love.
So next time you’re at a meetup and someone dumps on you for your “lifestyle business” I want you to think of this Kurt Vonnegut quote
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Because for me both 1998 and 1994 certainly were nice.
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