No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3 The Early Years

Funding

The cover of our business plan. Note the screen cap of the prototype of RightCAD, running in Windows 3.11.

For the year that I was in New York, I spoke to David every day about the details of RightCAD, mostly acting as a sounding board. They would be considered boring conversations now, but back then we were fascinated by the minutiae of how a feature should work, whether we should use ODBC, whether Windows or OS/2 was a better operating system, and whether we should use Access or Btrieve as a database or Microsoft or Borland as a development tool. In addition to doing EMTrack support, I used my free time to do the accounting, pay the bills, write the user manual for RightCAD, and most importantly, write a business plan for RightWith. Among other things, the business plan outlined the need for $100,000 to get things going.

I remember spending a weekend in the ADS offices in Miami with David and Bob working on 1995–1997 financial projections for the business plan. We created detailed projections of sales, expenses in a number of categories, and whom we would hire when. The process was typical for us in the early days. We’d come in and work hard in a very focused way to do the best job we could. Ultimately, the numbers proved to be accurate within 3 percent.

Once the business plan was completed in September of 1994, I tried to find someone ...