More about Brainerd

 Yesterday's post about Paul Brainerd focused a bit on the early days, including his first outside investment as well as the date.  In doing so, I was a bit cheeky, suggesting that the Computer History Musuem oral interview done in 2007 was in error on those two factoids.  

History has a way of being recorded, and then repeated, sometimes to the total exclusion of any revisions over time.  That doubtless will be true in this case.   Consider for example the eulogy wirtten about Brainerd for GeekWire by Todd Bishop on Feb 19,  2026, which takes vthe CHM interview irtually intact  (https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainerd-1947-2026-aldus-founder-devoted-his-second-chapter-to-the-planet/).

My chary comments were not written to criticize the interviewer--au contrare--computer historians are best able to do great interviews, with modest back-checking usually.   They have a hard time contradicting the interviewee, especially if the subject has not previously had a series of equivalent interviews or fact-checks.  And for an interview done some 27 years after the fact, it is not all that surprising that Brainerd would get the year wrong by one, or the name of the first VC group.   

In addition, Brainerd provided one of the most insightful marketing research stories of our industry for the interviewer--which itself could serve to buttress many books about entrepreneurship if the authors only knew about the story.  Bishop relates this story well, taken from the excellent excerpt in the CHM interview.

So there are several points to consider from this extended example.  

1.  How do we validate oral interviews?  Because of concern for braggadocio or revenge-taking, or understated shyness or just faulty memory, historians have long been concerned about and in places wary of oral interviews.   I cover this in some depth in a monograph I wrote for the Computer History Board of Trustees in 2015 (https://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-house/digital-revolution-heritage/paperback/product-22378873.html?srsltid=AfmBOop5Db1DNvUso1lYNd-OtWySnOWrfyEUd_ZT6Jvhi145PaJqlXck&page=1&pageSize=4).

2. Now that the high-tech world has accumulated nearly 10,000 such interviews, how do we extract the powerful stories contained within them?  This is a great on-going subject, suitable for a later time.  Suffice here to note that although some details are 'suspect' due to my carping, that Todd Bishop very adroitly captured the essence of Brainerd's market research efforts and insight.  That is a key contrib ution, typical of what we aspire to, but too seldom happens.

3. "Correcting the record".   Ahh, the wistful desire.   Hard to do.  HP's origins are often proclaimed to start with selling eight audio oscillators to Disney.  HP PR is still stuck on this.   The facts are that the Disney order was nowhere near the first for the company; more importantly, it was NINE, not EIGHT, a fact that has been proven repeatedly to any and all interested folk at HP. and IGNORED, even denounced.  Ah, well.

So here let me just put some passages from the interview that might help the context for why it should be 1983 and not 1984.

I will let the record stand re the Summerhill investment (noted in The HP Phenomenon, p. 587.   https://www.amazon.com/HP-Phenomenon-Innovation-Business-Transformation/dp/0804752869)

When we first formed the company in January or thereabouts of ’84, it was essentially for the professional user.

There was an Apple branch office here in Belleview, Washington, and they had an OEM sales person there. He came and visited us in our first six weeks of being a company in a little studio apartment below the Pike Place Market, and he loaned us two prototype Macintoshes. He didn’t know us from Adam. I had called the office and set up this appointment. He showed up; he got two Macs out of his trunk, brought them into the office and said, “Here. You take them for the next six months.” So they didn’t actually come from Apple – I mean it came from Apple, but not from Cupertino. This whole relationship with Apple was based on individual Apple employees from the working level, i.e. Bruce Blumberg and a sales person. It had nothing to do with any high-level decision making on the part of Steve Jobs or anyone else at Apple. 

I started trying to raise money during the summer of 1984; I called upon 50 different venture capital firms both in Seattle and Silicon Valley and was told ‘no’ 49 out of 50 times. We got all the way to September which was our drop-dead date. We had less than $5,000 left in our bank account. Finally, we got a commitment from a group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley – Palo Alto – that was made up of some partners who had been former Apple Computer executives, and they understood what we were trying to accomplish and why software might have value.

Note here that he says that Aldus actually started in mid to late 1983, in a little studio apartment.  All other docs except my anecdote trace the founding to 1984.  And they got two prototype MacIntoshs, weeks before the Super Bowl ad of January 22, 1984.   Must have been 1983, huh?

PageMaker would be the tool that they’d be using for that kind of publishing. It was just beyond our imagination. We started to show this in January of 1985 when the LaserWriter came out. We were there at that product launch, of course. When we started demonstrating it, people were grabbing for the sheets coming out of the LaserWriter because they couldn’t believe that we could do the quality of output with the quality of text, and that it really was coming close to what you could do with a traditional publishing system. It was then that we really began to understand how widespread the market opportunity was for desktop publishing. 

but it wasn’t as fundamental a shift in our thinking as you’re implying, perhaps, because the Macintosh with the LaserWriter was still going to be a $10,000 solution. We really underestimated how fundamental, even at $10,000, the value proposition was in terms of what PageMaker, the LaserWriter and Macintosh could do 

And it was very difficult to develop that whole interface that Apple had already done. So, we immediately started to work on PageMaker for the Macintosh

In the summer of ’84 when Macintosh unit sales weren’t doing that well. Bruce Blumberg came to me and said, “There’s an opportunity to go in front of the new president.” Steve had been pushed aside in that timeframe, or at least John Scully had come on the scene, and John wanted on his desk, from his product managers, a marketing plan. Bruce said, “I can’t do this by myself, and I want to partner with you. Can you pull together a marketing plan for desktop publishing?” So, I hired a marketing consultant locally, and in three or four weeks we put this thing together from nuts to bolts. We developed the whole marketing plan for desktop publishing for us and Apple

And the rest is history.  Brainerd drove the point abouot Desktop Publsihing, and a new era opened.  I could go on, and describe how great Persuasion was compared to PowerPoint, but that is a different topic.   Meanwhile, RIP Paul.

Paul Brainerd RIP

The obituary squib caught my eye, and gave me pause.   I knew Paul Brainerd, briefly.  https://lnkd.in/gBPmHenV brainerd-1947-2026-aldus-founder-devoted-his-second-chapter-to-the-planet/?

When I moved to Palo Alto for HP as their new Corporate Engineering Director in 1982, I had little exposure to the wider electronics and computer communities.   Yes, I had led the HP Logic Analyzer business, and in that connection met with key developers at many computer companies around their diagnostic issues.  Yes, I'd led the first computer graphics display project at HP, the HP 1300A, even earlier.  But except for a few stalwarts there, I didn't develop deep ties to any of the graphics teams.

In Colorado Springs, we were pretty remote, all things considered.

In Palo Alto, it was happening all around us.   And one day, an old colleague from HP--Tom Whitney--called me to invite me into a dinner club that purported to be a small-time investment club.  Tom was the lead manager for HP's (and the world's) first personal computer, the HP 9100A that I had used to develop the COPD thesis for the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission in 1970.  He also was the lead manager for the subsequent HP 35A, the world's first scientific pocket calculator.  And then he left HP to become Apple's VP of Research and Development.  That assignment didn't go so well--yes, he made $60M in stock from Apple's IPO, but his team produced the ill-fated Apple III, and he was bounced out in favor of his HP protege John Couch.  Couch also foundered, leading the LISA project before Jobs took over its slimmed-down version, the MacIntosh.

Whitney proposed a small dinner group, meeting monthly starting in late 1983, where he would invite friends and colleagues to chat about what they were working on, which inevitably led to requests for investment.  Well, we did do a little bit, but it was cursory to say the least.  The group was titled SummerHill Partners, since Tom and Donna lived on Summerhill Road in Los Altos Hills.  And SHP stood for "Since HP" for Tom.

Our third speaker was a young earnest fellow named Paul Brainerd, who was an escapee from Atex, a start-up in word processing automation tools.  One of their focii was productivity for the newspaper industry, and Brainerd had been deep into that world for awhile.  When Kodak bought the computing business, circa 1981, the word processing group was terminated.  Nearly all of the team went off on their own tangents, but almost all started some version of the same business.  Brainerd was the marketing guy, and he lacked the technical chops to invent another version, so instead he focused on a 'low-ball' derivative that he thought might be of interest for small-time newspapers.

NBI in Boulder, CO (stood for Nothing but Initials) was one version, Interleaf Inc. in Cambridge, MA was the best-known and most successful for a time.   David Boucher founded Interleaf, which developed the first commercial WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) document processor.   Stephen Kirsch would later found Framemaker, which was a dominant product for a time.   Wang acquired key folk from the group, as did Lanier, and others.   

And in my role at HP Palo Alto, I had been using (and loving) the Interleaf system for my own work for a year, when Brainerd came to our dinner in late 1983, along with a colleague, Charles Ying.  The dinner group had eleven members that night, and essentially none of them understood the value of the ideas presented.  What they did understand was the beauty of a new computer shown--a preliminary MacIntosh.  This was maybe eight weeks before the famous Apple ad at the SuperBowl, announcing the new MacIntosh.  The entire group had seen the Apple Lisa, and I believe that most of them had already seen the Xerox PARC devices.   So the idea of an icon-driven screen, rather than raster-based lines of text, was not novel to this group.   The idea of WYSIWYG printing was less familiar, but not unknown--although in fact, my usage of the Interleaf system had probably given me an edge here.

The way the club worked was each of the members (we had fourteen in total) put up $50,000 to play, and the club would vote where to invest, in small chunks of $50,000 total.   We took a vote when Brainerd finished, and the vote was 2 in favor (Tom Whitney and me) and nine against (including Bill Krause, CEO of 3Com at the time; Dave Norman, founder and CEO of BusinessLand; and Walt Loewenstern, co-founder (and the L) of ROLM Inc, about to be bought by IBM.  Ying was apoplectic, sahying something like "this will be big, you guys should support it."

I stepped in and described why I was excited.  Next thing you know, the group said, "Okay."  We gave Brainerd $50,000, of which each member had a $3,500 share.  Over seeral years time, it became $12.5M when Aldus was bought by Adobe a decade later .   It was the only significant winning investment that Summerhill ever made.   So, $3,500 became $900,000!  The worst one we made was two $50,000 votes for Manny Fernandez and his brilliant Gavilan computer, plus several of us invested some additional private money (I did another $50,000 on my own).   Gavilan declared bankruptcy 30 days after our investment!!!  Talk about sucker-punched.  

The sequels are perhaps worth recording.   Tom had loaned me my entire grubstake ($50,000) to be in the club.  I had recently arrived from Colorado and a big divorce, into what even then was Palo Alto real estate woes, so discretionary money was scarce.   His terms were to pay it back from club earnings, and I had done so for half of it within a few years.  And then, a second divorce gave up half of my small share.   So, running the numbers, I wound up investing a net $75,000 ($25,000 paid to Tom to clear the original debt, and $50,000 into Gavilan), and got back (1/2)*(1/2)*(1/14)*($900,000) = $160,000 after eleven years total time, which is a whopping 7.2% compound interest--not exactly a smash hit.

The other sequel of interest was many years later, when the Computer History Museum conducted an oral interview with Paul in 2006.   And we learned that his work to get funded was indeed difficult.  Here are the relevant passages from CHM's interview (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Brainerd_Paul/Brainerd_Paul_1.oral_history.2006.102657986.pdf)

I started trying to raise money during the summer of 1984; I called upon 50 different venture capital firms both in Seattle and Silicon Valley and was told ‘no’ 49 out of 50 times. We got all the way to September which was our drop-dead date. We had less than $5,000 left in our bank account. Finally, we got a commitment from a group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley – Palo Alto – that was made up of some partners who had been former Apple Computer executives, and they understood what we were trying to accomplish and why software might have value. The basic reason I was told ‘no’ is that no one felt that a software company had any long-term market value; that basically anyone with an idea could come up with this in his garage, and in a matter of a weekend or two, write the software. Microsoft hadn’t gone public yet; it was still a private company, and people just didn’t see how a software company was a worthy investment. It was too risky. 

(Who was the VC?).  It was Vanguard, and the partner was Douglas DeVivo; he was on our board until we sold the company. The former Apple person was Gene Carter. So, in the summer of ’84, we raised $864,000 in one round of early-stage financing based on our business plan and a very rough prototype. The product shipped a year later. The Macintosh was introduced in January, and we shipped PageMaker 1.0 the following July. 

These passages reveal the difficulty historians have with oral interviews, when they complain that the facts are not always 'correct'.

Point 1: It wasn't 1984, but 1983.  Which shows up in the 2nd paragraph, noting that the MacIntosh introduced 'the following January' (and we all know from the 1984 SuperBowl ad when it debuted.

Point 2: It wasn't Vanguard, it was Summerhill Partners, who were indeed partially former Apple execs.  We only gave them $50,000, and then Tom and Charlie Ying called Doug DeVito to persuade hin to give Paul 'real money'.  

The facts otherwise are great, and while I mentioned these tidbits once to the CHM chairman, Len Shustek, he and I both agreed that this will have to stand as recorded.

The other thing that is fabulous in Paul's interview is the story of their 'big marketing trip'--a classic story of brilliant entrepreneurship.   But I will save that for now, and maybe put it up later or in a separate. blog.

Cheers