The Other Side Of The Table

Tweet

For a small company, working out the details of a business agreement with IBM Corp. is usually as one-sided as bidding for ball players with George Steinbrenner. But not only did tiny Information Unlimited Software Inc., of Sausalito, Calif., carve a remunerative licensing deal for its EasyWriter word-processing program, it also hired a valued IBM employee from across the negotiating table. IBM was so startled that, to woo him back, it offered him a job anywhere in the world he wanted to go.

But software specialist Paul Chaison had left his heart in Sausalito. He had been smitten by the brief taste of a small-company atmosphere to which IBM had inadvertently exposed him while developing its new personal microcomputer. When the PC go-ahead was implemented, Chaison was one of only 30 or so people initially assigned to the crash project.

The team worked in uncharacteristic isolation in a lab at Boca Raton, Fla. Chaison was thrilled. "I loved that environment," he recalls. "We stayed up 13 nights a week to get it out." They finished in a year. People spontaneously sat down and communicated with each other, Chaison says, and got things done expediently. Realizing that in the "hurry-up-and-wait" IBM style, progress would have been terribly slow, and impressed by IUS's snap-decision capabilities (After IBM unexpectedly asked how much they would take for the company, its two principles calculated within minutes: $15 million. IBM turned it down.), he resigned and flew off to the other coast.

IUS and IBM recently announced the European introduction of the IBM PC, along with the EasyWriter package translated into five foreign languages. Chaison -- at age 43, IUS's self-proclaimed "granddaddy" -- was an active participant in the deal-making, this time on the small-business side of the table. "He knows all of them, how they think, and what's important to them," says IUS's 27-year-old founder and president, William Baker. Chaison is now managing 54 IUS projects. "He wanted to get his hands into the pie, and he sure has. He's got the entrepreneurial spirit now," says Baker. But whether that entrepreneurial spirit will last is questionable. Spurred by its IBM affiliation, IUS has more than quadrupled in size, from 12 employees when Chaison joined to over 50. Still, that is a far cry from the 1,000 or so who are said now to be working on the IBM PC.