With Howard and Jack's desks out there on the shop floor just like everyone else's, the no-one-flies-first-class rule, the "committed to excellence" motto coined before the word "excellence" became the corporate rage, Vollum and Murdock built a corporate culture and a company that became a mecca for Oregon engineers. Some of them thought working for Howard and Jack was more exciting than going to school.
But although many of the cultural symbols at Tektronix were the same as those to the south, there was something about the company's self-reliance, its reputation for keeping things to itself, its solidity as a corporation and the employer of decent, hardworking, family-oriented people that was characteristically Pacific Northwest.
When it became obvious in the late 1940s that the company was going to have to move "someplace where there was a large amount of ground," Vollum and Murdock asked their employees where they wanted to be, and the employees said west.
"West" at that point was mostly apple orchards and cow pastures, but land was cheap, and forward-thinking developers were building houses in all price ranges around the Cedar Hills Shopping Mall. Tektronix moved there. For all the absence of hierarchy in the Silicon Valley, employers there weren't asking their workers where they wanted to live.
And then there was the story about Vollum getting a telephone call from a woman whose radio he had fixed back in the days when that was part of what he did for a living. The woman told him that the radio had broken and asked if he would come and fix it. Although Vollum was then the president of a successful company, he drove over to the woman's house and fixed the radio. "When I fix something, it stays fixed," Vollum reportedly told the woman when she offered to pay him and he turned her down.
There weren't many environmental regulations in the 1940s and '50s, and Tektronix stayed out of politics. The company built its own waste-treatment plant when it moved west of Portland to Beaverton, and the company rule was to make sure the water that left Tek property was as clean as it was when it came on. Murdock didn't like the state tax structure, and moved across the river to Washington in the late '50s. Vollum's attitude was that he had been born and brought up in Oregon, and he intended to live there and pay the taxes without complaining.
For a long time -- 25 or 30 years of consistently strong growth -- Tektronix was like a family or a religion, and people stayed for life. Besides, there was really nowhere else to go in the Northwest. But in the 1970s, life at what had become the largest employer in Oregon began to change. The company was nearing the $1-billion level of annual sales. It chose not to go into small computers. Some sensed a wavering of corporate purpose. As in any large company investing in a wide range of research and development, there were a number of projects researched for which Tek didn't see an appropriate market. Projects got killed. And some of the managers and engineers of those projects began to think about leaving.
It had been happening for a long time in Silicon Valley -- employees leaving companies to start something of their own -- but until the '70s, this phenomenon hadn't quite caught on in Oregon. Of course, over the years a few people had left to start their own companies, but the relentless rollovers of people and resources of Silicon Valley just weren't happening in Oregon. People in Oregon had a sense that things were out of control in California. They had visions of headhunters cruising the streets during lunch hour. Drugs in the schools. Housing prices that even managers couldn't afford. People liked the slower pace of life in Oregon. They were generally more conservative than the folks in California.
But during the '70s, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel moved R&D operations up to Oregon, unrest at Tek grew, and venture capital started trickling to Oregon. Norm Winningstad left Tek in 1970 to start Floating Point Systems, a company that would build array processors. Although 1970 was a venture capital nadir, Floating Point struggled through a difficult four years, then got venture capital through the American Electronics Association (AEA) Monterey conference and went on to become a $100-million company.
The flood didn't really start until the early 1980s. Then Tom Bruggere left Tektronix to start Mentor Graphics Inc., Gene Chao resigned as head of Tek's applied research to start Metheus, Jonathan Birck jumped ship to start Northwest Instrument Systems, and Tom Clarkson left to start Graphic Systems Software. And each of them took top Tek employees along.
"People thought we were going crazy," says Gerard Langeler, one of the founders and a vice-president of Mentor Graphics. "Tek was stable. Respected. We didn't know what we were going to sell. We just wanted to start and grow something."
But, although Tek may not have purposefully supplied a climate that would encourage entrepreneurial activity by its employees, at least not in the form of spin-offs, it did supply the culture that most of its spin-offs took with them. "Tek is the glue that holds us together," says James Towne of Metheus. "It's a point of reference. We understand each other. Metheus was started by six people who knew each other well at Tek."
Tek emphasized the value of employees and invested in them, and it had a way of dealing with customers and making sure they were satisfied, points out Birck of Northwest Instrument. It's more laid back than some of the California companies, he adds.
Tek put less of an emphasis on money. Not only were salaries on the low side for the industry, but there was a sense that "Howard Vollum was looking for something more than an amazing number of turns on his bucks," says Towne. Like Tek, start-ups in Oregon seemed less flashy than those in California. Many of the people who joined Metheus took 50% pay cuts to join the start-up team. Entrepreneurs (with a few notable exceptions, among them Norm Winningstad) didn't drive Ferraris. "We're happy in our Hondas here," says Towne.
