At first, he found it tremendously exciting to work for a company on the cutting edge of an important new technology. Charlie Sporck, National's president, would get up at quarterly meetings and talk about doubling the company's size in the next year and putting up three more buildings."We all thought it was a big joke," Birck says, "but the company grew from $20 million to $200 million a few years later."
There was another side to the semiconductor industry, however, that made Birck uncomfortable. He saw engineers hired away from competitors, then "sucked dry and given nothing jobs" until they went to work for someone else. One engineer hired away from Texas Instruments Inc. went back to TI after a week when his new company tried to pump him about proprietary processes. It wasn't unheard of for an engineer who wanted a promotion to purposely obstruct the projects of other people in line for it.
"I grew up on team sports," Birck says. "I thought we were supposed to be working for the common good. I kept wondering: Is this necessary? Is this reasonable? Is this all there is?" Eventually he went to work at a small company called Precision Monolithics Inc., to learn about linear circuitry. Then, after a couple of years, he headed off to graduate school at Stanford University.
Tektronix Inc., the Oregon company Birck joined after Stanford, showed him that it was possible to build a business with the kind of values he had grown up with. Tek managers talked about treating employees and customers well, nurturing relationships for the long haul, and giving people enough rope to make their own decisions and mistakes. "There was this attitude that we were all in this together," Birck says. "I loved it."
The years at Tek tested his one-problem, one-answer model of the world. He went to seminars on such topics as conceptual blockbusting, heard associates in the research group talk about creative analogies, and took some classes in business at Portland State University. There, the chairs were arranged in a circle and the case studies had more than one right answer. That may not sound like much to a liberal arts major, he says, "but to an engineer from Purdue, it was a Big Aha."
All of this might have added up to nothing more than personal fulfillment had Birck not been disturbed by a sense that Tektronix had a narrow view of its future. Decisions were made not to enter the computer market and not to pursue business applications of the technology that the company had developed for engineers -- decisions that some of the young managers found hard to understand.
"Tek wasn't hitting on all eight cylinders," Birck says. Although in many ways it was the best place he had ever worked, he and his co-workers just weren't accomplishing what he thought they could. That inefficiency led him to start thinking how he could build something better: a company with the values of Tek and the energy of the semiconductor industry.
Birck never talked much about wanting to start a company, but the idea had been in the back of his mind since his days at Purdue. Being an engineer, he figured the opportunity would present itself as a technology window, so he just waited patiently for one to open up.
In 1979, the window appeared, in the form of the Apple II personal computer.
To many engineers, the first personal computers looked like sophisticated toys. Birck saw them as a "probe into the model" -- a new factor that could change the way people viewed electronic instruments. Traditional intelligent instruments relied on dedicated control computers usually built into each instrument. The intelligent instruments could then be hooked up to small computers to analyze the data. Birck speculated that if someone figured out how to work an instrument off the computing power of a personal computer, the user could avoid the duplication of intelligence that occurs when each instrument has its own, and could use the personal computer to document and manage products. He bought an Apple II and took it home to see what it could do.
His first experiments were fairly basic. He made an electronic controller for a kiln he used for stained glass work; tested a solar collector he had built; and hooked up the family security system, the lights, and the heat to a control system that would turn everything on and off. It was hobbyist stuff, but it indicated that larger things were possible.
Karen Birck was not particularly thrilled when her husband told her in June of 1981 that he wanted to quit his job to work fulltime on a business plan. As a CPA, she was capable of supporting the two of them indefinitely -- except that she was pregnant with their first child. She was concerned that Birck hadn't done anything like running a company before.
The lack of operating experience didn't bother her husband, however. Other founders he admired -- Bill Hewlett, David Packard, and Tek's Howard Vollum and Jack Murdock came to mind -- had learned on the job.He told Karen they would be better off if he got some momentum going while she was still working. Perhaps by the time the baby arrived, he would be back on a payroll.
After convincing his wife, telling his boss didn't seem particularly momentous. "There was an element of apprehension," he says. "You wonder if you're stepping off a cliff. But you take a deep breath and say, 'Here we go." Two weeks later the people in his research group gave him a cake and wished him well.
