Sandra Kurtzig started ASK Computer Systems with $2,000 and no venture funding, using customer deposits to finance growth. She built the first packaged software for minicomputers, landed Hughes Aircraft as her first major client, and stayed profitable from the start.
So the other thing is I said I had no money and I clearly— I didn't even know what a venture capitalist was at that point. And even if I did, no venture capitalist was going to give me any money. We already established I had no business experience. I was going into a market straight after IBM and I'm still a woman and I like being a woman, so that wasn't going to change. So I had to finance this company. $2,000 obviously didn't get me too much. We did get HP to let us use computers at night. So we'd go to their offices down in Santa Clara and we'd work from 12 o'clock at night till 6 in the morning on a computer they let us use. But we still needed a little more money than that. So we financed the company by getting deposits from our customers. We took a 20% deposit on the hardware that we actually sold to the company. We bought the hardware from Hewlett-Packard and then resold it, and the software. And these 20% deposits were the total funding that ASK ever got, and that took the company to the point that we were profitable. Clearly, my entrepreneurial first venture was scary. I gave up a good job at General Electric. I did— I was very— there was a fear of failure, but I believed in myself. I believed that this was a good market. That we were ahead of the market. You always want to be ahead of the market. People were just starting to think that the minicomputer can do something. And it's not too surprising because the first minicomputer that we were successful at programming had only 15 megabytes of disk and 16K of total memory. So just imagine that today. I mean, I think these— the JPEG is clearly more than that. So— and our first real customer is Hughes Aircraft. So we got all this data and our programs on a computer that size. But we were ahead of the trend and we became the first company to develop a complete manufacturing and financial management software for a minicomputer. In fact, we were one of the first companies to have packaged software. And in spite of everything that we did wrong, we became pretty successful.
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