Thomas Prescott: From Funding to Product Launch

Early in 97, Zia and Kelsey were at Stanford Business School getting their masters, their MBAs, and they thought there had to be a better way. They came up with this idea. They actually got a little bit of seed money. The company was formed in April of 1997. It was followed by an A round, a pretty good size, a round of financing in the summer. And they went ripping off on solving problems, imagining technologies and starting to think about how they could actually bring a product like this to market. The product actually came to market and the product was shipped in August of 99. There was a lot that happened between then, including several financings all in before we made a profit. The company raised $280 million. Now, do you think that's likely today? And so I think there's shaking. No way. There's much more pressure on companies with very big ideas that require a lot of capital to enable them. And so virtual models, you've had some great speakers in here talking about virtual models and different ways to do this. Very few companies are going to have the capability to raise those kinds of dollars. I don't know that you could have done what these guys did in today's environment with the access to capital that was back then versus what it is today. But that said, they did a fabulous job of that. They had a first class group of folks here, many from Stanford computational labs, some of the same DNA that went into some of these great companies in the Valley. And they were solving enormously difficult 3D geometry problems and manufacturing technology problems. And with all the dog years of work that you can imagine went into that.