Duane Murray was the the fourth founder of Excelan. We had an ambitious hardware development plan and we needed somebody to supplement me. Duane’s name popped up in my head. Duane had worked with me for four years. He had interned under me at Singer-Link in 1976 and came on full time in 1977. Both of us had gone separate ways in 1980, I went on to work for Zilog and he had gone to work for Tandem Computers. When I called him to let him know that I was starting a new company, he immediately asked when could he join. No discussion about title, salary or equity followed. He just assumed that I will take care of him.
Duane was a hardware engineer par excellence. He handwired the initial boards that I had designed and debugged them. He totally relieved me of actual design work. I designed the initial Multibus Ethernet board but Duane designed all the other busses- Uni Bus, Q Bus, PC Bus, VME Bus. Duane was a most dependable individual and was like me, a perfectionist.
Later when I became CEO and realized that our sales and marketing was not very effective. I plucked Duane out of engineering and made him director of Technical marketing with an explicit charter of making our sales process effective. Duane moved into sales area and with his usual zeal set about to find out why a large number of incoming calls were not converting into sales. He quickly discovered that actual sales were very much technical in nature and a usual initial buyer was a ‘nerd’ and needed a “nerd’ on our side to close the deal. We put several engineers on the frontlines and started to close sales rapidly. Duane was later promoted to VP of marketing. He made a great VP of Marketing.
Incidentally, Duane did very well when the company went public. I had assumed that Duane would do a start-up of his own after leaving Novell. That was not to be. Instead, he opened a restaurant and lived happily ever after.