TiE’s first annual report was published in 1996.
Philosophical framework was wordsmithed by Suhas Patil, Roy Prasad and yours truly over a bottle of wine at Suhas’s house.
It took several revisions and precise wordsmithing to get it right!
It was not called TiEcon back in 1994. That name did not come about till 1997. But the very first public TiE conference was held on March 26-27 at The Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. Initial thought was maybe 100 to 200 people may come – 500 had signed up by the time conference happened.
This is the very first press we got in San Jose Mercury News. I had made a cold call to to Steve Kaufman of San Jose Mercury to ask him to come and take look at us. He was very dismissive on the phone but a couple of weeks later walked in unannounced. He did a nice story that put us on the map! Hiring became easy after that.
Excelan had hit a full stride by early 1989. We finished a very strong year in 1988 with almost $60 million in revenue. I can’t recall the exact profits, but we were very profitable. Our LAN Workplace product for PCs had caught fire. For the first time users could use their local server and be on the corporate network at the same time. We helped Microsoft with Windows where we taught them to preserve the “state of network connection” when the user switched to different window. Until then, Windows was strictly a local machine or a single window network workstation.