We Don’t Need Any Money

 SANDRA KURTZIG

About the time Fawn Alvarez got her job writing change orders, Sandy Kurtzig was sitting down to lunch with a man she hoped would join ASK’s board. It was hard for her to believe that only a year before, the company’s future had seemed doubtful enough that she had considered selling ASK and finding a better-paying job. Now ASK was on track to triple its 1979 revenues of $2.8 million and quintuple its profits to $1 million.

The exploding market for minicomputers, like the Hewlett-Packard machines for which ASK’s MANMAN software was written, was fueling ASK’s growth. (In 1975, HP had sold about eighty of its top-of-the-line minicomputer systems. Five years later, five thousand systems had been installed worldwide.)¹ As hardware prices dropped and customers began to buy, ASK rode the surge. MANMAN was intended for managers and workers with no programming knowledge, but customers who coded could also easily add custom features, because MANMAN was written in a well-known language (FORTRAN) and shipped to customers with its source code.²

Though Kurtzig had found it exhilarating to lead ASK through its ramp-up, she also knew that as an engineer who had so far managed the company on what she called “gut feel,” she could use some guidance.³ Already she had enrolled in the Harvard Business School’s Smaller Company Management Program (SCMP), a three-week intensive session for owners and CEOs of small companies that met every summer for three consecutive years. She had also hired a second-in-command, Tom Lavey, a thirty-five-year-old former army lieutenant. An experienced salesman, he had met Kurtzig when he had come to California to see if she wanted to sell ASK to the giant computer-leasing conglomerate Itel Corporation, his then employer. After spending the day with Lavey, Kurtzig declared, “I don’t want to be bought by Itel, but I want to buy you. How much do you cost?”

Kurtzig was on the cusp of recognizing that ASK, a small business started at her kitchen table, might be a high-tech Silicon Valley startup. Certainly Paul Ely, a computing executive at Hewlett-Packard, saw ASK that way. When Kurtzig asked him to suggest potential board members—she, her father, and Arie were the ASK board at that point—he recommended men enmeshed in Silicon Valley’s financial and entrepreneurial networks.^VI

One of those men was Burt McMurtry, now sitting across the restaurant table from Kurtzig. McMurtry headed a venture capital firm, Institutional Venture Associates, whose lead fund would quintuple in value, from $19 million to roughly $200 million, in a space of six years. McMurtry was a forty-five-year-old native Texan who had moved to the Valley almost a quarter century earlier. He had an engineering PhD from Stanford, and before he had become a venture capitalist, he had run an important lab at Sylvania, where Fawn Alvarez’s mother had also worked. McMurtry had recruited the four founders of ROLM to come to the Valley to work for Sylvania; shortly after they had launched ROLM, McMurtry had joined the startup’s board. A humble man in a valley where humility was rare, McMurtry once attributed his success to his extensive technical training, which had convinced him that “you don’t know very much, really, about anything . . . so the only way you make any progress is to say, ‘I don’t get it.’ ”⁴

Kurtzig knew little of McMurtry’s background. Ely had recommended him for ASK’s board because McMurtry was a director of a company, Triad Systems Corporation, with customers similar to ASK’s. Triad, which was backed by Hambrecht & Quist, as well as McMurtry’s firm, sold an inventory management system to automotive parts distributors.

Since venture capitalists rarely join corporate boards without a financial stake in the business, McMurtry assumed that Kurtzig’s invitation to join the board was also an invitation to invest in ASK. He was thus surprised when, after telling Kurtzig that he would be happy to invest and serve as a director, she seemed confused.

“What do you mean, you’d like to invest in the company?” she asked after a pause. “We don’t need any money.”

Kurtzig was now in her third year of the Harvard Business School management program. She had been running a software company in Silicon Valley for nearly eight years. It may thus seem improbable that she had set up a lunch with Burt McMurtry scarcely aware of the venture capital industry in which he worked.

But Kurtzig had not thought of herself, or ASK, as part of the world of high-tech entrepreneurs or venture capital. She was not pursuing management education at Stanford’s business school but at Harvard, three thousand miles from Silicon Valley, where most of her classmates were running family businesses, not tech startups. Nearly all of the press she had received had appeared in manufacturing industry magazines or newsletters, with a nod here or there from a Hewlett-Packard publication.

She was not part of the crowd from Intel, National, or AMD who were drinking together at the Wagon Wheel bar. She did not join the scraggly-bearded gang with roots in the Homebrew Computer meetings. She had no connection to PARC or the Computer Science Department at Stanford or any other of the origin points of various Silicon Valley networks. Instead, she belonged to groups such as the American Production and Inventory Control Society. She had no mentor like Mike Markkula, no one to push her like Tom Perkins or Don Valentine. She had been going it alone, getting advice from her father-and-husband board of directors or her advisory board composed of customers. Every year she combed through the Hewlett-Packard annual report on her own, calculating HP’s gross margins and after-tax profit percentages, to come up with reasonable targets for ASK.

Kurtzig’s status as an outsider was due, in some part, to the industry in which she worked. Most tech companies in Silicon Valley in the 1970s built tangible products: instruments, computers, microwave devices, chips, disk drives. Venture capital deals around software were unusual before 1980. The first software products company IPO was not until 1978, when Cullinane Data Systems went public, underwritten by Hambrecht & Quist. No software company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange until Cullinane was listed in 1983.⁵

Software had even less meaning to the general public. When BusinessWeek ran a major story on the industry in 1980, the magazine had to define the term (“the long lists of commands or instructions that tell the computer what to do”).⁶ Entrepreneurs complained that even as the personal computer was gaining attention, the software that controlled the machines was little appreciated. “You can’t kick it,” one explained. “People just don’t understand it. They don’t like it.”⁷

At the beginning of 1980, when Kurtzig invited McMurtry to lunch, venture capital, IPOs, and stock options were esoteric concepts outside of a small group of financiers and executives.⁸ (That would change within months, after the Genentech and Apple IPOs.) McMurtry found it plausible that Kurtzig was not familiar with venture capital, and he was impressed that she had wanted to meet with him because she thought he had relevant board experience. “That she was not focused on financing and liquidity issues made me more interested in investing,” he says. “She was focused on building a great company.”⁹ At the end of the lunch, after declining to join the board (since he could not invest), he recommended another person she might ask.

In the course of their conversation, Kurtzig asked McMurtry: If he were to invest in the company, how much would he want to put in, and what would he expect in return? He replied that in exchange for a million dollars, he would expect to receive about twice as much stock as he would be able to buy at the same price “if you went public.”¹⁰

Kurtzig says that that was the first time she had heard the phrase “go public.”¹¹ She asked McMurtry to explain public offerings. Looking back nearly four decades, it is natural to wonder if at times Kurtzig manipulated similar situations because she knew that as a young woman, feigned cluelessness could help garner assistance and support from powerful men. Perhaps she did exaggerate her lack of understanding with McMurtry or at other times. But context matters. Women were negotiating a professional world still dominated by men. Kurtzig’s lunch with McMurtry happened around the same time that Fawn Alvarez had a supervisor stick a Post-it note on her chest and say, “I was looking for a flat surface to put this on.” The bestselling advice book for career women in the late 1970s included a chapter on “What If They Call You a Castrating Bitch or a Lez” and suggested that the best way to avoid a pass was to say, “I’m flattered by your invitation, but . . .”¹² A woman CEO of a technology company was nearly unheard of, so Kurtzig was inventing almost every step she took.

She listened carefully to McMurtry’s explanation of an IPO and quickly grew convinced that going public would be “the next logical step to making ASK a better company, the next challenge for me personally.” As a publicly traded company, ASK would have a certain gravitas, a seriousness of image and reputation that would reassure customers and attract employees. A public offering would also enable the company, with $8.3 million in revenues, to expand operations, and Kurtzig and her employees to sell stock.

Even before returning to ASK after lunch, Kurtzig began researching the next steps to an IPO. She took the same approach that Nolan Bushnell, Chuck Geschke, John Warnock, and Fawn Alvarez had taken when they had questions about business: she read a book. In this case, she drove to the public library.

Back in her office, reading and making phone calls, she learned that ASK was smaller than most companies then going public.^V She hoped, however, that its rate of growth, its lack of debt, and the building excitement around high-technology ventures would make up for the company’s size, especially since fast-growing technology companies were beginning to be valued as a hedge against inflation.

She learned something else as well: no woman had ever taken a high-tech company public. “All I heard was about men taking companies public. It was the macho thing to do, men measuring themselves against other men,” she recalls. The discovery fired her. “Why not women?” she asked herself.

Several months later, in June 1980, Kurtzig was hosting a dinner after the first formal meeting of the new board she had assembled in the wake of her conversation with McMurtry. As the waiters stood discreetly by, she surveyed the directors at her table. She had added several marquee names, including the investment banker Tommy Unterberg, Tymshare executive Ron Braniff, and Ken Oshman, the CEO of ROLM.

Kurtzig had planned the dinner to celebrate what she anticipated would be a unanimous vote to take ASK public eight months later, in March 1981.¹³ The naïf who had never heard of an IPO now planned to lead one. She had fielded underwriting offers from several investment banks, including Hambrecht & Quist, which was already co-managing what would be the top three high-tech IPOs of the year.^IV But Kurtzig thought that Hambrecht & Quist was “greedy” for investing in a startup before taking it public; the bank thus made money as both an investor and an underwriter. She instead chose the New York–based L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin, the firm that had taken Intel public.¹⁴

Kurtzig was proud of ASK. She expected that within a few weeks, the company would, for the first time, sell more than $1 million in products in a single day, a milestone achievement. Once dependent on a single computer supplier (Hewlett-Packard), ASK was now negotiating with a second company, the Massachusetts-based minicomputer manufacturer DEC. The move to acquire a second source was inspired, in part, by HP’s decision to release a competing manufacturing software package, with a name—MM/3000—suspiciously similar to MANMAN. “We had this definite feeling that HP’s hardware was all responsible” for ASK’s success, recalls one HP executive who also described the company’s relationship with ASK as “a little bit of a love-hate.”¹⁵

The dinner began as the wineglass-clinking, multicourse event that Kurtzig had expected. But when the dessert dishes had been cleared, Ken Oshman, the ROLM CEO, laid his napkin on the table and said something she did not want to hear.

“You can go public if you want to go public. Everyone else is going public,” Oshman said. “But I simply don’t think ASK is ready.” As Kurtzig and the rest of the table went silent, Oshman enumerated the reasons against an IPO. ASK didn’t need the money, and if Kurtzig wanted outside investors, they would be easy to find privately. A public offering was risky. At $8.3 million, ASK’s revenues were well below most companies’ at the IPO stage. (Apple, admittedly an outlier, had $117 million in revenues at its IPO.) With the exception of Tom Lavey, the sales executive Kurtzig had “bought” in 1978, ASK’s management team lacked experience outside the company. Oshman said that ASK should not go public until it had grown and hired more senior managers.

“I know you want a unanimous vote, and I’d be willing to resign from the board,” Oshman said, “but my recommendation is to wait.”¹⁶

Kurtzig was stunned. She heard herself asking the other board members what they thought of Oshman’s points. She heard them saying, after a bit of hemming, that they guessed they agreed with him. And when Kurtzig thought about it, she did, too.

She excused herself. In the ladies room, where she knew no other board member could follow her, she let herself cry.¹⁷ She had been so close, and public markets were fickle. Right now the market was churning out one successful IPO after another, at a pace more than triple the previous year’s. Every month brought a new record for the number of IPOs.¹⁸ What if the window of opportunity slammed shut while she followed Oshman’s advice? She would not be able to take ASK to the next level. She would not be able to cash out.

After a few minutes, she wiped her face and took a deep breath. She went back to the table. She paid the bill. She went home. The next morning, she postponed ASK’s public offering by six months, to October 1981.

The white-hot market for public offerings in the months after Kurtzig delayed ASK’s IPO felt like a tease. Genentech’s record-setting IPO three months after Kurtzig’s fateful board meeting kicked off even more excitement as some fifty companies—Apple among them—went public in the final quarter of 1980. The graph of NASDAQ performance from February 1980 through the end of the year is almost a vertical line.¹⁹

In the midst of the frenzy, a week before Apple’s December 12 IPO, Kurtzig drove to Santa Clara to attend an American Electronics Association seminar on “going public.” Sitting in the audience with some two hundred other aspiring entrepreneurs, she listened to an investment banker caution that the thirst for new technology companies had not been so great since the bubble in 1969, when fully half of the companies that went public had had the words “data,” “computer,” or some derivative of “electron” in their names. “You better get out there fast,” he said, mostly joking. Already BusinessWeek was worrying that venture capitalists were pushing out companies with “inadequate knowhow, personnel, and track records” and that Wall Street did not have the scientific acuity to analyze these new issues properly. The banker assured Kurtzig and the other entrepreneurial hopefuls, each of whom had paid $155 to attend the conference, that the excitement ought to last a few more months.²⁰

Kurtzig needed it to last nearly a year while she followed Oshman’s advice to bring in experienced management and increase revenues and profits. She hired a seasoned head of R&D from Hewlett-Packard and a CFO from a company called Advanced Electronic Design. With Tom Lavey, she spent one night brainstorming straight through to morning, trying to imagine a way to bring in customers that could not afford a full $200,000 ASK computer system. The solution she and Lavey devised, called ASKNET, allowed customers that installed terminals (not full computers) at their companies to use MANMAN software, paying a monthly fee for processing (which would be run on computers at ASK), rather than making a large up-front purchase. In some sense, ASKNET was a throwback to the old time-sharing model. It also anticipated what today is called “software as a service,” in which companies—Salesforce.com is among the best known—offer their services as software that a user accesses through a browser over the web, rather than installing a program on a computer’s hard drive.

ASKNET was intended as a stepping-stone for companies too small, new, or timid to invest in their own computers, but businesses ended up staying with ASKNET long past the time it made economic sense. An executive at one computer manufacturer told Lavey that he was willing to pay a premium to stay on ASKNET, since the alternative, buying a stand-alone system, would mean buying HP or DEC minicomputers. “I sell computers,” he said. “You think I’ll have an HP computer in my building? We compete with them.”²¹ By 1984, ASKNET would account for 20 percent of ASK’s customer base and 15 percent of revenues.²²

By July 1981, with the IPO scheduled for October, Kurtzig had molded ASK into a more typical-looking company on the brink of an IPO. ASK had a seasoned executive team; relationships with two major computer suppliers; multiple revenue streams; an increasingly complex and integrated version of the MANMAN software package that now included graphing capabilities; nearly a hundred employees spread among company headquarters in Los Altos and sales offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Southern California; and revenues of $13 million, well above the $10 million target Oshman had recommended she hit. ASK’s performance was even more impressive in light of the significant competition that had arisen. More than seventy suppliers, from other software businesses to mainframe manufacturers, sold materials resource planning software that competed with ASK’s flagship MANMAN product.²³

Meanwhile, the mainstream press had picked up the ASK story. Kurtzig was the subject of admiring articles in BusinessWeek, Informatics, San Francisco Business Journal, Executive SF, the San Jose Mercury, and Computer Systems News. The single-page typed newsletter Executive Woman praised her as having “absolutely no hang-ups about anything . . . self-assured, easily capable of handling a family and a business, and not the slightest bit concerned about being a woman in a man’s world.”²⁴ Kurtzig confided to one reporter that she had a private bet riding on her plan to make ASK a $100 million company in five years: “I tried to get a little handicap because I was a woman but he wouldn’t give it to me. We’ll do it because I just have to win that bet.”²⁵

She asked Regis McKenna, the public relations, marketing, and strategy expert whose best-known clients included Genentech, Apple, and Intel, to help develop the slides and story for ASK’s IPO road show. “He was famous, and of course, we couldn’t afford him,” Kurtzig says.²⁶ She paid him in reduced-price stock: 1,000 shares at $6 each, about half the price at which ASK would go public.²⁷

ASK had begun giving its entire customer list to any prospective client who promised to require other companies bidding on a project to do the same. The message—ASK is so confident of its ability to satisfy customers that we encourage anyone to call any of them—not only was good for ASK but also helped to build community among customers who came to know one another from the reference calls. In 1980, ASK brought its customers together for an over-the-top user-group conference. Hollywood-themed, this amped-up version of the company’s Friday beer bust featured a Burt Reynolds look-alike and a near river of alcohol. Customers presented to one another on how they were using MANMAN or had modified the source code that ASK gave to every customer. “It was like a reunion,” recalls Liz Seckler, one of ASK’s first employees.

The spirit remained, but much had changed. The company was no longer a ragtag team of Deadheads and new college graduates dragging their sleeping bags into Hewlett-Packard. Lavey, though loved and respected, was nicknamed “the suit” for his natty attire. Ken Fox, the newly hired head of R&D, drove a Mercedes, and Kurtzig had a Jaguar. ASK’s headquarters, which had tripled in size for two consecutive years and featured a showpiece glass-walled computer room, now occupied two one-story buildings off El Camino Real.²⁸ A sign in front, emblazoned “ASK Computer Systems,” featured a loop-de-loop logo Kurtzig intended to represent diffuse “information coming in, getting churned up by ASK software, and coming out as manageable information.”²⁹

At the company Christmas party in 1980, Howard Klein, who had joined ASK when there were only four other employees, sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock” with revealing new lyrics that he had written: “I need a loan/Gazing from my window, I wonder how it’s done./There’s a new Mercedes, musta cost a ton” and “Sales that are soaring is money we don’t see/We spend it all to buy some new V.P.s.”

That Kurtzig kept a copy of those lyrics in her company scrapbook is a measure of both her sense of humor and the easygoing relationship she maintained with her employees. She knew that some on her staff resented the changes the company was undergoing—a few members of Marty Browne’s team, though not Browne himself, wore a T-shirt emblazoned “ASK Me If I Care” on the first day the new R&D head came to work³⁰—but Kurtzig saw the objections as inevitable growing pains.

In August, ASK submitted its preliminary prospectus, the so-called red herring, to the SEC.^III One month later, Kurtzig headed to Europe for a road show similar to the back-to-back-different-luxury-meal-in-a-different-hotel-every-night effort Genentech and Apple had undertaken.

ASK’s road show, however, had a unique feature, notes Marty Browne, who joined the trip. Investors “were there to see Sandy, the woman CEO.”³¹ The marketing vice president at ASK’s lead underwriter had warned Kurtzig that many in attendance would be there “because they’ve never seen a woman do it before. And you just have to be prepared for that.” Both he and she felt that her status as a curiosity was a fact to be dealt with, not an insult. So when the vice president recommended that she trim her long red fingernails and paint them a pale, nearly invisible shade to appear more professional, she did.³²

The weeks between the end of the European road show and ASK’s IPO, scheduled for October 8, were fraught. The S&P index had dropped 17 percent in the previous nine months, seeming to fulfill Kurtzig’s fear that she might miss an opportune market window.³³ Analysts were already calling it a crash.

As the day of the offering neared, no one at ASK or L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin spoke of canceling. Kurtzig and the bankers were concerned enough, however, that they priced the stock at $11, the lowest amount proposed in the preliminary prospectus (which had given a range of $11 to $13). The highest price would have meant an additional $2.7 million, but the uncertain market meant that Kurtzig and the bankers needed to play it safe.

Kurtzig was asleep at home when Unterberg called to tell her that ASK’s offering, under the symbol ASKI, had been a success, and the company was valued at nearly $50 million. Kurtzig sold 546,550 shares of stock, worth roughly $5.6 million, at the IPO and still retained 3 million shares, worth more than $33 million ($92 million in 2016 dollars). She owned 87 percent of ASK before the IPO and 66 percent after—remarkably high percentages that can be traced, in part, to her decision not to bring in private investors along the way to her public offering. Most of the other companies that had gone public in the previous years had done so with shareholder equity three to twelve times that of ASK’s.³⁴

Kurtzig had shown that women could, indeed “compete in this league.” Two weeks after ASK’s offering, another woman-owned tech company, the Los Angeles–based computer manufacturer Vector Graphic, also had its IPO.³⁵

At ASK headquarters, reaction to the IPO was muted. Kurtzig admits that part of her wanted to cash in her millions for a pile of single dollar bills and “frolic naked through it, like Scrooge McDuck in the Disney comics of my childhood.” She restrained herself. She did spend $40,000 at a jewelry shop at the Stanford Shopping Center, but it was to buy watches for her management team.³⁶ Beyond that and a luncheon for a few managers, the celebration consisted of a low-key company party in the new on-site cafeteria, with a cake iced to read “Congratulations, ASKI.”

The quiet nature of the celebration might have reflected the distribution of stock at ASK. The company had instituted a stock option plan in 1974, and Kurtzig says that “virtually everyone” in the company was a shareholder. Liz Seckler remembers that when ASK was still small, Kurtzig had offered her the choice of a $50 monthly raise or fifty more shares per month. Seckler had chosen the $50. Kurtzig’s father had had a similar reaction to an offer of stock. When it came time for Kurtzig to repay his loan in 1979, she offered him shares in lieu of cash. “What am I going to do with it? Wallpaper the bathroom?” he joked, referring to the paper stock certificates. “That bathroom would have been worth $12,500,000,” Kurtzig later pointed out.³⁷

Though many ASK employees may have had stock options, few, including even the earliest hires, owned significant amounts of stock. When ASK went public, Kurtzig’s shares were worth $40 million. She owned 3.6 million shares, seven times the combined stock of all other employees.^II38

By the time ASK went public, it had many trappings of a classic Silicon Valley company. Its improvisational work culture featured jokes, first names, and dispersed authority. ASK’s board included the CEO of ROLM, one of the Valley’s most successful firms; the managing senior partner of a major investment bank; and an attorney from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the law firm that Larry Sonsini had by now successfully built into a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs.³⁹ Young programmers in jeans worked in ASK’s low-slung headquarters building.

When it came to stock distribution, however, ASK was structured like an old-line company or a typical small business at the time, with the founder/CEO owning the vast majority of the company, while even the earliest employees received little. As Klein’s fondly joshing Christmas song put it, “I’ll buy up all the stock options I worked for/And I will be worth hundreds, maybe more.”

Sharing equity was common in Silicon Valley at the time but not yet as pervasive as today. It certainly was rare in the manufacturing industries most familiar to Kurtzig. Moreover, though Kurtzig by the time of the IPO had well-connected CEOs, bankers, and attorneys on her board, in the beginning of the company’s life she worked outside the networks of financiers and specialist suppliers that might have pushed her toward a different equity structure.⁴⁰ The one Silicon Valley company that Kurtzig did choose as a model, Hewlett-Packard, already mature and publicly held for fifteen years when Kurtzig began analyzing it, had a generous stock purchase plan but limited its options grants to its highest-level employees.^I Ken Fox, the R&D manager Kurtzig hired (and to whom she granted options on 45,000 shares of restricted ASK stock at $1.67 per share), had never had stock options at HP, even after twelve years.⁴¹ Chuck House, a computer executive at HP, says that he received as much stock in his first year with a new employer as he had in twenty-nine years at HP combined.⁴²

Stock distribution at ASK remains a sensitive subject for early employees. Several of them spoke of their great love for the company, their great pride in its success—and their great bitterness and confusion at having shared in relatively little of the upside.

Kurtzig was undoubtedly the only CEO in history who, during the road show for her IPO, was handed a bright yellow T-shirt, which she held up for photos in front of her hired limousine, reading “ASK me if I go down.”⁴³

But $40 million makes up for a lot of sexist baloney. Of the thousands of entrepreneurs and employees who made money from the 448 companies that went public in 1981, only eight emerged from the public offerings with stock worth more than Kurtzig’s nearly $40 million stake in ASK. (Nolan Bushnell’s holdings in Pizza Time Theatre, which went public six months before ASK, were worth roughly $28.5 million.)⁴⁴

Kurtzig never did roll around in a pile of money, but she did do the Silicon Valley equivalent. She bought a red Ferrari 308 GTSI, calling from one dealer to another to negotiate the best price. She divorced her husband within a few years of the IPO. The settlement—reportedly some $23 million to her ex—was, she says, “one of the largest, if not the largest, cash and stock settlement in the United States ever given by a wife to her husband.”⁴⁵

On the first day Kurtzig brought the Ferrari to work, Marty Browne, her first programmer, asked to drive it. Kurtzig tossed him the keys.

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I. HP’s stock option plans, adopted in 1964, 1966, and 1969, limited grants to “unusually well qualified personnel” and “key personnel whose long-term employment is considered essential to the company’s continued progress.” HP did have a profit-sharing bonus, and employees could buy stock at a generous 25 percent discount, a practice ASK mirrored, though the discount was 15 percent.

II. Kurtzig says, “It would have been easier for me to give stock than cash, but at that time employees didn’t want stock. They wanted the cash. There was no expectation that the stock was going to be worth anything. The thinking was, you can’t eat stock—especially stock in a women’s lingerie shop.”

III. The document is called a “red herring” because it features a prominent statement in red on the front stating that the information contained within is not complete and may change.

IV. The top three high-technology issues of 1980 were Apple, Genentech, and Monolithic Memories.

V. Much of ASK’s revenue went to pay HP for the computers that ASK sold loaded with MANMAN software. Computers were still expensive: ASK’s revenues of $8.3 million represented sales of only about forty systems, at around $200,000 each.

VI. Kurtzig had initially asked Ely to join the board. When he declined—he did join later—he gave her other names.