SANDRA KURTZIG SANDRA KURTZIG
By 1983, ASK was the fastest-growing software company and the eleventh-fastest-growing public company in the country.II From just under 100 employees and 150 customers at its 1981 IPO, ASK had shot to 350 employees and 700 customers. During the same period, its revenues zoomed from $13 million to $65 million and its profits from $1.6 million to $6.1 million. MANMAN blossomed from one stand-alone product with six modules to ten integrated products comprising thirty-three modules, compatible with VisiCalc and the ever-more-popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program.1
Kurtzig now moved among Silicon Valley’s elite. A poll of analysts named her one of the top three CEOs in the software industry. Working Woman magazine called her the “Queen of Silicon Valley.”2 At her beautiful, sprawling new home in the rolling hills near Sand Hill Road, she hosted parties attended by Steve Jobs and Don Valentine. She dated California governor Jerry Brown.
She and Tom Lavey folded ASK into the heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem she had spent so much of her early career outside of. They targeted the rising generation of entrepreneurs as customers. Lavey assigned someone full-time to work with venture capitalists and bankers, so the financiers would be more likely to recommend ASK’s services to promising young companies. ASK landed one of its biggest clients thanks to this outreach, when a banker phoned Lavey to say that he had just left a meeting with a startup that planned to build computers. “I said that before they bought anything, they needed to call ASK,” the banker told Lavey.3
Lavey had a sales person at the company, Compaq Computer, the next morning.I Compaq became a customer on ASKNET, the remote computing service that Lavey and Kurtzig had designed to allow customers access to MANMAN software without the up-front cost of a hardware purchase. Lavey estimates that Compaq accounted for $100 million in revenues to ASK over the next years.4
Kurtzig, whose first purchase for her company had been a filing cabinet, wanted an ASK system to be “the first thing people bought after they got funded.” She mimed plucking an investor’s check from an entrepreneur’s hand: “Don’t let the ink get too dry on that!”5
ASK’s customer list included some of the most exciting names in high technology in the 1980s, including Cisco, Seagate, and Sun Microsystems, as well as Compaq. At the important American Electronics Association conference at the Del Monte Hyatt in Monterey, Kurtzig sent every one of ASK’s customers a dozen long-stemmed roses to display in their rooms while they met with investors. “I could do that because I was a woman,” Kurtzig says, adding that every bouquet served as an advertisement. Investors would ask companies without the flowers, “Why aren’t you a customer of ASK?”6
Kurtzig kept her team together for years, even though many of ASK’s employees lacked the large stock option grants with delayed vesting that serve as “golden handcuffs” to keep even wealthy employees tethered to companies after a successful IPO. The ribbing about Kurtzig’s wealth persisted. A joke video shot in Kurtzig’s office in 1983 shows a woman’s hands dumping a purse on her desk. As hundreds of dollar bills spill onto the wood, the hands dig through the pile to retrieve a bottle of nail polish. One hand begins painting the nails on the other, and when a bit of polish bleeds onto a cuticle, the hand grabs a bill as if it were a tissue and uses the money to wipe away the smear. When the nails look good, the hands begin shoving the bills off Kurtzig’s desk, into her trash can. Through it all, the chorus of Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” blares in the background.7
The hands were not Kurtzig’s, but she played along with the joke. The sequence ends with Kurtzig, her fingernails perfectly polished, faking a phone call for the camera and laughing.
I. The analyst-turned-venture-capitalist Ben Rosen had funded Compaq and would chair its board for eighteen years.
II. Altos Computer Systems (no relation to the PARC Alto) was the second fastest growing; Bushnell’s Pizza Time Theatre (filled with video games and singing electronic characters) ranked third; and Apple ranked fifth.