How They Started Read Online Free Page B
Author: David Lester
felt he needed to bring in investors to tap their business expertise and accelerate the company’s growth.
Several investors were interested, but Trip zeroed in on those he wanted on board, starting with Valentine, and Ben Rosen from Sevin Rosen Funds, whom he knew from Apple. Others came knocking: Trip recalls picking up the phone at his home in the Portola Valley to find future legend John Doerr, who was then new to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
As he wasn’t desperate for the cash, yet, Trip was feeling cocky. Thinking that Valentine wanted too rich a deal, Trip played the venture capitalists off against each other to get a better valuation for his company, lowering the percentage of Amazin’ the venture capitalists’ money would buy. In the end, he raised $2 million in the first round at the end of 1982, half from Valentine, with the other half split between Sevin and Kleiner.
Amazin’ moved to a small office in Burlingame, California, in October 1982. During the company’s short stay there, Trip continued hiring, luring Stanford pal William Bingham (“Bing”) Gordon. Other early hires were Tim Mott, David Maynard, and Steve Hayes, all from Xerox PARC. Shortly, Amazin’ moved to more spacious quarters in San Mateo, California, where the company would remain for more than a decade.
Becoming Electronic Arts
Around the time of the move from Valentine’s office, the newly hired team began to agitate for a new company name. Some team members disliked the Amazin’ moniker. In one early business plan, Trip had used the name SoftArt as an amalgam to convey both software and artistry. But both Trip and Melmon knew Dan Bricklin, founder of VisiCalc maker Software Arts, and thought it best to avoid such a similar name.
Trip wanted to include the word “Electronic,” and suggested it might be called Electronic Artists, in part as a tribute to independent movie studio United Artists, whose model of artist-driven production he sought to emulate. But Hayes reportedly objected, saying that the developers were the artists rather than the staff. Finally, the team settled on Electronic Arts as the new name.
Bad timing
Despite all of Trip’s years of planning for his launch, the newly renamed company’s timing turned out to be a bit off. The technology needed to play truly full-featured electronic games had arrived, but had not yet been widely adopted by consumers. The dominant game system at the time was an 8-bit Atari console, which offered a puny amount of memory.
Trip knew from the start he didn’t want to create games for the Atari. While waiting for the game-console industry to mature, the company would focus on creating games for PCs. This posed its own challenges as the most popular PC of the time, the Commodore 64, did not yet come with an external disk drive. One would be added in late 1983, but at an extra charge that would discourage many home users.
To counter this problem, Trip devised a workaround that ended up being used in Europe for the company’s first game releases: the games were converted to audio signals on a tape cassette. With the help of an A/B adapter cord, the data could then be input to the computer to play the game.
In 1982, EA’s producers had released their first games for the Apple II— Hard Hat Mack and Axis Assassin —as well as a few games for the hated Atari 800 console— Pinball Construction Set, Archon, M.U.L.E., and Worms?. In keeping with Trip’s record-artist philosophy, each game was packaged like a record album with an eye-catching, graphical cover. This immediately set EA’s products apart from competitors, whose packaging was less slick-looking.
Rather than signing a distribution deal with an established company or competitor to get the games into stores, Trip and the entire team set out to meet thousands of mom-and-pop computer store owners to sell them, one by one. It was hugely time-consuming, but paid off in new
Several investors were interested, but Trip zeroed in on those he wanted on board, starting with Valentine, and Ben Rosen from Sevin Rosen Funds, whom he knew from Apple. Others came knocking: Trip recalls picking up the phone at his home in the Portola Valley to find future legend John Doerr, who was then new to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
As he wasn’t desperate for the cash, yet, Trip was feeling cocky. Thinking that Valentine wanted too rich a deal, Trip played the venture capitalists off against each other to get a better valuation for his company, lowering the percentage of Amazin’ the venture capitalists’ money would buy. In the end, he raised $2 million in the first round at the end of 1982, half from Valentine, with the other half split between Sevin and Kleiner.
Amazin’ moved to a small office in Burlingame, California, in October 1982. During the company’s short stay there, Trip continued hiring, luring Stanford pal William Bingham (“Bing”) Gordon. Other early hires were Tim Mott, David Maynard, and Steve Hayes, all from Xerox PARC. Shortly, Amazin’ moved to more spacious quarters in San Mateo, California, where the company would remain for more than a decade.
Becoming Electronic Arts
Around the time of the move from Valentine’s office, the newly hired team began to agitate for a new company name. Some team members disliked the Amazin’ moniker. In one early business plan, Trip had used the name SoftArt as an amalgam to convey both software and artistry. But both Trip and Melmon knew Dan Bricklin, founder of VisiCalc maker Software Arts, and thought it best to avoid such a similar name.
Trip wanted to include the word “Electronic,” and suggested it might be called Electronic Artists, in part as a tribute to independent movie studio United Artists, whose model of artist-driven production he sought to emulate. But Hayes reportedly objected, saying that the developers were the artists rather than the staff. Finally, the team settled on Electronic Arts as the new name.
Bad timing
Despite all of Trip’s years of planning for his launch, the newly renamed company’s timing turned out to be a bit off. The technology needed to play truly full-featured electronic games had arrived, but had not yet been widely adopted by consumers. The dominant game system at the time was an 8-bit Atari console, which offered a puny amount of memory.
Trip knew from the start he didn’t want to create games for the Atari. While waiting for the game-console industry to mature, the company would focus on creating games for PCs. This posed its own challenges as the most popular PC of the time, the Commodore 64, did not yet come with an external disk drive. One would be added in late 1983, but at an extra charge that would discourage many home users.
To counter this problem, Trip devised a workaround that ended up being used in Europe for the company’s first game releases: the games were converted to audio signals on a tape cassette. With the help of an A/B adapter cord, the data could then be input to the computer to play the game.
In 1982, EA’s producers had released their first games for the Apple II— Hard Hat Mack and Axis Assassin —as well as a few games for the hated Atari 800 console— Pinball Construction Set, Archon, M.U.L.E., and Worms?. In keeping with Trip’s record-artist philosophy, each game was packaged like a record album with an eye-catching, graphical cover. This immediately set EA’s products apart from competitors, whose packaging was less slick-looking.
Rather than signing a distribution deal with an established company or competitor to get the games into stores, Trip and the entire team set out to meet thousands of mom-and-pop computer store owners to sell them, one by one. It was hugely time-consuming, but paid off in new
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