Natural-Born Entrepreneur

I was lucky. No doubt about it. In 1979, when my partner, Bob Frankston, and I created VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, we didn’t realize it would jump-start the personal computer industry—let alone revolutionize the businesses kept records and tested financial scenarios. In the midst of my studies at Harvard Business School, I had grown more than little frustrated by having to manually calculate and recalculate every single change on a spreadsheet as I worked through a case study. There had to be a better way, I figured, so I started designing a computer program to address those inefficiencies. I described my idea to Bob Frankston, whom I’d met as an undergraduate at MIT, and he agreed to try to turn my primitive prototype into a working program. After toiling for several months in the attic of Bob’s home, we had a hunch that we might have something big on our hands. The rest of the VisiCalc story is replete with the usual twists and turns—not to mention some very difficult downturns. But that cool little software program is still regarded as the first killer app of the PC industry, and, much to my surprise, I have had to get comfortable with being famous as “the father of the electronic spreadsheet.”