Chapter 11

CASE STUDIES

This chapter provides a glimpse of how a number of actual high-information-technology ventures have formed. The Bell-Mason Diagnostic is used, after the fact, to assess the health of several of these companies at various points in their growth.

The first two examples come from software start-ups of the early 1980s:

• Ovation: a now-bankrupt software firm that conducted an aggressive sales and marketing effort but was unable to produce a product.

• Analytica: a decision-support software company that had a good product but conducted a poor marketing effort.

The next six examples involve firms that appear to be healthy and whose products are representative of the types of products that a start-up might be founded to build:

• Dragon Systems: a manufacturer of speech-recognition systems that used product sales to fund the development of its technology and its understanding of the market as computers with sufficient processing power for speech recognition evolved. Dragon's story provides an example of how a company can start up in a self-funding fashion and evolve slowly with and develop a very complex technology.

• Cirrus Logic: a $100 million, public "semicomputer company"¹ in Silicon Valley that builds complex chips for the PC industry.

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1 A semicomputer company is a firm that supplies microprocessors or microprocessor peripherals in the form of semiconductors.

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