Start-up Stories

Start-up Stories

Mister Clean
The story of Murray Spangler, who because of his asthma (and his job as a Janitor at an Ohio department store) ended up inventing the Vacuum Cleaner. He later sold the patent to his brother-in-law William Hoover, who succeeded in popularizing it, and making "Hoover" synonymous with vacuuming.

Gateway Computers
Started in 1985 by Ted Waitt and his friend, Mike Hammond, on his family's cattle farm in Iowa (Gateway PCs, are still shipped in boxes with the black and white patches mimicing those on a jersey cow - the cow also serves as the company's logo). Armed with a $10,000 loan guaranteed by his grandmother, he built what is today the fourth-largest PC manufacturer in the U.S., with $9.6 billion in sales and 14,000 employees. His secret: Cut out the expensive middleman and sell custom-made PCs direct to consumers and businesses.

Computer Associates
Founded in 1978 by Charles Wang and two partners to provide IBM customers with performance enhancing software Products. Its first product was a data sorting program for IBM mainframes. It went public in 1981. In 1989, it was the first billion-dollar software firm. Its strategy was to acquire companies with software products and, and make them part of it's suite of products of tools in that category.
Till mid-2000, CA had several products and the long list was rather confusing. It now has branded its products into groups and repositioned itself as a firm that supplies e-business infrastructure software. Its software allows firms to manage any software or hardware from a single console. You can back up a PDA or manage an application running on a mainframe remotely.

Read about some of the initial reactions to what are today's success stories.

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