Friday, September 26, 2008

Avid founder Bill Warner: How a dirt farmer made me an entrepreneur

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In 1987, I fulfilled a lifelong dream when I started Avid Technology Inc. The company went on to win an Oscar in 1999 for digital film editing technology. But it never would have happened were it not for a man named John Beall, whom I had met 12 years earlier, when I was 19. Although he was by then an expert in digital electronics, he always described himself as “just a dirt farmer from Alabama.”

In 1974, at the age of 18 and a freshman in college, I was in an accident that broke my back and severely damaged my spinal cord. In an instant, I was a paraplegic.

On my 19th birthday, with a cast on my back and on a stretcher, I flew from St. Louis to the Rusk Institute in New York to begin rehabilitation. Once at Rusk, I was in a room with four other people my age. One was Tom Wade, who broke his neck in a diving accident and was a quadriplegic. He couldn’t move his arms or legs.

 Suddenly, I began to feel very lucky. I watched as Tom had to have a phone cradled at his neck to talk to his girlfriend.

As soon as I got out of rehab, I started working on ways to help Tom get some control back in his life. For $20, I bought a “whistle switch” and hung the high-pitched whistle over Tom’s bed. He gave one toot, and a light would go on; another toot and it would go off. The smile on his face told me we were on to something. So I set out to make that one whistle do a whole range of things: turn lights on and off, change TV channels, answer or dial the telephone.

My first big technology demo occurred in 1974 on my parents’ beautiful dining room table. I set the machine down, plugged it in and flipped the switch. I blew the whistle and it jumped to life and started sequencing. I blew the whistle a second time and — BAM! — the lights went out, there was smoke, and we all wondered in the dark if the table was ruined.

John Beall showed up at my father’s office looking to buy some aluminum extrusions for a machine he was working on. It had to do with computers. My Dad told John what I was doing. John said “send him over.”

John Beall greeted me outside his office in what otherwise was a car-repair garage. He handed me a thick, white book with the reverence a preacher would reserve for the Bible. He said, in that wonderful, totally disarming Southern accent, “Son, this is what you need. Everything you need is in this book.”

He handed me the white Signetics 7400 Series Digital Logic Guidebook. It was the Bible of the day, the guide to all the digital chips you could want for making anything from smart toasters to giant computers.

I was dumbfounded. I said I didn’t know a thing about using chips. He said, “Look, it’s easy. Follow the book. Jim, my technician will show you how. Go to that bench and get started.” And I did. Jim showed me. By the summer of 1976, I had prototypes in the homes of quadriplegics such as  Tom.

What John Beall did for me truly changed my life. When I applied as a transfer student to MIT, I’m certain it was the working Whistle System that got me in. Then MIT led to a solid foundation in the fundamentals of engineering. When the “aha” moment came, and I knew I had a way to build that digital editor I had been dreaming about, I knew I was ready. And it all traces back to the expertise and encouragement of a dirt farmer from Alabama named John Beall.

For years, I’ve been thinking about how to foster innovation here in Massachusetts. I’ve thought about how John Beall and many other people have helped me along the way.

With the help of Tom Hopcroft and Heather Johnson of the Mass Technology Leadership Council, we’ve created a new kind of conference that’s designed to make John Beall-like encounters easy. At this 200-person “unconference,” there are no podiums, no stages, no pre-arranged panels. With the help of a facilitator, the attendees create an agenda in the first hour.

It’s a hands-on day designed for meeting people and moving ideas forward. Do you have special knowledge or skills to share? Maybe you can do for someone else what John Beall did for me. Find out more at www.masstlc.org.
 

 

Bill Warner founded Avid Technology Inc. and now runs Warner Research LLC, a software development firm that also operates a collaborative workspace for entrepreneurs. He can be reached at bill@warnerresearch.com.