Do You Really Want to Read This?

I can't imagine that there will be many readers interested in this blog. This is my personal story of my efforts to make something of my CycleFree Software invention. If you are interested, then I advise that you read the posts in reverse order, as they will make more sense that way.
If you want to start at the beginning, you will have to select the October archive.

This month's ACM journal has "the Blogosphere" as the cover story. The editorial comment discusses "the dangers of living in a world that exclusively reflects personal convictions but misses the big picture."

Welcome to my world!

Beating my head against the wall.

By the Summer of 2003, things were getting tight. I had to sell off my 401K, and house, and really tighten the belt to make ends meet. Luckily, Eaddy had her best year ever as a working actress in Atlanta in 2003.

They say desperation is the mother of invention. I don't know about that. I wrote Allchin a long rambling letter to his home address suggesting that if he ever returned to work he should look up my Microsoft Researcher I had meet the year before. I think a bottle of wine was involved in writing this letter.

I started running out of ideas, and after a year without a regular paycheck, I felt like I was foundering. I had a brilliant idea, that could make software much more stable, but I had just gotten another rejection from my last NASA proposal. I felt like I was beating my head against the wall. I had to do something different.

Rich LeBlanc had a friend at NASA, and I believe he was the one to suggest another approach to NASA. On the previous two proposals, I was listed as the principle investigator. I had never completed my Ph.D., with is the "union card" required for the government to give you money. The idea was to find another professor with a common interest, and make a proposal to advance CycleFree with this professor as the principal investigator.

Perhaps this could be done in conjunction with me returning to academia to complete my Ph.D. How this would help my ACIS shareholders was not immediately obvious, but I began to be concerned more with getting a paycheck so we could keep the peanut butter coming to the dinner table than a return on investment for my ACIS shareholders.

Olin Shivers was a smart Tech Professor with an interest in Programming Languages. Rich introduced us, and we agreed to create a proposal that might fund my return to Georgia Tech.

Then I noticed a bunch more hits from Microsoft on my CycleFree site. After months of no activity, I had a lot of activity. Had the letter to Allchin resulted in another look from Microsoft?

I contacted my Microsoft Researcher buddy, and he informed me that Allchin had indeed sought him out and discussed the technology with him. FINALLY! My old buddy that held the destiny of WINDOWS in his hands had talked to my new buddy who completely understood the CycleFree technology. GOOD THINGS WERE GOING TO HAPPEN!

They didn't.

The Microsoft activity faded away, and my new buddy didn't hear back from my old buddy. Maybe I needed a third buddy at Microsoft.

I can't keep beating my head against the wall, what should be done with this Technology? I had lunch with Rich DeMillo, the Dean of the College of Computing and former CTO of HP. He advised that it should be put into the Open Source community because it was too foundational for anyone else to take on Microsoft with it, and Microsoft would never embrace it. Not invented here syndrome. Hummm...

Maybe return to Tech, and get a Ph.D. I was out of ideas.

We submitted a proposal to NSF/NASA in February of 2004, with the idea that I might get funded to return to the Ph.D. program. In the summer of 2004, we got our review. Of 31 submitted proposals, only 3 had been funded. Ours received three "Good" reviews, and one "Fair" review. A much better review than previous efforts,, but no cash. Olin informed me that he got an opportunity to go to Denmark for a year, so there was no way I would be returning to the Ph.D. program at Tech in 2004.

I got a gig as a "software consultant" for a Company ran by a bunch of Romanains for a few months in 2004. It helped make ends meet. I wrote a proposal for a New York City Homeland Security project with the software to be developed in Romanian. We won the project. Then I wrote the software spec for the project and conducted testing. I was now an official part of the "outsourcing" of software jobs food chain. They were pleased with my work.

They had another project that was in trouble. The manager of the project was another American and he lobbied strongly that the Romanian embedded team was not competent enough to pull off the Mesh Radio project. I conducted a software review of the code. They had some serious problems. I wrote an excellent report that summarized the flow of the code and the nature of the problems. They were not pleased with this work. The American Manager and I were both gone less than a week after I turned in my report.

I had tried to get the Romanians interested in CycleFree. Offshore development with a superior embedded methodology. I was grasping at straws...

The Backup Plan

In the summer of 2002, Simtrol cut its staff down to a skeleton crew of four developers. I thought the cut was too deep for the Company to survive. If you are going to attack a certain market, you need to have a team that is large enough to win the battle. With its new strategy, Simtrol was too small to win any significant portion of the A/V control system market. They were abandoning hardware development entirely, which I thought was a mistake. Simtrol had one box, called an ONSIRIO unit, which was being sold with about 80% of its systems. It was the box that provided digital I/O and infrared transmitters and receivers. With this box, Simtrol had a product competitive with AMX and Crestron integrated controllers. Without it, they were not a product company, but only a software company.

The ONSIRIO used firmware licensed from a company on the West Coast called Nirvis. There were a few known technical limitations with the firmware licensed from Nirvis.

Ed Castro was a hardware engineer cut from Simtrol at the same time I was laid off. I believed that Ed should have been kept on the staff, as any control system manufacturer needs a certain level of hardware competency. The project Ed had been scheduled to work on was a better and cheaper replacement unit for ONSIRIO. I lobbied to keep Ed off the layoff list, but when the cuts were made, Ed was gone with the rest of us.

When I left Simtrol, I thought I could get attention for CycleFree Software and then win back Ed Redstone and Larry Carr's support for working together. But I wanted a backup plan. Simtrol had ONGOER, which was over 10 man-years of development, and the only CycleFree application. I knew it would be really, really hard to get some other Company interested in building their application on top of the CycleFree Kernel, and I didn't have the resources to build a CycleFree App on my own.

But Ed Castro and I could build the replacement box for ONSIRIO. We formed a Company called Zreo, and built the "ZeeBox," a better replacement box for ONSIRIO. We could provide Simtrol with a better box, at the same price point, or sell direct to Simtrol's customers giving Simtrol a 6% sales commission. Mike Miller was enthusiastic about us building an improved box.

I had confidently told Ed that there were only two possible outcomes for Simtrol, (1) they would start selling systems and become profitable, or (2) they would go out of business. Either outcome would work for me. If they became profitable, I estimated we would be selling 300-400 ZeeBoxes. Ed and I would make enough to live on and be able to expand Zreo's product offerings. If they went out of business, now that was the really exciting prospect.

Who would buy the ONGOER software from bankruptcy court? I would find a way to do this! I would then have the CycleFree Kernel, the ZeeBox, the Patent, AND the CycleFree control program. This was the backup plan. If I had been a betting man, I would have bet on the back-up plan.

I didn't really believe in the steps Simtrol was taking. The pricing plan I had advocated while Chief Technical Officer at Simtrol had been scraped. I had advocated a cheaper base price, and additional charges for "Component Technology" which was pricing based on features. This was replaced with a "device count" pricing model, selling medium, big, and small ONGOER systems.

Mike Miller had estimated that we would sell 400 in 2003. In 2001, Simtrol had used about 80 ONSIRIOs, and I told Ed I would be satisfied if we sold 100 in 2003.

We sold 19 boxes in 2003.

Ed and Larry kept Simtrol a float.

By the end of 2003 all mention of CycleFree technology had been removed from the Simtrol web site. The distance between Simtrol and the CycleFree technology kept increasing.

Striking out on my own.

I wasn't too worried about leaving my job at Simtrol. I had been employed in the software industry for 20 years, and I was one as good as anyone I'd ever met (except maybe Curtis) at writing embedded software. I had been offered a job everywhere I ever interviewed, and if I couldn't make anything happen with CycleFree, then I could always fall back on writing code for a living.

But first I was going to try to make something happen with CycleFree Software.

After leaving Simtrol, the first thing I did was revamped the CycleFree web site. Lien Suandy gave me some nice templates for a tab based user interface, and I started working on the Academic presentation. The initial CycleFree web site did not attempt to explain the technology. The idea being, I suppose, that when you have neat proprietary technology, you don't just go around telling people how it works. That was my thinking at the time.

Well, the keep-your-cards-closely-held approach had not worked, so I just set out to explain the technical approach as clearly as possible. By the end of the summer, I had finished the Academic and Programmer explanations of the technology. Then I tried to stir up interest in the new site.

I was particularly proud of the Academic presentation. I thought that by contrasting Java and the C# language, I could position the CycleFree stuff in such a way that it could be viewed as an incremental improvement to these two mainstream languages. I couldn't wait to hear what the Microsoft Researcher thought of the new site.

Microsoft Researchers tend to be pretty busy. Giving talks, publishing books, and traveling here and there. But when he finally read the site he pronounce that it took a little digging to get through to the concurrency result, but the explanation was "pretty excellent." I was pumped!

I invited my new found friend to come to Atlanta to actually go through how the kernel worked. In December of 2002, my new Microsoft buddy came and spent the night at my house in Hoschton, Georgia. I am sure he was impressed with the high tech environment as we drove past horses and road signs shot full of bullet holes. That's what happens when you marry a woman with horses, you learn to chew and spit through your teeth.

I was still on good terms with my old buddies at Simtrol. I truly believed that I would get something going with CycleFree, and then the Simtrol Board would be interested in teaming back up to make something happen together. The Simtrol Board had money, I didn't have any to speak of, and Simtrol had the world's only CycleFree application, ONGOER. I had the CycleFree kernel, and the patent. Together we had something, but separately we were both weaker. I just needed to get some real outside interest in CycleFree, and I was sure we could hook back up for mutual benefit.

When my Microsoft buddy came to Georgia, Rick was gracious enough to allow us to review the ONGOER application software with the help of Curtis, to explain how we solved various problems the CycleFree way. We had a convert. This Microsoft guy was really, really smart. He seemed to understand everything about the technology. He got it. He also could talk the .NET model articulately, Java Beans, CORBA, and all the Component buzzwords that I had neglected in my education. The door to Microsoft would soon be open again.

So I thought.

Nothing has happened quite the way I thought it would. I have a terrible track record of predicting things.

My Microsoft buddy started working on his peers. The number of web hits from Microsoft went up dramatically. People from Microsoft were pouring over the web site. Smart people were looking at my stuff. I was pumped. Then the hits trickled off slowly. Within six weeks they had all but disappeared. It was February of 2003, what was happening?

My Microsoft buddy could not be very illuminating in his e-mail responses. If he put anything too glowing in an e-mail to me, he ran the risk that I would publish it all over everywhere and potentially cause him embarrassment if he endorsed a technology that was patented, and not owned by his employer. I had to read between the lines to get a clue about what was going on.
"It is harder than it seems..." what did he mean by that? Apparently, the smart guys at Microsoft weren't seeing how this technology could solve world hunger, etc., etc.

I started having headaches. This wasn't in the plan.

I have convinced a smart technical guy inside of Microsoft of the merits of the technology. The guy was smarter than me, knew all the technical stuff I had neglected over the years, and totally seemed to understand all of the benefits of CycleFree Software. If he couldn't get people internal to his company interested, who could?

I needed my new Microsoft buddy to talk to my old Microsoft buddy. Allchin is a FORCE withing the Company. My new buddy was a Smart Guy, but not in charge of Windows. New guy talk to old buddy, good things would happen. I was convinced of it.

Okay, so I began to be a little less sure of my own beliefs. But I had a new problem. I was running out of money, and I needed to find a job. I had sent resumes out extremely selectively in the Fall of 2002, whenever I found a job on Monster or Dice that I thought would be particularly interesting. Being selective, led to no responses.

I began to send resumes to everything. By the summer of 2003, I had sent 180 resumes out without a single in person interview. One telephone interview, and only two e-mail replies that were not automatically generated. Both of the e-mail replies stated that I appeared to be "over-qualified" for their position. I began to dumb-down my resume.

Allchin, had been super great to me in 2000-2001. He personally answered my e-mails, and when he returned from his sabbatical he had his personal assistant, (Kyle?), review my ICSE paper. Kyle didn't get it.

By 2003, I was losing my credibility with Allchin, as my e-mails went unanswered. I wanted Rich LeBlanc, to spent his personal capital with Jim to get Jim to talk to our Microsoft Researcher, but I can't remember if LeBlanc tried to contact Allchin or not. But I sent Jim one last e-mail, and was surprised to get a reply. Jim was not at Microsoft. He had taken leave again for some persoanal reason. He didn't say when or if he would be back.

I had struck out on my own, and it was cold out there.

Et Tu Brutus

Dan Gittleman had made a bundle of money selling a Company to HP. He had a technical team that had built some disk replication software system, and I believe he had built sales to over $10M a year. I researched his deal a little, before I went to talk to him, and I believe he sold his Company for over $400 million in early 2000.

His timing was impecable. He sold at the peak of the dot-com frenzy. When Rick and I went to meet him in Febuary of 2002, he was living in a 30,000 ft home yards from the ocean in West Palm Beach. Dan Gittleman had money.

Rick had found Gittleman by working with his brother (Dave?) a venture capital guy in Atlanta. I was enthusiastic about going to explain how CycleFree Software worked to Dan's smart technical team. Gittleman was a technical guy with money. I was certain he would be enthusiastic about the CycleFree Technology, and his interest would help reenergize the enthusiasm of Larry and Ed.

I had strong convictions. But I was wrong to be certain of anything.

I met with Dan and his technical team around a big table in his house. After exchanging polite conversation, Dan and Rick retired to another room while I fielded questions from his technical team about CycleFree Software. I could tell there was a great deal of skepticism, but they had formed a new company called Open Peak, and they could use some of the technology we had developed for ONGOER. I invited them to do due dilligence, come to Atlanta, and continue a dialog about the technology. In total, I talked to them about 90 minutes.

On the drive back to the airport, Rick asked me how it went. I thought it went well. Rick knew something I didn't, but he did not share it with me.

In March and April, some more discussions took place with the Gittleman team, but I was not part of them. Just like Microsoft, there was no follow up dialog regarding CycleFree Software, but the Open Peak team seemed to be impressed with ONGOER. Rick told me there was a funding agreement in the works for around a half million. But I was excited about something else. I had an advocate for CycleFree Software inside of Microsoft.

The Microsoft Researcher was a featured speaker at the ICSE 2002 conference to be held in Orlando in May of 2002. He and I had exchanged a few e-mails regarding CycleFree Software and he had agreed to have dinner with me at the Conference.

The Conference itself was a little disappointing. I thought our talk went well, Rich LeBlanc and I each presented part of the paper, but all the attention was on the papers in the Academic track. Our "industrial experience" paper had an audience of less than twenty people. However, dinner with the researcher went well, and I invited him to come to Atlanta and review the actual code to see how the kernel worked.

I was pumped when I returned from the conference. A smart guy at Microsoft seemed to completely understand the significance of the CycleFree technology. Good things were going to happen.

Simtrol's warrant to acquire 20% of ACIS had expired in March of 2002. Simtrol could have exercised the warrant in 2000, exchanging 500,000 shares of Simtrol stock for a 20% interest in ACIS when the Simtrol stock was trading at $4 a share. I thought they should have done this as it would have shown confidence in the technology. It would be giving up about 2.5% of Simtrol to complete a 20% position in ACIS. A sweetheart deal. But the board did not do this. I don't know why, perhaps they had no confidence in the technology.

In March of 2002, I had offered to extend the warrant, but I wanted to make sure that Simtrol would be funded. When I went to the conference, I still believed Simtrol would be funded and the warrant would be extended. When I got back from the conference I got a surprise.

I had been stabbed in the back.

That's how it felt.

Unknown to me, there had been several conversations between Gittleman and the Simtrol Board in which Gittleman had bashed the CycleFree Technology. The Open Peak team liked ONGOER, but they told the Board that I had Simtrol held hostage, that there was no real value to the CycleFree patent. At least this is what was told to me by Rick. While I had been talking about the technology to the Gittleman team, they had been text messaging Dan in the other room with messages poking holes in the technology. Dan shared this with Rick, but Rick had not shared it with me.

According to Gittleman, Simtrol software was built on top of technology with no true value that they didn't own. While I was attending the ICSE 2002 conference, Mike Miller and Curtis Smith were explaining to the board how ONGOER could be rewritten without the CycleFree Kernel. Meetings had been held in Boston, that I thought would lead to a coalition with the Open Peak people, but instead of rekindling enthusiasm with the Board their faith in CycleFree crumbled.

My friends of 15 years, Mike and Curtis, had not told me what was going on. My buddy Rick never mentioned it to me. To this day, I don't understand this. I wasn't given the opportunity to defend the technology. I wasn't in any of the Board meetings, and the Board was making a critical decision without the advice and counsel of their Chief Technical Officer.

I returned from the ICSE 2002 conference, with an ultimatum delivered by Rick. Either Simtrol would be granted new licensing terms, completely unrestricted (granting equal rights to the use of the kernel) or the software would be rewritten taking CycleFree out of the code. This was a ridiculous position as I knew the software would never get rewritten without the kernel. I don't know how Mike and Curtis advised the baord that this was possible.

I explained that I was willing to extend the warrant, but I could not grant unrestricted rights to ACIS technology without any compensation. To this date, Simtrol had paid nothing for the CycleFree development. They had taken the benefit of the hype of the technology to close funding for their own company, but ACIS had not gotten a dime of equity funding from Simtrol.

In June of 2002, two weeks after I had returned from the ICSE conference. Simtrol had a layoff of 50% of its workforce. I was a part of the people cut.

A month later, Gittleman backed out of his offer to fund $500K. Two years later, and Simtrol is still using the CycleFree Kernel, and the code doesn't crash!

A Ray of Hope

In November 2001, things looked pretty bleak, I had spent the better part of 18 months trying to get some recognition for the CycleFree technology without any results. I had e-mail correspondence with several very smart people, James Gosling, Grady Booch, and others but they did not recognize the "diamond in the rough." Cash was running out, and we had dropped the Omega business and our customer accounts without getting any integrators interested in selling ONGOER.

It wasn't in their best interests to sell ONGOER.

Even thought ONGOER was a strong PC based control system, that DID NOT CRASH, integrators made more money selling Crestron and AMX than they would selling ONGOER. A AMX color touch screen retailed for $4,000 and the integrator could make 40 points selling it. This is $1,600 of margin. An equivalent PC based touch screen cost about $900, but it was a commodity, and the integrator could only mark it up about 25 percent, making only a little more than $200 on the item.

So even though ONGOER was a great system for the customer, it wasn't great business for Integrators. We had a marketing problem. I got involved after the departure of Scovell, and put together a plan to differentiate ONGOER from the competition. I set a base price of $500 for the software, making ONGOER dramatically cheaper than the competition, and implemented a licensing system that would let us charge more money for "component technology." These were basically features, like Click&Zoom camera positioning, that could not be provided with the competitor systems. My thinking was we needed to define the "VALUE" our system delivered and price the system according to the value.

Then we got a Ray of Hope on the CycleFree front. I had received another rejection for a paper submitted to the ICSE 2002 conference, but one reviewer had something positive to say about our paper. "In spite of its deceptive simplicity, the approach is novel and the claims appear sound." Exactly!

I wrote to the selection committee and asked if I could get in touch with this reviewer. What was it that made him see the value in the CycleFree Technology when apparently all the other reviewers didn't get it?

They contacted the reviewer, and he agreed to an e-mail correspondence. As it turns out, he was a researcher for Microsoft! Finally! Someone within the monster software organization that sees the value of the software!

Then we got another piece of good news. Although the paper had been rejected for the "academic track" of the conference, it was accepted as an "industrial expereince" paper. We would be going to the conference in May of 2002, and I would be meeting the reviewer that was intrigued by CycleFree Software.

I was convinced once the reviewer understood the technology, I would be back in at Microsoft. A patent on a fundamental major software result belongs only one place, and the smart people at this great company would see it.

We just needed to keep Simtrol going until then. Ed and Larry were tired of writing checks to keep the company afloat. From Ed and Larry's point-of-view, I could understand why they were leary of the technology. The crash proof system had crashed at Michael Dell's house, my prediction that Microsoft would jump on the technology did not happen, and I couldn't get any of the smart people to believe the technology had merit.

We needed some fresh money that was enthusiastic about what we were doing. I suggested to Rick that we needed to find a money guy that had made his fortune in technology. Someone that could understand the potential of CycleFree Software. Rick found a guy, Dan Gittleman.

The Rick and Dick Show

Richard Harrison came in with the job of disposing of the subsidiaries and raising capital. After that job was completed, Rick and I thought we could run the Company without Harrison. It would be my job to see that we built a strong product, and Rick's job to sell it.

The Board backed this point of view and chose not to extend Harrison contract. According to Rick, after paying off debts, we were left with $2.2M in the bank. The multi-stack kernel and W++ preprocessor were complete (or so we thought). It was the summer of 2000 and the beginning of the Rick and Dick show.

I would get the guys to build ONGOER, the new better control system for integrators based on the CycleFree Kernel, and Rick would sell it. We already had an installed customer base loyal to the Omega; many key accounts that would be coveted by A/V integrators: Boeing, Hoffman-Roche, Duracell, NationsBank, and Lockheed. ONGOER would be the new better Omega, and it would feature much easier configuration tools suitable for use by third party integrators. That was the plan.

Something went wrong with the plan.

The first mistake was mine. I had played a major role in the development and deployment of the Omega system that was successfully marketed to the Fortune 500 companies. I had been doing heads down product development for so long, that I felt I had neglected the theoretical advancement of the CycleFree technology. I talked Larry Carr and Rick Egan into letting me free lance for a while to promote the CycleFree stuff. I thought I could formalize the results, get a few publications, maybe get NASA interested in the technology, and get back in the door at Microsoft. The guys could build ONGOER without me.

We went out to the west coast, and found Mark Scovell, a guy with a small company doing A/V control system work with the competitor's control systems, AMX and Crestron. We bought his company to get the product experience we thought we needed to launch ONGOER. By hiring Scovell, and promoting Mike Miller to Director of Development, I though ONGOER was in good shape, and I turned my attention to trying to get P.R. for CycleFree.

I wrote several papers, and a couple of proposals for funding by NASA that did not get approved. I basically violated my own rule for doing development: write down what you plan to do before you do it. Plan the work and work the plan. I didn't have a plan with CycleFree, I was just stabbing out in various directions.

I was really bummed when my second NASA proposal was turned down in the Summer of 2001. I really thought we had a shot with that one. We also got a savage review on a paper to POPL, but the worst news was that things weren't going all that smoothly at Simtrol. Scovell's prediction that ONGOER was ready to compete directly with the competition wasn't proving to be true, and there seemed to be some sort of melt down between Scovell, Egan and Miller. I dropped the ball on this one, as I am sure if I hadn't turn my back on development I could have helped out before things got out of hand.

There were three mistakes made by Rick Egan. The first was handing over our Omega accounts to other integrators without getting sufficient value. The second was the acquisition of Scovell's company without a plan to kept the revenue and accounts that came from his business. Egan's third mistake, I don't know what it was, there is always a third mistake. It was probably letting me go off and play long after it became apparent that I was getting nowhere with CycleFree.

In truth, I didn't see the mistakes in advance so I can't blame Egan. I really thought I could get something going with CycleFree. I was wrong.

We also had some really bad luck. In the summer of 2000, we actually got to put ONGOER into Michael Dell's house. It crashed. The crashproof cyclefree system was crashing with a transient program failure. This was not supposed to happen. The methodolgy was supposed to prevent it. As it turns out, we had an error in our CycleFree kernel synchronization. The exact problem CF was supposed to fix occurred in our kernel implementation. I worked with Curtis to reduce the reentrancy in the kernel, and simplify the design to use just three semaphores instead of six. We fixed the kernel in November of 2000, but we had already lost the Micheal Dell account.

We also had a shot at winning the Paul Allen account as well. I can't even bring myself to write about that one. Simtrol seemed plagued with missteps.

Still, with all that had gone wrong, by the summer of 2001 I was still optimistic. We had a working ONGOER system controlling over twenty plasma displays for Morgan Stanley, and it looked like we would be selling them forty more systems in the Fall of 2001. Then came 9/11.

The world trade system was destroyed, and our hopes of having a profitable fourth quarter went down with the twin towers. Our 24 plasma display system burned up in the rubble, and we lost our strongest account. We were about out of money, and the Rick and Dick team had not made it happen with the funds that had been alloted.

CycleFree Hype

In the summer of 1999, VSI was once again out of cash. Dick Snelling had brought in two deep pocket board members, Ed Redstone and Larry Carr, and they had both dropped a chunk of change in the Snelling grand vision of VSI becoming a $250M business in four years. In truth, VSI was a travelling integrator with a few hardware boxes and some neat software. There was not sufficient value-add for the company to have a viable business model based only on the Omega. What should the Company do?

Judi had asked me about the CycleFree stuff, and I had explained to her that I thought it was a BIG IDEA, and could be worth lots of money to Microsoft. Judi gave me an audience in front of the board to pitch the idea behind CycleFree Software. Larry brought in a consultant, Richard Harrison, who was a bright financial guy who seemed to understand the potential for the software patent. My notion was that we could build a viable control system, and market it instead of videoconferencing, with a super-duper multi-stack CycleFree kernel that would also validate the technology. The Omega only had the single-stack kernel, and you needed the multi-stack to have the performance to do serious real-time control stuff.

I sketch out a document about how we could do this together. Either VSI could pony up some money, and buy a significant interest in the patent, or ACIS could retain the patent, and VSI would have an license to use the technology. As it turned out, VSI did not have the cash to buy a chunk of ACIS, so instead they got a warrant to acquire up to 20% of ACIS. This was considered fair value for building a system that validated the technology.

In the summer of 1999, ACIS had about 5M shares issued, and we were raising money for development of the multi-stack kernel, and preprocessor at $1 a share. We had already been informed by the US patent office that a patent would be granted, but we were still arguing over the first claim of the patent: the run-time enforcement of invocation hierarchy. I considered this a key claim of the patent, and the patent to be MUCH stronger with this claim. We had an appointment to meet with the patent examiner in September of 1999.

We turned away money at $1 a share, so it appeared to be a pretty fair evaluation to me. A lot of uncertainly about things, but a $5M valuation on an idea that could cause Microsoft to change the way they write software seemed to be pretty reasonable. In the summer of 1999 Judi left the company and Richard Harrison was designated the "interim CEO." Richard's job was to sell off one of the subsidiaries and raise money for the new business plan. The new business plan was to keep the good parts of the Omega, but focus on selling our control systems to integrators rather than direct sales to customers.

In September of 1999, we were informed that we got approval for this important patent claim. By the terms of our agreement, the warrant price was set at $2 a share if this claim was awarded, and VSI had up to two years to exercise the warrant from the date of issuance of the patent. They also had the ability to give stock instead of actual cash to exercise the warrant. I thought it was a sweetheart deal for VSI.

Larry and Ed continued to keep the company afloat, and Richard Harrison went shopping a private placement memorandum to close financing for the company. In December of 1999, I wrote an e-mail to my old buddy Jim Allchin saying I had something I thought was important, and I wanted to talk to him about it. Jim set a date for a January meeting. VSI stock was trading below 30 cents per share when I got my reply from Jim.

I had assumed that investors would be very interested in the CycleFree story, and I expected that Richard would bring a group or two of investors to VSI for me to talk with them about it. I expected VSI stock to rise, once the potential of the technology was known, but I did not expect the crazy run-up that occurred with the stock.

Rumors were flying everywhere, and the stock started to move, by the time of my meeting with Jim Allchin, the stock was over a $1 a share. When Jim had me back for a second meeting, the stock had hit a high of $9 a share, and Richard quicky closed the private placement raising $4.5M at $3 a share.

I seem to recall there were about 15-20 million shares outstanding, so a private placement at $3 gave the company over a $50M evaluation. The stock traded at $4 for a long time after the placement closed in March of 2000. Richard says the valuation was justified by a business plan, and expected proceeds from the sale of the ETI subsidiary. I don't know about that. I think most of the evaluation was based on speculation of the value of the CycleFree Patent to Microsoft.

The first meeting with Jim Allchin went great, and we had a second meeting in the Spring of 2000 (around the time of the placement) with Jim's technical team. I pitched CycleFree as a Java killer, they could have a new language to take on the Sun Java machine, and tout it as superior because of the implicit concurrency and superior small memory model performance. This second meeting did not go as well, mainly because I failed to present a coherent view of the technology. However, I had warned Jim that the subject needed a dialog, and I was convinced that if I could keep a conversation going, the smart guys at Microsoft would eventually see it.

I am sure that many investors thought the CycleFree hype was oversold. I personally beleived it was worth a billion dollars to Micorsoft, but it is one thing to think that, and another thing entirely to get it. I thought the hype was getting out of hand when the VSI stock went over $3 a share.

Rick Egan tells me that after paying the debts VSI owed, and VSI had about $2.2M in which to develop and market the next generation control system. Rick Egan and I both thought we didn't need Mr. Harrison's services after completion of financing. In the Summer of 2000, Rick Egan took over as CEO of the company. Soon thereafter, the company was renamed from VSI to Simtrol.

Around this time, June of 2000, I got a letter from Jim Allchin explaining to me why his technical team felt the CycleFree stuff would not work at Microsoft. I did not have the dialog with the team I had requested. I tried to get back in touch with Jim but he informed me he was leaving for a six month sabaticcal from Microsoft. Microsoft had just announced the .NET strategy, and C# was revealed as their programming language for web services. C# was basically a Java me-too, and was not CycleFree. They had been working on C# for over two years. Perhaps I had gotten to Microsoft two years too late.

Simtrol History, The Judi North Era

I wasn't the only one stressed out by VSI. Dick Snelling started having heart problems, and his wife kept pressing him to get out of the VSI mess. He somehow talked Judi North into resigning from BellSouth to take over the company. Judi was a class act. She was President of Bell South's consumer products division, before leaving to VSI. I have no idea what story Dick told here to get her to leave BellSouth for VSI.

Judi headed up the company for a little over a year. She came in, and started reviewing the company business in a very systematic fashion. She interviewed everyone in the company, and even though I was only working part-time, she was interested in my take on the Company. I gave her several of the technical and business model papers I had prepared for Snelling, including my paper portraying different markets as different sized hills.

Judi liked the quality of my thinking. She talked me into coming back full time to be the company's chief technical officer. She took a vote on the business model proposition and the majority of the managers were of the opinion that we could still be profitable if we cleaned up the way we did business. I didn't believe this and after about six months of trying to do this Judi came to the same conclusion.

Judi made all the right moves, she put the Leopard in a cage, made key personnel changes, and divested the obvious bad lines of business. Finally things were clean enough where she could see that the company had no future as a "traveling integrator," and that it would have to be taken into a small startup mode to emerge as a control system manufacturer.

Judi had no interest in presiding over a startup company. Judi told the board that she would be leaving the company and she anointed Rick Egan as her successor. Rick Egan had impressed Judi with his tenacity and diligence by traveling to China to extort money out of the Chinese military that had purchase over $2M of Omega videoconferencing systems. It was said that Deng Xiaoping himself enjoyed using the Omega and positioning the camera with click&zoom camera control. Rick had tenacity, and Judi knew the company needed tenacity to survive. Finally Judi concluded her tenure by writing off $10M in crazy past VSI mistakes, and booting the Leopard out the door.

The Microsoft Strategy

I thought I would get a patent for the CycleFree Kernel in 1997. We had applied for a patent in 1994, and most patents took about three years. My brother Lee and I formed a company, ACIS in 1994 and raised money from our own family members to fund the patent after VSI passed on the opportunity to own controlling interest in the technology.

I always believed the patent would wind up at Microsoft. The CycleFree stuff affects things at a low level, and the company that had the most to gain and the most to lose from this Technology was the company that owned the Lion's share of the platform market, Microsoft.

When I resigned as Director of Software Development, I had given up on VSI. I was bidding time until I got my patent for CycleFree Software, and then I planned to make a trip to Microsoft. An old buddy of mine out there was in charge of Windows. Jim Allchin and I had both been Ph.D. students at Georgia Tech. I'm not sure Jim would have considered me an old buddy, but I considered him one. He had given me guitar lessons, and the high point of my week was travelling out to Allcin Estates in the Atlanta suburbs to jam with Jim.

Jim had everyting I lacked as a Ph.D. student, focus, discipline, and intensity. Unlike most of the faculty and students at Tech, Jim had a genuine desire to bring out the best in others. He was extremely encouraging and I am sure these personal charcteristics and his highly competitive nature served him well in his career. I had helped Jim during his thesis, by implementing some of his algorithms for distributed transaction control in a Pascal simulator. I was fairly confident Jim would give me an audience when I came to pitch CycleFree Software to Microsoft.