Читать книгу The Bravest Hunter - Michael Newell - Страница 12

Dr. Kozmetsky left Teledyne and went to the University of Texas in Austin (Graves’s alma mater) as Dean of the Business School in 1966. Gordon followed him in 1969 and worked part-time as the Technology Advisor for the Barnabus Fund, a venture-capital investment partnership jointly owned by Rauscher Pierce, a Texas-based investment banking firm and the University of Texas’s endowment fund. One of their successful investments was with a startup in San Antonio called Computer Terminals. They later changed their name to Datapoint. Graves’s focus was on going to the university’s graduate business school. He made all As and won the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence. A couple of Gordon’s professors tried to entice him to remain in academia. Still, Gordon, by that time, had a passion for getting back into the business world and trying his hand at running a company.

When Graves finished graduate school in 1971 with an MBA, George introduced him to Dr. Dave Learner, President and Chief Executive of Applied Devices Corporation in College Point, New York, across the bay from LaGuardia. The investment banking firm, Loeb Rhoades, a company that started during WWII by a very prolific inventor Harry Bellock, controlled Applied Devices. The company grew rapidly until Bellock lost interest. A series of new managers, along with various disasters, came and went. In 1969, when Loeb Rhoades asked Kozmetsky to get involved and help them, the company was in disarray. Rhoades had recruited Learner, who Kozmetsky knew from his Carnegie Mellon days.

Dr. Learner bankrolled Graves’s first venture, a company Gordon named Advanced Products Laboratory (APL). He was thirty-three at the time.

Graves recruited some smart engineers (including Larry Drayer) from Teledyne and picked up Dr. Marty Keane, a brilliant mathematician and engineer from Chicago. They designed a microprocessor-based LORAN receiver, which they then sold to the Army. They next went after a contract to develop a complete avionics system for a light observation helicopter. Bell Helicopter, out of Fort Worth, was the prime contractor. APL competed against Litton, IBM, Teledyne and other avionics systems houses. APL used the same type of large-scale system design techniques Graves had used on the IHAS project.

Bell narrowed the competition down to IBM Federal Systems Division out of Owego and Graves’s Advanced Products Lab. APL won because they were bolder and worked harder than the competition, the result of a philosophical work ethic Graves had learned at Teledyne. Graves said, “I was at my physical prime then, and I could really work hard. When you write a big competitive procurement proposal like that one, you never finish writing—you just run out of time. You design as much of the system in as much detail as you possibly can, before hitting the deadline for proposal submittal, which sometimes becomes too close for comfort. Then you write it all down and polish it until the editors and the typists tell you there is no time to finish, and then you keep writing and redesigning a little longer until everyone is screaming at you. Then you jump in and help make copies and collate the pages and bind the documents and drive to the airport with them and put them on an airplane.”