Department: Interviews Editor: Dag Spicer, [email protected]

Interview With Larry Bohn

David Walden Annals Editorial Board

& INTERLEAF, INC., WAS founded in 1981 and was was able to actually get a job at Data General, acquired by Broadvision in 2000. Larry Bohn which was just an emerging company in the was with Interleaf in 1986–1993, serving in a vari- area, and I was a software technical writer. I ety of senior management positions. This inter- wrote books about programming computers, view took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that led me to my interest in document on September 24, 2019, at his place of work, Gen- processing because it was really at the very eral Catalyst. birthofwordprocessing,text processing, etc. Walden: Please tell me about your youth and I was at Data General for a couple of years, and education. then I went to Digital Equipment Corporation, Bohn: I grew up in Milton, Mass. I went to where I managed a couple of groups. This was public schools. My dad ran a luncheonette in the time when some fundamental parts of the Boston, and he died when I was 16 years old. He declarative markup language was being devel- had been a World War II pilot, got shot down, oped, called SGML, along with the way in spent a couple of years in a POW camp, so as a which you could develop documents and result of that I actually inherited his GI benefits, structure documents, etc. I became very inter- and so I was able to go to college. I went to ested in that and ultimately went to Apollo UMass, majored in English, came out, went to Computer. Apollo was a workstation company. graduate school at Clark University, and got a It was one of the first companies to integrate master’s degree in English Linguistics while I text and graphics, and so it provided the bene- taught writing. I taught writing for a couple of fit of actually being able to show a document years at junior colleges in the Boston area and in what was called WYSIWYG form, What You realized this was not something that I wanted to See Is What You Get, and it was one of the first do for the rest of my life. platforms at this startup in Cambridge called I had a couple of skills. I was a good writer, Interleaf—actually built its software on it. and I knew a little bit about computers from Walden: At Digital, you said you led a couple taking one Fortran programming course; so, I of groups. Bohn: They were the Operating System Docu- Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAHC.2020.2968141 mentation Group; I led that; and then I had a Date of current version 6 March 2020. small development group that was building

January-March 2020 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180 ß 2020 IEEE 51 Interviews

some software to automate the text processing a license deal between Interleaf and Apollo so business. everyone at Apollo could use the Interleaf soft- Walden: Before we move on to Interleaf, I ware. It was a big thing for Interleaf, and it was a read your website where it talks about your big thing for Apollo. unusual path to becoming a venture capitalist: Walden: Early software before any real delivering groceries, driving a taxi, working on a release? farm, being a short-order cook, and managing a Bohn: No, it was just being released, so I pool hall. helped them get Apollo systems. Originally the Bohn: That was before and while I was going software was developed on Sun’s Microsystems, to college. And then, when I went to college I did which was a competitor. I helped fund the effort work on a farm, sadly, in exchange for housing, for them to port the software to Apollo, and then and I managed a pool hall in college. we used that within Apollo. About a year later, I I was sort of the scrappy guy. I had to sort of actually talked to Dave and Harry and joined the find my way early on and help a family whose company as head of product planning at Interleaf. dad had passed away; so I would say I learned to The first job I had there was Vice President of work hard early on, and that has benefited me Product Planning, working with the development throughout my life. group on sort of where the product should go, Walden: So at Apollo you were already seeing how it should be built, what the market was, etc. text and graphics. Walden: What technologies were there from Bohn: Yes. Just to back up: I learned a lot the TeX world that you used? Do you remember about document processing at Digital because it by any chance? was at the beginning of when Donald Knuth, who Bohn: TeX was a very low-level language for was a famous computer scientist, developed document processing, but there was a higher- what was called TeX, and TeX was a program- level version called Scribe, and Scribe was a ming language for documents. I learned a lot more declarative language. I think it might have about that and was very interested in the whole even used TeX. Brian Reid developed it, and it way in which computer markup worked, typeset- became very popular, and it was something that ting, and the interface to typesetting. It was a we started to use at Apollo to do our documenta- very proprietary world that was starting to open tion and to use it so that we could produce both up, and I became very fluent in the technologies high quality copy and online versions. So these that were emerging around document process- were the main sort of developments in document ing. I then went to Apollo. The thing about Apollo processing at the time; and so when I went to was it was the first workstation with a big screen. Interleaf, Interleaf was very different because You could see a document, and Apollo was very Interleaf was a completely interactive system. It interested in moving the whole documentation did not rely on any sort of low-level language. It process online so people could retrieve docu- did not rely on actually putting declarative ments electronically. I actually led a project with markers in a document. It had a user interface a small development group that was in the docu- that allowed you to create what are called com- ment retrieval business, using some underlying ponents, and so it was really in many ways the technologies around TeX to do it. Then, we first interactive structured document editor. found Interleaf, a startup company in Cam- Walden: My understanding is that some of at bridge—very small. It was a handful of people, least the Interleaf prototype came from the probably ten people, but it was building some- Etude project at MIT. thing very, very advanced. I got to know the Bohn: A number of people from the Etude founders. project, which was Mike Hammer’s project. That Walden: This is while you were still at Apollo. was a project in office automation. The docu- Bohn: This is while I am still at Apollo. I met ment processing was one of the central parts of the founders of Interleaf, Dave [Boucher] and that. I would say that was the basis for Interleaf. Harry [George]. I met the development team, The inspiration came largely from Xerox PARC Bob Morris, Steve Pelletier, etc., and I negotiated and the Star document editor. The Etude project

52 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing was sort of the foodstuff of the first Interleaf that was fundamentally enabled by high-perfor- version. mance workstations. Walden: One of the things I have been trying Walden: I have read in one of the Seybold to understand is that while Etude was written in Reports that when Dave Boucher was invited to CLU at MIT, I believe Interleaf’s original project an early Seybold technical publishing meeting, was written in C. Do you know who did that he turned it down because he said, “We’re not a conversion? technical publisher. We’re in the graphic arts Bohn: I cannot say who actually did the business.” And then a year later, he said, conversion. Most of the Interleaf people who “Whoops, we are in the ...” were developers were very strong C develop- Bohn: What happened to the company, ers, and so the original product was written in which is true of a lot of startups, is that they C. Ultimately one of the things that Interleaf basically believed that they were creating a new innovated on was building an interpreter as kind of product that could be a widespread prod- the customization layer. It was an AI language uct basically like a super word processor. Some called Lisp. of the fundamental benefits were: it was WYSI- Walden: So, at the very beginning, the pro- WYG, it was easy to use, it was highly interactive. grammers, as far as I can tell, who were at the But one of the things they failed to realize was company to for instance get the first demo going that the cost of deploying an Interleaf system in 1984 were Bern Niamir ... was so high because it ran on a 32-bit worksta- Bohn: He came from MIT. He was sort of the tion, which cost $80 000. That relegated it to a person who came from the MIT project, but he sort of specialized high-end market. The first was not the lead developer. market of the two early markets for Interleaf was Walden: Other relatively early programmers the graphic arts business and companies that were Jim Crawford, Steve Pelletier, and several were doing directories and things like that, so others that Pelletier brought in, such as Mark Donnelley was a customer—big publishers like Dionne, Kimbo Peebles-Mundy ... that. But the bigger market was what I would call Bohn: What happened is Pelletier had it the military specification technical document worked for a company out in Colorado, and he market. The reason for that is, you have to had recruited Kimbo and Deborah Landsman understand, that the software only ran on high- and Kimbo’s wife ... to the company because end workstations. Most of the high-end worksta- they had worked on a word processing system. tions at the time were being sold into defense They brought that sort of heritage, and they contractors around electronic CAD (computer were very strong developers. Crawford came aided design) because this was the Reagan from Harvard. He was a brilliant developer. buildup at the time—Reagan’s Star Wars. There Walden: Do you have insight into why the was a massive investment in the defense area, founders, David and Harry, chose a publishing and a lot of it was around embedded electronics, system as their product? so these workstations were actually being used Bohn: They were very interesting guys. Harry for ECAD [electronic computer aided design] to was sort of a poet by background although he design circuits. They were also needed to pro- later became the CFO, and Dave was—I think duce all the complex documentation around he might have been an English major at MIT. He these embedded systems, so all the people in was not a hands-on engineer. But they had done the military who were producing these Mil-Spec a lot of research in office automation, and I think technical documents saw the potential of the the relationship with Mike Hammer was funda- Interleaf system, and they had a lot of money, so mental to understanding that there were a lot of they were more than willing to fork over lots of problems in document processing around cut- money for both the workstations and the soft- ting and pasting text and graphics together, and ware. That basically guided the company to so they saw that that core innovation—being focus on the technical documentation market. able to take text and graphics on a page and Walden: There also were big companies that show it—could provide real benefit, and that need documentation.

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Bohn: Yes, exactly; so basically Interleaf Bohn: Dave Boucher was sort of a visionary, moved from sort of an office automation orienta- and I think he had a great vision for the company tion to much more of an industrial one. and the technology and what it could become. He Walden: As I understand it, the very earliest was not, I would say, a great hands-on manager. He Interleaf systems had some Interleaf hardware in was much more of a product visionary. Harry them like an Interleaf scanner of some sort. [George] was a very good fundraiser, and we Bohn: Yes. needed to raise a lot of capital to fund the com- Walden: I think that Jon Barrett developed pany, and he was very good at that, and he became some kind of a raster image processor which the CFO in the company. The other person who was licensed out. Can you say something about was very notable early on was George Potter, who the idea of building their own hardware in addi- was in charge of sales. They recruited George from tion to the software? Wang, where he sold word processing equipment, Bohn: So, the original Interleaf business and he was a very sort of aggressive, boisterous model was to build their own workstations. sales exec and did a great job landing the first And what Dave and Harry realized very early handful of accounts and OEM deals, etc. One of the on—it was a very smart decision—was that things that is sort of notable about the company is theywerenotgoingtobeabletocompetein Interleaf developed a somewhat problematic the dedicated workstation market and that relationship with workstation vendors early on Sun Microsystems was coming out with the because the product was really impressive. It was Sun-1, which was the original workstation, and a great product, and all the workstation vendors that could be a platform for the software that wanted to have it on their system, and so the com- would make it much more economically pany would work with these workstation vendors advantaged. But one of the core investments to have them pay a lot of money to port the soft- that they made in terms of the technology ware to these different workstations. The problem was in raster image processor [RIP], the thing was that it created a huge amount of channel con- that put together a page on the screen around flict because all these companies were selling to a printed page; and one of the things that the same end-user customers, so someone like they saw would be an opportunity would be Boeing would have five different vendors trying to to actually build a printer, a laser printer, that sell it Interleaf software. The most notable of these used that RIP and could produce documents was Kodak. The first big OEM deal that George did at very high performance. We actually did a was with Kodak, and Kodak literally bought a full deal with Dataproducts. Dataproducts was a perpetual license to the software to run on their big printer manufacturer. They were a laser workstations, and that did bring a big revenue printer company, and so they licensed the stream into Interleaf, but it meant that when Inter- Interleaf RIP to embed in that printer. For the leaf was starting to sell its own product directly it first handful of years most of the Interleaf cus- competed with Kodak everywhere, and so it was a tomers bought a custom printer from Interleaf really difficult situation. that had the Dataproducts printer along with Walden: Was that product stream different the raster image processor. than the investment that Kodak made in the Walden: Do you know how the founders got company? connected up with Bob Morris? Bohn: No, it was part of that. They made an Bohn: Morris was teaching at UMass. He was investment in the company, and they did a com- a pretty well-known professor of computer sci- mercial deal in which they had license to sell the ence. He was also a developer, a pretty good Interleaf software on Sun workstations with their developer, so he came. I do not know how he own printers, etc. was recruited into the company. He was in the Walden: Were you at the company at the company when I came. time of the IPO? Walden: Regarding the founders, what do Bohn: I was there. They had two IPOs. you see as their strengths and the different roles Walden: I have heard that the first IPO was each played over the years? rescinded.

54 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Bohn: Yes. When I came to the company, part would otherwise, but the company was able to of the reason I came was they needed some man- go public because the company had a strong agement. I had some management experience, business. It really did. and this was at a time when the company had Walden: Once the IPO was successful, did the just been awarded a huge government contract; company change? the contract was out of the Army, and it was Bohn: Well, the company grew quickly, and called 600-S, and this was a huge multimillion the company was under pressure to make num- dollar contract that really made the company bers. The company I would say was generally and allowed for the company to plan for an IPO. successful in the public markets although there The government contract was to automate the were times in which the company did miss its way the Army did technical manuals, so you numbers. As the company grew it became clear could see this as multiyear, millions of dollars. that Dave did not want to be the CEO of a public The system integrator was EDS [Electronic Data company. Probably the biggest thing that hap- Systems]; EDS won this award to automate the pened in the company after it went public was way in which the Army did technical manuals. that we recruited in a terrific guy named Dave We were a subcontractor, but we were going to Collard to be the CFO; Dave had been the CFO at get rich off it; so, as we won that contract, we Prime Computer, and when he came into the filed to go public. What happened is that there company he looked at the cost structure of the was an impropriety in the way in which EDS met company. You have to understand, Interleaf with or solicited some of the Army officials. through the time it went public was a systems They basically met in violation to what they company. It would sell software and hardware were supposed to do. The whole contract was together with printers, and they did that rescinded, and it was rescinded on the day the because there were few ways you could distrib- company went public, so that is why the whole ute workstations because you could not buy IPO had to be rescinded because the basis of them in a computer store. The only place you the IPO was gone. This caused a huge storm in could get them was directly from the manufac- the company. There had only been one IPO that turers, and the manufacturers were focused on had been rescinded before that; but to the selling them through OEMs like MentorSystems company’s credit, it readjusted its numbers, and and Cadence, and Interleaf was an OEM. We basi- it had a strong business and was able to go pub- cally bought the computers, loaded them with lic for a few dollars less a share a few weeks software, and shipped them to customers. Dur- later—I think it was not even a month later. Ulti- ing that period after we went public, the distribu- mately the company did go public, but it did not tion model changed a lot, so people were able to have that backstop of the big contract. buy hardware directly from the manufacturers Walden: You said that it caused turmoil in rather than through OEMs, so it meant that it the company. Was that at all levels? Were the was very hard for a company like Interleaf to employees were looking forward to this? charge the premium for a system, so when Dave Bohn: Yes, because it was a big event, a big Collard came in he looked at the cost structure celebratory event, so when ultimately it was of the company and realized that the company rescinded it was like, “What happened? What do should be restructured: it should get out of the we do now?” systems business and just sell software. What is Walden: Was there despair or did everybody interesting is the company’s revenues, which know that it was going to be taken care of? were growing very fast, continued to grow but Bohn: There was definitely despair, but I would not as fast as before, but the margins for the say the company handled it pretty well and was company increased dramatically, so overall it able to go public despite the loss of that contract. was a very positive thing, but it was a big Walden: Did the IPO hiccup matter much to shakeup in the whole company because we the financial markets or to the customers? ended up laying off a lot of people in manufactur- Bohn: I do not think it mattered much to the ing, etc.; we had built a big manufacturing customers. The company was valued less than it facility.

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Walden: Before this shift, there already were that were coming out of that. That was pretty lots of direct sales offices around the country successful. and in certain parts of the rest of the world. Walden: People I have told that I was going to Were they selling to OEMs or were they selling interview you have said, “He’s a great guy.” directly to users? Bohn: Well, that’s nice of them. Bohn: They were selling directly to users. Walden: Can you tell me something about Walden: You had these OEM channels, and your theory of managing people and technology also you had all this direct sales force. and so on? Bohn: Yes, there was a lot of conflict, and Bohn: In my career, I always worked with part of it was that when you are in the systems very, very smart engineers, and I think I learned business you are selling a two or three hundred that there are ways in which you can work with thousand dollar system to a defense contractor engineers and there are ways you cannot work in Los Angeles, and you have to support that sys- with engineers. It is very hard to tell engineers tem as an OEM, so you have to have hardware what to do. You have to sort of work with them technicians, and it is a very expensive operation. around common goals, and at the end of the day In the early days you had to do it, but as there you learn a lot of management skills around how was more distribution of the hardware directly do you organize people to get the work done as from the manufacturers it became uneconomi- a company and at the same time get the work cal, so there was a big changeover. Interleaf done of their interests, and so I would say I came was one of many companies in this transition. into Interleaf as one of the first outside manag- All the ECAD players went through the same ers. And I think I was successful because I had thing, and so ultimately the restructuring of good interpersonal skills, I could communicate the company was a huge shakeup to the organi- and really understand both the side of the engi- zation, the business model, etc., but the com- neers and the side of the salespeople. I was right pany actually came out the other side in a much in the middle, right? And in the tech business it better way. is not like a factory. In these companies, the Walden: In 1990 when this transition was sort brains run in and out every day, so a very impor- of happening the company lost sixteen million tant part of managing a technology organization dollars. Was the problem only that revenues and is try to find alignment across the different expenses were not well matched, or was there organizations, especially in the technical roles. also a big restructuring charge? The way in which you manage technical teams is Bohn: I think it was probably the restructur- quite different than the way you manage sales ing charge then. teams. Those teams are very coin operated Walden: What other roles did you play in the based on incentives of making money. Technical company? You started, you said, as Director of teams are in some ways very based on meritoc- Product Planning. racy and the ability to execute, create creatively, Bohn: I became Vice President of Product and usually there is a lead developer that can Management and Planning. I became VP of Mar- inspire and shame developers into doing great keting at one time. I sort of managed a lot of the work, and Pelletier, who was the VP of Engineer- peripheral parts of the development group, the ing, was brilliant at that. He was very good at groups that did the porting and other things. I managing people to both their own interests and was one of the senior execs that sort of managed to the company’s business. a lot of parts of the business. At a certain point Walden: I have been making kind of an in the company’s history, Dave Boucher brought approximate list of Interleaf’s product offerings in Bob Weiler [who replaced Boucher as presi- over time. Can you say something about Inter- dent and CEO in 1990], who was an exec from leaf’s product strategy? Lotus, and it was at a time when we were trying Bohn: One of the things about Interleaf’s to concentrate on certain markets. So, I led an product strategy is that you pay a penalty for effort to focus on the aircraft industry to develop being first to market, and the penalty that the product more in line with new requirements Interleaf paid was that it literally needed to

56 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing invent itself all the components of the system. market and had a certain belief that it was in the You know today, with open source software, office automation market, it realized that it could you assemble stuff. Everything’s already been not compete in that because of our system built. You just reuse it. In contrast, one of the requirements. So, the word processing market first groups I had to manage was literally the went to Microsoft and Microsoft Word, and in font group. I had a group of graphic artists some ways, people will say that Word was a who were developing typefaces for the prod- poor man’s imitation of Interleaf. Our system did uct. Now, the amazing thing was that, fast for- handle a bit more structure. It ran on a PC and, warding three or four years, you could go to at one point, we did port our software to an IBM the computer store and buy fonts for, you PC. We did a big deal with IBM. I think it was an know, $30, right? There was a massive change early version of IBM’s PC, but the problem was in the availability of underlying technology to that the PC required—it required so much mem- support document processing. But Interleaf ory that it was just out the league of most com- had to develop its own proprietary user inter- panies so ... face, proprietary font system, and proprietary Walden: Was this the IBM RT or something window system. As it was developing function- else? ality for just core document processing, it was Bohn: No, the RT was a UNIX workstation. We also in the process of having, at different also attempted a port to OS2? The first IBM prod- times, to unbundle the things that they had uct ran on DOS with an extender—a memory built previously to use more standard fonts, extender. There is a company—I think it was windows systems, and user interfaces. And from Phar Lap. They had a memory extender so the interesting thing was that the classic point we were able to run under Microsoft’s DOS with was when we did the ports of the Macintosh. a huge extender for memory, but it was sort of Steve Jobs was really excited about Interleaf kludgy because it required so much extra mem- porting its software to the Mac because we ory that no one could afford it. were the leader in this high-end desktop pub- Walden: In the second Annals special issue lishing—he really wanted to own that. But on desktop publishing, there was an article by when we ported our software to the Mac, the one of the Frame founders, and he says, “We first version had our own user interface. They directly targeted ... went nuts because everything else on the Mac Bohn: Interleaf. Yeah. was the seamless experience and everything Walden: ...Interleaf.” looked the same and here was this different Bohn: Totally. Interleaf user interface. So, we were under Walden: The Frame founder said, “Interleaf wicked pressure to reengineer our product to was the market leader and we went after them.” work within the framework of the Mac user Bohn: One of my partners here, David Orfao interface, which took a long time. ran sales at Frame. That is how I knew him. The Walden: Back to the fonts for a second, you founder of Frame was a brilliant British engineer, said you had developed your own font. Do you Charles Corfield. One of the things he realized happen to remember what font technology was that by the time that Frame entered the mar- you used? ket, there was enough of a substrate of window Bohn: What we did was we literally had technology, font technology, etc., so you could artists who would do pixel placing. They would build on top of that, and build an easier-to-use, literally draw fonts on the screen. It was our own lighter-weight product that you could sell indi- proprietary technology. They were raster fonts. rectly and compete very effectively with Inter- Ultimately, we did go to Bitstream; we licensed leaf. So, what happened is when Frame came technology from Bitstream. after Interleaf, it came after the segment, which I Walden: Can you say something about the would call the sort of secondary segment—the competition over this time? occasional user. It was not the dedicated pub- Bohn: Here is what I would say that hap- lishing group. It was much more the engineers pened in the market. When Interleaf first came to who are doing ECAD, who needed to do specs,

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etc. So they did a lot of OEM deals with all these would come into the market and this was stan- CAD vendors, and in some ways it really ate dardization on things, like, you know, page away at the bottom end of the Interleaf market. description. Adobe came in and changed the So that forced Interleaf to focus much more on world in terms of, you know, PDF, etc. Motif and what I would call the long complex document Xwindows, which was a workstation windows market, which was much more the Mil-Spec— system, came in and took over. You know, fonts hundreds of thousands of page documents, etc. came in. So the company was too tied to its own They did good job. They targeted us. They technology, which in many ways was superior. undercut us on price. This was true of, you know, if you follow the his- Walden: But ultimately Moore’s law made tory of Apollo computers, it is very similar. They the small hardware more powerful so somebody built the wrong windows system. They built their could take that business away, too. Yes? own ... And some of this people claim was sort Bohn: Yeah. The high-end of the market Inter- of an East Coast liability—that companies leaf tended to own because it became a sort of a on the East Coast would be very good a building very specialized market because of the features fundamental technologies but hang on to and functions and it was defensible, but Frame them too long as standardization came into the did a very good job taking away a bunch of the market, and Interleaf was not quick enough commodity level market. to abandon what it had built and move on to Walden: When we were talking a little while standardization. ago about distribution and direct sales versus Walden: But, of course, you had this big leg- OEM, was that the same internationally, as well? acy installed base that presumably, wanted to There was both direct sales and OEMs. be supported. Bohn: There was. And early on, you know, we Bohn: Yeah. So that was part of it but I would expanded a lot to Europe. We did a deal with say the company was just not agile enough to Japan. We expanded internationally very make those transitions quickly enough to meet quickly. Probably, it was a mistake, and we set the market. up offices and the offices were expensive and Walden: Did Interleaf have a user organiza- the personnel were expensive. So we invested a tion or more than one of them? lot. You have to understand, the early—in the Bohn: Interleaf had a really big user group—a system’s business—setting up all these offices, very passionate user-group. Yeah. A lot of users etc.—you had to hire field service people. It was were, say, these sort of young women who sat in a nightmare. front of terminals and did document processing. Walden: Did the customers pay separately They loved the product. They just loved it. There for field service and maintenance and all of that was very, very high satisfaction with the prod- or was that somehow bundled with the price of uct, especially in the early days. And there was the product? an international user group ... Bohn: No. Basically you would buy the prod- Walden: And the company supported that? uct and then there would be a maintenance plan. Bohn: Very much so. You know, it is one of Walden: And was that a useful, stable reve- the things I tried to do is to really be close to cus- nue stream? tomers and see where customers were going. Bohn: It was. Everyone bought it, but I would The Interleaf user group was both a real asset say it was not sustainable as a business model and a demanding part of the company. They long-term. were demanding to the company about new fea- Walden: What do you see the key mistakes tures and future developments. Interleaf made that caused it to have problems? I Walden: What you say about “demanding to think you sort of said that they were early and the company,” being in this very high-end busi- innovative, and the world changed out from ness, or quite high-end business with companies under them too quickly. doing different kinds of things, I assume that Bohn: I think the key thing was the company each company was asking for modifications to did not anticipate how quickly standardization address its detailed needs.

58 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Bohn: Well, let me give you a couple of Bohn: Yes. They hated it. They hated the idea examples because, in some ways, I learned very of doing it. interesting lessons in the tech business when Walden: Do you have any insight about the I was at Interleaf. As Interleaf emerged into effectiveness of the board over the years of Inter- more demanding markets, like, the Mil-Spec leaf—from founding to acquisition? technical manual market or the pharmaceutical Bohn: I feel Mike Hammer was helpful. Mike market, these markets had very specialized was a great guy and he sort of was an enthusiast requirements. on the board. The others, the investors, were So, for example, in the Mil-Spec technical mar- from Advent. Advent was the biggest institu- ket, there was a security clearance requirement so tional investor, and there is a guy named Clint that if you had a certain level of security discus- [Harris], who later ran another fund. I think he sion on a page, you had to indicate it up in the top, was helpful. But George Potter was on the Board right part of the page. Every page was earmarked and Harry and Dave. There were no real industry with what level of security. So, this was a super- outsiders on the Board, which I think was a limi- important feature for people who are doing these tation. I would say, I think the Board it did its documents because you have got thousands of job, but I do not think it was super influential. pages and trying to keep track of where the secu- Walden: There was a succession of CEOs. rity clearance is. I remember working with the Bouchet, Weiler, Rupert, Koepfler ... there was development organization, pushing them to solve Rory Cowan on an interim basis before Ellertson this problem of Mil-Spec technical manuals and to came. make it so that people who were documenting Bohn: So Ellertson was a workout guy and he these pages did not have to worry about how the was famous for doing these workouts. documents would get published with this upper Walden: Workout means what? right-hand security mark. It took forever. I fought Bohn: He will take over a company that is with the development group to do it. They finally sort of in distress. He knows how to rework it in did it, and it was, like, a knife through butter in the the public markets. He is a money-maker. market. As soon as we had that, people ran to us. It Walden: So getting the big price for acquisi- solved such a big pain point, but it was a very spe- tion ... cific vertical market feature for the Mil-Spec Bohn: He did that. Yeah. He did a very good market. job. The other people I would say ... Weiler was Similarly, in the pharmaceutical market, they a pretty interesting guy. He was energetic. He had a requirement, which was called the “big dealt with some of the issues. He was only there page number,” which means that when you do for a year. Rupert was his sales leader, and he an NDA, a New Drug Application, you are putting was very much a sales guy, and in many ways, together hundreds of documents into literally a he became CEO and he alienated many parts of million pages, and what happens is you have to, the company. at some point, repage the entire collection with Walden: Then there was Koepfler. a big page number on every page. Again, this Bohn: I do not know what his background was one of these things that you see when you was. I think I left when he came. are building out this big published set. To do Walden: Many people, primarily engineering that was sort of complicated and hard because it kind of people that I have been talking to meant that you are taking collections that had because that is my connection, have said that been paginated. You have to repaginate it. Interleaf was the best place they ever worked. Finally, we did it, and again, the same thing hap- Bohn: It was a great place. pened. It meant that it was so easy to sell to Walden: And my question is, what is your pharmaceutical companies because we had the perception of the culture? big page number problem solved. Bohn: It was a very product-driven company. Walden: And is this an example, as well as, of Very innovative company. It allowed engineers the fact that sometimes you have to cajole the to take on projects on their own and to develop engineers? ideas. The benefit of that was that out of this

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sort of, you know, petri dish, there was a lot of what I learned is that. You know, I keep relearn- really interesting technology that was devel- ing this—that what works today is likely not to oped. The downside was, if you look at the com- work in a few years, and you have to really antici- pany, it is engineering expense was off the pate change and embrace it. So that is one les- charts. It spent way too much on engineering son I learned, and the other one I learned is that and when you look at a standard public com- you really have to stay close to customers. At pany; but it was a very high performance devel- this level. at the application level, you can invent opment team that challenged each other. It was things and you can be ahead of customers but at very much a meritocracy, and I think Steve [Pel- a certain point, you have to satisfy their needs, letier] and others led it that way, and if you were and usually, an early technology solves a small, not up to the task, you were gone. In some ways, but important problem, but overtime, you have it was very demanding place but it was a very to solve more of the problem. You have to be energetic place. close enough to customers to both anticipate Walden: Was there a collaboration or friction what they are looking for and to be able to among the functional organizations? develop it in time. Bohn: I would say there was both, but there Walden: How did you come to leave was some good friction. You know, the sales peo- Interleaf? ple wanting certain things. The developers not Bohn: What happened is I had been there wanting to do them. There was that classic ten- about seven going on eight years. I had done a sion. I was often in the middle of that. lot. I had been with the company from the early Walden: Mark [Dionne] mentioned that early days. The company had changed a lot. It was on, the software engineers did the product becoming slower growth. Weiler left, a new CEO design. Do you have an opinion of how things came in, and it was clear that I had done about went once product managers came on the everything I could there. And by that time, I felt scene? like I had developed enough confidence and I Bohn: I think it was in the classic case as the said I want to run my own company, and I got product developed. It was hard for engineers to recruited by a company in the document man- be close enough to customers to really know agement market called PC Docs, and this was in what to build. Product managers came in. It was the network document management market. also at a time when the market had changed so One of the things that happened, if you look at more standardization was coming in. So, there the history of publishing, is that the first genera- was definite tension between the product man- tion was all around creation systems—tools to agers who said for instance, “We need to support create documents; and then the next generation this PostScript printer because everyone’s sup- was around managing them. So, there were com- porting it,” and the developers saying, “Well, we panies like Documentum and PC Docs, and we have this RIP printer; it is five times as fast.” [at Interleaf] had a product called RDM [Rela- Walden: You mentioned, for instance, the tional Document Management]. So RDM was a benefit of building a small thing—maybe hard— document management product but it was a but small that the customer really needs such as pretty clunky product, and we competed against in the security area and the big page number a company called Documentum, which was a area as something you learned at Interleaf. Were West Coast start-up that did very, very well. PC there other lessons from Interleaf that helped Docs was sort of in the volume end of the docu- you in your later business? ment management market around the emer- Bohn: One of the things I learned, is that you gence of PC networks. I wanted to get into have to be very careful about too much pride in running a company, the software business, appli- authorship. In other words, you know, you cation level in the volume business, and so this develop a product and you put your heart and was a really good fit, and so I was recruited to be soul into it, but you have to understand, the mar- president of the company. I think I started out as kets evolve very quickly, and if you cannot adapt the executive vice president. I became president to market changes, you are going to die. Some of of the company and ran the company. It was

60 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing actually a division of a Canadian holding com- Walden: Was Interleaf already at Canal Park pany that was in several different products in in Cambridge when you joined the company or it the legal software business, and one of our big- is still on Mass Avenue? gest markets at PC Docs was the legal business. I Bohn: I joined on Mass Ave. and made the ran that for a few years. We took the company move to Canal Park. (I invested in HubSpot, and public. It was a very successful company, and HubSpot is in Canal Park now.) then toward the end, we had some acquisition Walden: Let us talk about after Interleaf, I offers that made a lot of sense and I wanted to read again your website about you like building do it and the chairman did not, and we decided companies and you have had some successes. to part ways. You mentioned one of them that you went to Walden: After you left Interleaf, did you keep after Interleaf. following what was happening up through the Bohn: PC Docs. acquisition by Broadvision? Walden: What else happened? Bohn: Pretty much. Yeah, not super-closely. Bohn: So then, I was at PC Docs for a few But the company, I think, went into sort of a mori- years, took it public. We ended up selling the bund state because it was, you know, flat growth, company. I left. I took some time off and then I the public market. What happened is that Inter- took over a company called Net Genesis. Net leaf, in some ways, anticipated but missed the Genesis was an MIT company—very early com- Internet boom. I remember looking at Mosaic at pany. I took over CEO in I think 1998, and took Interleaf when Mosaic, the browser, first came the company public in 2000, and it was one of out, and I think there were a lot of opportunities the first web analytics companies. It would ana- for Interleaf to participate in sort of an early Inter- lyze logs and tell you what visitors were doing net applications, but for a lot of reasons—people on websites—like Omniture and companies like had left—the company had lost a lot of innova- that. I was a very early pioneer in the web analyt- tion. It did not really innovate through the first ics market. It was a good company. Young found- internet wave of technology. So what happened ers out of MIT. You know, the “go-go” days of the is Broadvision, which was in the website develop- Internet. It was super fun and exhausting. ment business, was a big company. It grew and at Walden: You mentioned that the company a certain point, it too had run out of gas, but it you went to immediately after Interleaf was in could buy. One of the things that Interleaf had kind of the document business. Were any of the was all these customers, and all these customers others in the document world? needed websites, as well as documents, and so it Bohn: No. I went from Interleaf to PC Docs to bought Interleaf and it paid a good price. NetGenesis to here. Walden: $840 million. Walden: Can you tell me what you do in the Bohn: $800 million, yeah, which is a good rest of your life, besides work for General Cata- price, which sort of saved the company. It actu- lyst—hobbies and so on? ally saved the company because I think Interleaf Bohn: I am an avid biker. I am a 21-year rider would have just declined after that. It was a very in the Pan Mass Challenge and I play a little golf. good outcome for the shareholders. I read, I travel, have two kids who are grown up Walden: When you meet people and they learn now, which is great. you were at Interleaf, do they know about it? Walden: Is there anything else that you Bohn: Today very few people remember would love to speak about that I have not asked? Interleaf. But people who worked in Boston at Bohn: Not really. I think this is a pretty good that time and anyone who was at Interleaf, really history. When I look back at Interleaf, I remem- remembers it fondly because it was one of the ber a company with brilliant promise. An exam- really two software companies in the Boston ple is, Interleaf and Adobe sort of got started area that was very notable. It was Lotus. It was about the same time, and it is a great example of Interleaf. Really, those two. The ex-Interleaf list West Coast/East Coast and focus. Adobe, you called “Interleft” was an active mailing list for 20- know, was a very focused company, built, you something years. know, the page description language. Used that

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as an OEM—OEM printers—then build on that. [Annalee Saxsenian, Regional Advantage: Culture Today, it is one of the biggest software compa- and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128], nies in the world. It built a market around its and it talks about the history of the technology technology and expanded it very, very effec- business on the East Coast and the West Coast, tively. Interleaf came out with a product that and if you look back to the 1970s and 1980s, was brilliant—everyone will say it is brilliant— both coasts were very much the same. They but it was very proprietary, and the proprietary were very defense oriented. The culture our of nature of the product prevented it from becom- Stanford, the culture out of MIT. The change was ing as wide-spread and adaptable as it would that the semiconductor business developed need to build a huge company. It is so true of very much out of the West Coast and it was a companies in some ways on the East Coast. You components business, and the East Coast devel- look at DEC and you look at Apollo and people oped into a systems business. You know, like, have long commented on this is—that the East DEC, right, was building its own computers, its Coast mentality was very much systems ori- own chips, etcetera, and that orientation ented, proprietary technology, very advanced towards integrated systems versus assemblable technology. The West Coast was very compo- components showed up in a lot of different nents oriented, standards oriented. At the end of ways. So it showed up in Interleaf. In other the day, the West Coast model became more words, you know, Interleaf was building all of its adaptable and sustainable. And so, while Inter- own pieces, and the trouble was that at a later leaf had really good success, especially early on, stage of life, it ended up having to unbundle itself it did not endure. It did not endure and there is to reinvent itself and that was a big cost; some sadness about it, but it was a great com- whereas, Frame and others were able to take pany. I loved working for it and had I not worked advantage of these technologies. It is not so at Interleaf, I could never have had the career I much the VC; it was sort of the orientation, and I have had as a CEO or Venture Capitalist. think there is still some of it. It led into why the Walden: Years ago I heard someone say, West Coast built great Internet companies. “The VC world in California is just much more Walden: This has been fascinating. Before I willing to take risks and so on than the VC world knew only a little about Interleaf—the company in New England.” eventually was in a building I would drive by on Bohn: I think that there is some truth to that. Route 128, in Waltham, with “Interleaf” on the Absolutely, but, you know, VCs do not make side of the building; also, I believe we had an companies. Entrepreneurs do, and I would say if Interleaf system at BBN. you look at what happened, you know, there’s a Bohn: You did. famous book by a woman who was a professor Walden: Okay. Thank you very much for tak- at Berkeley. It is about comparative advantage ing the time to do this interview.

62 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing