SAPIEN Technologies

There are few finer things in life that sitting at my desk at 6:30 in the morning munching on plain M&M’s and listening to Bob Marley. OK, maybe that is too weird. But there has been an event recently that far outshines my early morning sojourns into Reggae and chocolate: SAPIEN’s 20th anniversary party.Last month, SAPIEN celebrated 20 years in business. It was as much a surprise to me as it sounds. Considering my typical 10 minute attention span, the fact that I have done ANYTHING for 20 years is just amazing. But I digress. This is not about me, but rather about SAPIEN.This wonderful event took place at Copia: The Center for Wine, Food and the Arts located in Napa, CA (our hometown.) It was wonderfully catered by Elaine Bell catering. The food was exquisite, the wine, superb. and wonderful music filled us all with glee. Many thanks to our Office Manager, Margaret Pratt, who spearheaded the event. It was well attended by current and former SAPIEN employees and many dignitaries of the software industry who were a part of the evolution of this company. Seeing all of those faces put me into a nostalgic mood and so I graced the guests with my rendition of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” Actually, I didn’t…that would have sent the guests rushing to the brink of the abyss. Instead, I entertained them with a tale which started a long time ago in a city far, far away…Flashback…1986-1990, (Hey! It was Berkeley in the 80?s)Two 20 year old Berkeley Computer Science undergrads (Paul Lamoreux and David Gaertner) and a 27 year old Forensic Science Ph.D. student (me) are laid off from their jobs at a local computer software store. The store was shutting its doors due to its inability to compete against the surge in software discounters like EggHead. Paul had gone to work for the former store manager who had started up his own consulting business. I was teaching at Cal State, Sacramento. One evening, Paul was expressing his frustration over his boss not paying him in a timely fashion, when I blurted out, ?You know, we can just do this ourselves.? And so began the dream.Paul, David and myself started a small computer consulting firm called Group Telein. Our stated goal was that we would eventually write our own software products, but we realized that the immediate goal was to actually make some money. So we set off on the task of helping people with their computers. PC?s in an office environment was still a fairly new thing and having one at home was a small miracle. There was not a lot of support out there, so business was good.Paul?s father was a bio-mechanical engineer, which is a cool way of saying that he built even cooler stuff for people who had disabilities. One of the cool things he was working on was a device to measure knee laxity (how loosely the tibia was attached to the knee joint.) This device was to be the first of its kind to feed its data directly into a computer in real time. Who better to write the software than his own son, Paul?Eventually, this became a bigger project than originally envisioned (hey, its software, right?) Working out of my studio apartment, I taught myself how to program in Turbo Pascal, and both David and I joined in on the programming. We eventually moved into our first office in downtown Berkeley. The knee device was a success, and other projects started to come out of the company that was producing this device.At about this time, I started teaching a class in Turbo Pascal at UC Berkeley. It was not a ?Computer Science? class, but what I euphemistically called ?programming for poets.? I had an outstanding student in that class, and when the class was done, she accepted our invitation to come work for us. We had our 1st employee!!!! Eventually, we hired a few more people, most of whom showed up at our 20th anniversary party! With all of these people we had to move into bigger offices. By the time the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hit, we had 7 employees. Then we learned the first lesson in small business?don?t rely on a single MAJOR client.The company that was producing all of the devices we were programming for one day decided that it was time to stop development. Since 90% of our business came from this one client, we had no choice but to lay everyone off until we could regroup. About this time, David decided to move on to greener pastures (IBM). Paul and I decided that we should incorporate and from there was born SAPIEN Technologies. It was time to move into phase 2….to be continued…