Fauve, Macromedia, and the Entrepreneur’s Abyss
Building a software company is like painting a masterpiece while the canvas keeps moving, the paint keeps changing, and the customer keeps asking if it runs on Windows — Richard Krueger
Singapore and the First Shape of an Idea
From 1990 to 1992, I worked in Singapore at the Institute of Systems Science ISS, part of the National University of Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew had recently stepped down as Prime Minister and become Senior Minister, carefully guiding the transition of the miracle state he had created since the 1960s. I had the opportunity to meet him once while I worked there.
During my two years in Southeast Asia, I traveled extensively with my brother Fred Krueger and his wife, first through Indonesia and later to India. Fred was working in finance in Paris for the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan as an arbitrage trader. He was looking to make a professional transition into the budding software industry, and he was looking for a partner to make that leap with.
At ISS, I was working on a medical volume visualization research project involving the National University Hospital. We were developing a C-language system for Silicon Graphics workstations. During our vacations, Fred and I began talking seriously about starting a software company together. The original idea was to move to North Carolina and develop a scientific visualization tool. We were not exactly sure what the market would be. Like many entrepreneurial ideas, it began more as instinct than strategy.
Betting on Windows Before It Was Obvious
In April 1992, I moved back to Raleigh, North Carolina, with my wife to meet my brother there. Shortly afterward, Fred got divorced after his wife’s infidelity. Whatever personal chaos surrounded us, we had already committed to the company.
Our first plan was to build on Silicon Graphics hardware, but the cost quickly proved impossible. So we pivoted to the Windows PC platform. The idea became relatively simple: develop a low-cost version of Photoshop for Windows and sell it for about $100 per copy.
At the time, there were already strong products on the market, notably Aldus PhotoStyler and Fractal Design Painter. But they were expensive, selling for around $300 per copy, and neither had a true layering or object-based model. We saw an opportunity: combine the imaging tools of PhotoStyler with the paint capabilities of Fractal Design Painter, support pressure sensitivity for Wacom tablets, and bring all of it to the low end of the Windows market.
This sounds obvious in retrospect, but in 1992 it was not obvious at all. Windows had not yet fully won. Microsoft was still a much smaller company than IBM, which was pushing OS/2 and seemed to have much deeper pockets. Betting on Windows was risky. The high-end desktop publishing world, dominated by Adobe Photoshop, belonged almost entirely to the Mac. We had no desire to attack that established market head-on. We were outsiders, so we looked for the market the insiders were ignoring.
Fauve Matisse and the First Taste of Validation
After more than a year of development, we released the first version of Fauve Matisse in September 1993 and showed it at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The very first person to walk up to our booth was Nathan Myhrvold from Microsoft. He asked for a demo.
Then he asked, “How much is it?”
I said, “Ninety-nine dollars.”
He looked at me and said, “No. For the company.”
He explained that Microsoft did not have a paint system and might be interested in acquiring one. Nothing ever came of it, but for a tiny software company showing its first product, it was a powerful ego boost.
I remember coming up with Fauve Matisse’s water color brushes purely by accident one weekend in early 1993.
Another key idea that was developed in Fauve Matisse was stroke smoothing, where we would give the drawing instrument (the mouse or tablet) a lead and average out the strokes. The idea came from looking a tug boat pull a super tanker.
Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs, and the Abyss
And entrepreneurs need ego boosts, because most of the time they are staring into the abyss. The reality is that entrepreneurs are outsiders at heart. They are not like the rest of humanity. They usually have something to prove, and deep down many of them are terrified of normal corporate jobs. The people who succeed inside large corporations are often not entrepreneurs but intrapreneurs: people who know how to work within a bureaucracy, execute a corporate plan, build consensus, and make the machine move.
Entrepreneurs live in a different psychological universe. They do not have the comfort of a machine. They do not have a brand, a budget, or a corporate structure to protect them. They are usually betting their savings, their sanity, and sometimes their marriages on something the rest of the world does not yet understand. The dream of every entrepreneur is that one day a powerful intrapreneur will recognize the value of what they have created and acquire it. That is the dream that keeps them going, because unlike their corporate counterparts, entrepreneurs are walking through a minefield.
Creators of Worlds
Before starting Fauve Software, I had worked for only one true entrepreneur: Jim Goodnight, the founder of SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina. I was at SAS from 1987 through 1990. I did not interact with him every day, but I met him a few times. He reminded me of a French nobleman from the Middle Ages, constantly watching over his dominion. He was nothing like the people who reported to him. He was a creator of worlds, not someone trying to fit inside one.
SAS was a one-vision-man operation. Jim Goodnight was looking for capable subordinates who would execute on his vision. I had tremendous respect for him. When I moved to Singapore, I realized that Lee Kuan Yew was also an entrepreneur, but at the level of the state. He was in an entirely different class. If Jim Goodnight was a duke, Lee Kuan Yew was a king. The rest of us were peasants. I myself aspired only to minor nobility — perhaps a baron, if fortune smiled.
I learned more by observing this man than almost anyone else in my career, with one extraordinary exception: Wang Huning, whom I crossed in Singapore in the early 1990s, and who would later rise to the very heights of power in China.
Macromedia Notices Us
After roughly three years of building Fauve Software and driving revenues to nearly $2 million a year, we finally got noticed. The company that noticed us was Macromedia.
Macromedia had gone public in December 1993, and by 1995 it was perfectly positioned to catch the internet wave unleashed by the Netscape IPO. Suddenly, internet media creation looked like the next great software frontier, and Macromedia had both the stock currency and the ambition to go on an acquisition tear. Its flagship product was Macromedia Director, which had been used heavily for authoring multimedia CDs. And, as anyone who remembers that era knows, multimedia CDs had a certain association with adult content.
That connection was not theoretical. At COMDEX in 1994, our booth was next to Ginger Lynn, the adult film actress, who was signing autographed CDs created with Macromedia Director. I would see her at the coffee stand in full lingerie regalia, which was surreal even by 1990s trade-show standards. She was, I should add, a genuinely charming woman, and in a strange way she fit perfectly into the geek culture of the time. The early multimedia world was a carnival of programmers, artists, hustlers, gamers, hardware vendors, and adult-entertainment entrepreneurs all trying to figure out what interactive media was going to become. The entire scene captured the transitional moment perfectly: software tools, multimedia ambition, internet dreams, and adult entertainment all sharing the same fluorescent-lit convention floor.
We first met Macromedia’s management in the multimedia pavilion at COMDEX that same fall. Their CEO, Bud Colligan, and his second-in-command, Jim Von Ehr, were looking for a paint and imaging system to complement Altsys FreeHand, which Macromedia had recently acquired for $130 million. Adobe had wanted FreeHand, but antitrust concerns prevented the acquisition because Adobe already owned Illustrator, FreeHand’s primary competitor.
Bud Colligan
Bud Colligan had talked Macromedia’s stock up to nearly $25 per share after the Netscape IPO and was ready to use that liquidity to strengthen the product portfolio. He wanted to buy Fractal Design Painter, but the price was too high. Fractal was venture-funded and had too many mouths to feed for the deal to work. We were the second choice.
Jim Von Ehr
Jim Von Ehr, much like Jim Goodnight, was an entrepreneur in the truest sense, and also a creator of worlds. He had built a company around FreeHand from scratch, with a sizable team of more than twenty employees in Plano, Texas. He also had some very good instincts about software.
He used to joke that FreeHand was a monstrous piece of spaghetti code, refined over the years into a beautiful product. At one point, a CTO convinced him that the whole thing needed to be rewritten and made “object-oriented.” The rewrite cost twice as much as promised and took twice as long. The result was a product that was three times slower and significantly buggier. The users hated it. Jim eventually fired the CTO and went back to the spaghetti-code version.
His argument was that it is nearly impossible to recapture all the accumulated effort embedded in a mature legacy system. There are thousands of tiny decisions baked into the code — undocumented decisions, forgotten even by the people who made them. He believed that the value of a software system was the accumulated effort of its developers, all working over time to perfect the product. FreeHand and Photoshop were great products because every detail had been iteratively polished. It was the spit-shine-and-sandpaper approach to software development.
This was almost the complete opposite of the line Alan Kay, the creator of Smalltalk, would have taken. Kay would have argued that clean, late-bound interfaces and object orientation were what made great systems possible. I think both arguments have merit. Jim Von Ehr’s view simply came from someone in the trenches — someone meeting customer demand, shipping product, and having to pay the bills.
That said, his reluctance toward rewrites was one of the technical and ideological stumbling blocks in trying to integrate the various, disparate Macromedia products that had been assembled through acquisition. Although, to be fair, he did eventually give his blessing to the Fireworks effort, which was an integrated rewrite of FreeHand and Macromedia xRes. So he was not quite as ideologically rigid as he sometimes let on.
After Macromedia, Jim used the proceeds from the acquisition to start a nanotechnology company in Texas called Zyvex. He later became deeply interested in Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about nanotechnology and radical life extension. He once told me over lunch that he intended to live forever. I thought this was a rather kooky idea, but knowing Jim, he might just pull it off.
Of course, I am not sure he has fully considered the unintended consequences. Nor do I believe he has read the Book of Enoch. Going up against God’s plan is never a very good idea. It did not work out for Azazel, who went in the other direction and was eventually hunted down by the archangel Raphael, bound in chains, and brought back to stand trial. Of course, that was just a myth — hopefully.
All I can say is: be careful what you wish for. It might just happen.
Escaping death may simply mean an eternity in Dudael.
The Acquisition Dream Comes True
In 1995, Macromedia approached us again and offered a multimillion-dollar package we could not turn down. Our mission had been accomplished. We had found the intrapreneur who validated our three years of work.
What we did not understand was that we were entering a completely different reality. Macromedia was not one company culturally. It was several companies duct-taped together. The San Francisco office, which controlled Director, was deeply countercultural: gay, artistic, politically left-wing, and infused with the recreational-drug atmosphere of the 1990s multimedia scene. The Plano, Texas office, which managed FreeHand, was the opposite: conservative, Republican, and Protestant evangelical in flavor. We were based in San Francisco but reported to Plano. That was the first mistake.
Inside the Machine
As someone with esoteric interests, including with the Theosophical Society, I personally fit far better with the San Francisco crowd. But culture was only part of the problem. The larger issue was that Bud Colligan had acquired too many companies too quickly and could not properly digest the result. After acquiring us, Macromedia acquired Backstage, an HTML editor led by Anthony Wood, who later founded Roku. None of these products received the serious R&D and integration work they needed to be properly integrated. Most of the products needed major rewrites, but there was no time for that. Quarterly numbers and minor feature releases mattered more.
Eventually, our product, xRes, and FreeHand were rewritten into an integrated product called Fireworks. Backstage was rewritten from the ground up as Dreamweaver. But the entrepreneurs who had brought their technologies into Macromedia were the first casualties. My brother Fred left the company in December 1995. Anthony Wood left soon afterward to start ReplayTV. Even Bud Colligan was replaced in 1996 after Macromedia missed its quarterly targets and the stock fell from $62 per share down to $8.
Rob Burgess and the Hard Choices
The new CEO was Rob Burgess, brought in from Alias|Wavefront in Canada. He inherited a balkanized collection of acquired companies and products, and he had to make difficult choices. Fortunately, he also had a $100 million war chest, but time was not on his side. He knew it, as did everyone else.
Burgess acquired Flash, a small North Carolina company that did fast vector graphics for the web. It quickly became clear that Flash would replace Shockwave/Director as the company’s future. He merged FreeHand and xRes into Fireworks, a highly successful imaging and web graphics system. He put enormous effort behind Dreamweaver, a full rewrite of Backstage. These were gutsy moves.
He also eliminated anything that did not fit the mission. He sold the video-editing effort to a struggling Apple, where it eventually became Final Cut. That sale gave him more money and focus for the road ahead.
In an interesting twist, my temporary product manager in the Spring of 1996, Phil Schiller, moved to Apple with my manager Will Stein in early 1997 with the video group. They both went there to help an embattled Steve Jobs, who had just returned to a battered Apple Computer. At the time, Apple was surviving in part because Microsoft needed the company to remain visible as a competitor during its antitrust battles — a strange form of corporate life support that only the 1990s technology industry could have produced. Schiller would later become one of Apple’s most important technology executives, another example of the successful intrapreneur: someone who could operate inside a massive organization, align with a larger vision, and help turn that vision into products the world would actually use.
Will Stein, along with Jim Goodnight, was one of the few people I ever worked with who was an actual entrepreneur. He had returned to corporate America after his venture failed in 1996, as ventures often do. But unlike almost everyone else I encountered, he understood the peculiar entrepreneurial DNA required to pull a product out of the abyss and turn it into something real. In other words, he wasn’t play-acting. I was the person who interviewed him for the job at Macromedia. Like me, he was a scuba diver.
Personal Crisis and Professional Disappearance
In late 1996, my wife was diagnosed with sarcoma. The prognosis was poor, and it appeared that I would have to care for her for several years before the likely outcome of death. Professionally, I had already watched both of my products — Fauve Matisse and Fauve xRes — get canceled, and the original team disbanded. I had a three-year employment contract, but I found myself with little meaningful work to do other than take care of my wife.
To his credit, Rob Burgess showed tremendous compassion. He allowed me to move back to Raleigh so I could care for her. As CEO, Burgess was not sentimental about Macromedia’s scattered product lines. He understood that the company had too many marginal efforts and needed to consolidate around a few winners. For FreeHand and xRes, that meant Fireworks. For multimedia on the web, that meant Flash. For HTML editing, that meant Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver and the Lesson of Round-Trip HTML
Dreamweaver’s secret sauce was round-trip HTML. The problem with most HTML editors was that they tried to automate too much. Web developers wanted visual tools, but they also wanted to tweak the code manually. Dreamweaver understood that. It respected the developer. That insight made all the difference.
1996: The Year Everything Came Apart
1996 was a very tough year for me. My wife was seriously ill, my brother had already left Macromedia to start another company called RandomNoise, and I was still inside Macromedia trying to navigate the political consequences of both. The name RandomNoise was appropriate, because it more or less described Fred’s mission at the time.
He even became involved in litigation with Jim Von Ehr, Macromedia’s second-in-command, over the alleged plagerism of what, in retrospect, was a very bad idea: a Java-centric website authoring tool.
That needs some context. In 1995, Java — the brainchild of Sun Microsystems and James Gosling — was being promoted as the programming operating system for the internet. Gosling was undeniably brilliant, but he also had a history of producing technology that was more visionary than stable, as anyone familiar with the NeWS windowing system from a few years earlier could attest. I had a run in with NeWS while working for SAS — it was not positive. Java had the smell of religion around it, and in Silicon Valley, once a technology becomes religious, otherwise intelligent people temporarily lose their minds.
John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, was an early and enthusiastic believer in Java. He was also on Macromedia’s board of directors, and he heavily promoted the technology inside the company. Even Microsoft jumped on the Java bandwagon, only to find itself embroiled in a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems after it tried to fix bugs and make the technology halfway usable through its own implementation, J++.
For a short period, Java looked like destiny. Then the whole Java religion crashed and burned, much like Mithraism competing with Christianity in the first century AD. Fortunately for my brother, he managed to sell RandomNoise to Vignette in 1997 and successfully cash out.
Rod Smith at IBM also embraced the Java movement, but only after he had led the early-1980s effort to develop a windowing system for the IBM PC — an effort I was intimately involved in from 1984 through 1987, and one that was ultimately overtaken by Microsoft Windows.
I was still at Macromedia as Director of Imaging (with no reports), which meant I had to navigate the delicate political situation between my brother and the company that employed me. It was not exactly an ideal position.
When Macromedia Started to Falter
Later that year 1996, Macromedia itself began to stumble. There had been too many acquisitions, too quickly — ours included — and the products came from organizations with wildly different cultures, architectures, and assumptions. They had not been properly integrated, and there simply was not enough time to make it happen.
The intrapreneurs inside Macromedia did their best with what they had, but sales began to falter. Some of those intrapreneurs, like David Lasner my project manager, did their best but still lost their jobs. Bud Colligan, who had been considered the wonder-boy CEO behind Shockwave, suddenly found himself overwhelmed. The stock fell from a high of $62 per share in 1995 to around $8 per share roughly nine months later.
He did not survive the onslaught. He was replaced by Rob Burgess.
These are the breaks inside publicly funded companies. A public company is not the entrepreneurial fiefdom of Jim Goodnight’s SAS, where one lord can make long-term bets and the peasants be damned. Public companies answer to the market. They answer to analysts. They answer to quarterly expectations. When the stock collapses, the court turns on the king very quickly.
Back in the 1980s, Jim Goodnight made a bold bet on the C programming language as the foundation for cross-platform development at SAS. The effort took far longer than expected, but it ultimately paid off handsomely. Had he been the CEO of a public company, he might well have been fired for the delay and expense, even though, in hindsight, it was absolutely the right decision.
In these situations, everyone feels abandoned, and everyone is angry at everyone else. When leadership changes, the intrapreneurs inside the company must reassess their loyalties and figure out where they fit — or do not fit — inside the new organization.
Two people from the previous Macromedia organization did survive the transition: Norm Meyrowitz (the CTO) and Tom Hale in marketing. I had hired Tom at Fauve Software in 1995, before the acquisition. Both men survived by swearing complete loyalty to the new administration.
Neither of them was an entrepreneur in any true sense, though both were very good at playing one on TV. What I learned from that experience is that surviving inside a public company requires a completely different skill set than developing a product from inside the abyss of a startup.
Norm had a particular quality I had also seen in a former IBM colleague of mine, Rod Smith (who hired me in 1984 out of Cornell): the ability to convince bosses that he was really an entrepreneur who had merely chosen, for mysterious and noble reasons, to work inside a large company. To his credit, Rod correctly recognized the need to build a windowing system for the IBM PC long before anyone else at IBM fully understood the urgency. He spent his entire professional career at IBM, like my friend Paul Frontera. Later, he was also my neighbor in the Swift Creek community outside Raleigh for roughly 30 years, where we both had multi-acre estates along Penny Road.
My relationship with IBM was a bit like Johnny Cash’s experience with the Army: the discipline probably did me some good, but the overall experience was a full-body root canal.
At times, IBM felt like the movie Citizen X set in the Soviet Union — only relocated to corporate America, where a few very smart people were trying to do useful work while being slowly crushed by an overbearing, incompetent bureaucracy that had mistaken process for progress. In the movie, two dedicated cops spend nearly twenty years pursuing Russia’s most notorious serial killer, while fighting not only the murderer but the suffocating Soviet bureaucracy around them. They eventually catch their guy, but only as the whole Soviet system is coming apart around them.
The Corporate Survivor Versus the Entrepreneur
The distinction mattered because Macromedia was no longer a place for founders. It was becoming a place for survivors. The entrepreneurs had brought in the technology, the energy, and the initial vision. But once the company entered crisis mode, the value system changed. The question was no longer, “Who created something?” The question became, “Who can align with the new power structure and help execute the new plan?”
That is where the intrapreneur has the advantage. Entrepreneurs are attached to their creations. They have a hard time letting go because the product is not merely a product. It is proof of existence. It is the thing they dragged out of the abyss.
Intrapreneurs are different. They attach themselves to the winning platform inside the institution. They can pivot emotionally because they are not trying to prove that their creation deserves to live. They are trying to prove that they deserve to remain useful.
That is not a criticism. It is a survival strategy. In many corporate environments, it is the correct one. But it is not the entrepreneurial mind.
The Fireworks Opportunity
By mid-1997, Rob Burgess had cemented the changes necessary for a proper restructuring. He also correctly calculated that Macromedia’s depressed stock — trading around $6 per share in 1997 — had nowhere to go but up if the company could regain focus.
Rob and Jim Von Ehr approached me about joining the new Fireworks effort. Bud Colligan was gone, and Jim himself was looking to leave the company to start a nanotechnology venture. I flew out and met with the Texas team. The effort looked promising. Fireworks had a real purpose: it would combine imaging, vector tools, and web graphics into a product that could sit naturally beside Dreamweaver and Flash.
I helped them think through the underlying memory-management architecture needed to support large images. At the time, Mac System 7 did not have proper virtual memory in the way developers needed it, so applications had to implement their own internal strategies to handle large image files. This was exactly the kind of hard technical problem I enjoyed. It was long before Mac OSX.
I remember our team pitching essentially the same idea to Norm Meyrowitz a year earlier. He jokingly dismissed it, insisting that painting and imaging were entirely different product categories from vector art, and that any attempt to merge them would produce a camel — “a horse designed by committee.” Apparently, he had tried something similar while at Brown University, working with Andy van Dam — it was not well received.
This, by the way, is the standard line used by IBM-style executives sitting in judgment: dismiss any idea with real promise by framing it as messy, impractical, or category-confused. It is a convenient way to kill anything that might actually change the world.
One of the biggest problems with larger software companies is that they accumulate too many gatekeepers — people who appoint themselves to sit in judgment over the ideas of others. This is neither motivating for the people trying to bring about change, nor does it produce the kind of change the company actually needs. That is why large companies so often have to acquire technology from the outside. They simply do not have the cultural DNA to create it internally.
In retrospect, I should have stayed.
IBM and the 3270
My friend Paul Frontera endured much the same hardship at IBM in the 1970s. Paul was the designer of the 3270 smart terminal, whose architecture, in many ways, anticipated the distributed logic that would later become foundational to the World Wide Web.
His ideas were repeatedly shot down because IBM executives could not visualize a terminal doing intelligent local processing. In their minds, the expensive mainframe — leased for millions of dollars in recurring rental revenue — was supposed to remain the center of the universe. Offloading work to a terminal, purchased once and sitting at the edge of the network, threatened not only their technical assumptions but also their business model.
Of course, Paul was right and the sales executives were wrong. But it took him several years, and surviving roughly three attempts to kill the product, before he finally convinced them of the wisdom of the idea.
IBM rewarded him by assigning him to spend years in court defending the company’s patent claims on the 3270 against lower-cost Japanese competitors. It was hardly a fulfilling role for someone with such a beautiful and inventive mind.
Like Rod Smith, Paul Frontera was an IBMer for life — one of those career IBM people who seemed to have absorbed the company into his bloodstream. He did have some good stories in retirement though, which he shared at Cup-a-Joe — Raleigh’s best coffee shop. I still look back at my IBM years as positively formative.
Why I Walked Away
But my wife was sick. I honestly did not feel that I could give the company the passion it required. I also did not believe Macromedia would survive the restructuring. In the 1990s, wounded technology companies usually did not come back. That was just the way it felt at the time. Think Quarterdeck.
I did not know Rob Burgess well, and Adobe seemed to have the desktop tools market sewn up. I still had about a million dollars of Macromedia stock at $8 per share, along with more than a hundred thousand stock options that were severely underwater. I decided to cut the cord and move on with my life. I gave up my stock options as a negotiated divorce.
Entrepreneurs also remain forever associated with the products they built, which means they are often blamed after the fact when those products fail to meet the expectations of the acquiring company. Never mind that, once acquired, they were usually following orders from their new masters. Success has many parents; failure is always an orphan. In the end, the acquired founder almost always becomes the designated scapegoat.
Emotionally, I still had not recovered from the fact that the new management had killed both of my products: Fauve Matisse and Macromedia xRes. In hindsight, it is clear that they had to. But entrepreneurs are emotionally tied to their products in a way that professional managers are not. You do not simply turn the page on something you built from nothing.
Norm Meyrowitz could do that because he was a intrapreneur at heart. He could just as easily build a career on top of Flash as he could on the back of Shockwave. The same was true for Tom Hale, who only two years earlier had been closing multimillion-dollar deals around Macromedia xRes. They both saw the bigger picture within the corporate reality they inhabited, but they were not attached to the products they oversaw in the way a parent is attached to a child.
That is a completely different mindset.
The Five-Million-Dollar Lesson
Over the next several years, Rob Burgess drove Macromedia’s stock above $100 per share. My divorce from the company easily cost me $5 million. At the time, my sentiments clouded the picture.
What I learned from that episode is that sometimes, in a time of crisis, doing nothing is the best strategy. Making a decision merely to satisfy the ego’s need for closure is usually a waste of energy. I could have stayed at Macromedia for another few years, taken some pressure off my life, and been paid handsomely for the effort. Given my wife’s illness, that would not have been an irrational compromise. It might have been the wiser one.
The lesson is that what happens at work can also be reflected in marriage. It is rarely wise to surrender to the puritanical ideology of one’s feelings. Life is often a gray zone filled with strange compromises. Sometimes the adult decision is not the emotionally pure one. Sometimes the adult decision is to endure ambiguity a little longer.
Entrepreneurs often overlook how much difficulty and luck were required to get them into a favorable position in the first place. Fauve Software was a unique product that blossomed in a unique environment. It could just as easily have never been acquired by Macromedia. It could have suffered a slow death, snuffed out by lower-cost versions of more dominant products like Photoshop. I have witnessed plenty of those.
Instead, for a brief period, we caught the wave. And then I walked away from the larger wave that followed. The first wave was still financially lucrative.
The Bargain
Looking back, the story of Fauve was not simply the story of a small software company being acquired by a larger one. It was a story about the difference between creating something and integrating it into a larger machine. Entrepreneurs create worlds. Intrapreneurs decide which worlds survive.
We had built something from nothing. We had taken a risk on Windows before Windows was obviously the future. We had found a market the larger players had ignored. We had been acquired. We had been validated. But validation is not the same as permanence.
In the end, the entrepreneur’s dream is often to be discovered by the intrapreneur. But once that happens, the entrepreneur’s creation enters a new battlefield — one governed not by vision alone, but by politics, integration, quarterly pressure, strategic consolidation, and cultural fit. That is the bargain.
The entrepreneur stares into the abyss in order to create something new.
The intrapreneur decides whether that creation becomes part of history — or disappears into it.
