Ten years before, at the end of 1983, Autodesk was wrapping up its first full year of operations, confident that in AutoCAD we had a winner on our hands. AutoCAD, which a year before had been only dimly perceived as Autodesk's primary product, had generated more than a million dollars in revenue, rendered the company profitable, appeared on the front page of leading PC magazines, and created an operating company with offices, payroll, dealers, and almost a thousand customers. AutoCAD, then so ill-defined even in the minds of the programmers who were writing it, has become the global standard for computer aided design, with more than a million users and billions of drawings created with it. Autodesk, the company so weird that no venture capitalist could screw up the courage to fund, is now part of the Standard and Poor's 500 average, the very benchmark of U.S. industry. Success is what comes at the end of a sufficiently long sequence of failures.
Success is no guarantor of continued success.
Often it is merely a punctuation mark in the series of small failures that are the day to day reality of building a business and creating new markets. How perverse, yet strangely equitable reality is. One must fail repeatedly in order to succeed, but one can fail, on the grand scale, only after having first succeeded. It is the groping of fallible humans, with incomplete and often inaccurate information, toward uncertain decisions which will ultimately be judged by a market whose preferences are unknowable in advance and evolve with every product introduced. It is perverse, indeed, that success conditions us to avoid risk, when unwarranted risk-aversion leads directly to the bullseye of failure.