He started with $1000 and grew to $912 Million over 43 years. That's compounding annually at 38% percent. I was surprised that after 43 years it is still under a billion. Just goes to show how big a billion dollars is :-).<p>He must also really really love his space and company, nowadays when companies are flipped in 43 weeks, he is going on for 43 years. Wow, that's some dedication and calls for a very difficult temperament and set of skills.
Ive met Jack and had conversations with him a few times. He is in the DC area often since an office is out there as well as the government.<p>He is a humble go getter just like you would imagine Steve Wozniak. He doesn't seem to talk about his money nor does he really care. What I have taken away from our few talks is that he actually does care about the customer and thats why I believe he keeps winning.<p>The software at version 1 was poorly written and sadly still poorly maintained. But since 2005 or so, its been improving ever since.<p>Ps. They are hiring folks of all types in the DC area.
This parallels Warren Buffet's strategy of residing in Omaha to completely avoid the influence of Wall Street hive-mind thinking.<p>There's something to be said for uninterrupted focus, whether its an individual coding solo, or a business focused on steady growth.
I've done a lot with both ESRI and the open source alternatives. I created zigGIS. With that said, the side you dont read about is that Mr. Dangermond - outside the ESRI compound - is generally considered a very cutthroat personality. Often his success is more attributed to this than most anything else.
I was watching an architecture show yesterday where a rich artist couple were re-purposing a barn as a house. It was a strange building for living in. Unconventional and contrary. The show follows people through the build and visits them after they've moved in.<p>At various point they seemed to be obsessed with concepts like <i>rooms</i> and how important they are for dividing up a house or walls and how useful they are for putting furniture against, directional lighting in the kitchen, etc. All these obvious things that come standard with a standard house and most people don't think about were discoveries to them. They started by rejecting everything until they begrudgingly let some of the things in or found workarounds. The result was pretty cool.<p>We end up with big lists of rules about things, whether we are aware of them or not. You can call them rules of thumbs or call them cargo cults. Either way, there is value to be had from rejecting standards and then rediscovering for yourself the ones that demand to be discovered. It's like a cleanup process.
I had to learn ArcGIS for a class. Ugh. That application brings new meaning to "feature creep".<p>They make their money off people who can't "afford" open source (ie. institutions & gov).
This article does not mention much about how they hit $912 million in sales. However, the title made me furiously click on the article. So they've done their job.
I don't follow it. He seems folksy, but if "Not taking outside money, and serving customers based out of a low cost area" were the path to $912 million in Sales, wouldn't a lot more people be doing that?
I'm all for bootstrapping and avoiding VC, but I get annoyed with these proclamations that make all businesses sound the same. (I suspect it is the writing at fault here as Mr. Dangermond probably doesn't think about business so simply. Maybe he just means software businesses when he refers to "young entrepreneurs".)<p>There are plenty of business models that aren't viable without lots of capital early on. Tesla and SpaceX are good examples of companies that could not be bootstrapped as they need lots of capital to actually build things and to build the factories that build those things.
for a while, I remember when ESRI was constantly hiring new people. The problem is, it's in redlands, and redlands in way the heck out side of L.A.C. or O.C.