330 Technical Workstations

Table 12-2. Founder Control in Various High-Tech Companies.
Firms Whose Founders Have Retained Control or Remain Involved		Firms Whose Founders Have Relinquished Control
AMD, Cypress, Intel, National	Fairchild, Texas Instruments, Motorola
Conner, Priam, Quantum, Seagate	CDC Disks, Maxtor, Shugart
Compaq, Dell	Altair, Apple, Commodore, Convergent
DEC, HP, Tandem,	CCI, DG, Harris, Prime, SEL, Wang
Silicon Graphics, Sun	Apollo
Alliant, Convex	Floating Point Systems
Microsoft	Lotus
Oracle	Relational Technology
Cray Computer		CDC, Cray Research Amdahl, Honeywell, IBM, Unisys 3Com, Ungerman-Bass (now with Tandem)

Certainly, Lotus changed when Kapor left, and HP changed when Hewlett and Packard turned over the management to Young. In 1990, HP introduced a new management concept by appointing Morton as co-CEO.

. With a few notable exceptions, those companies that retain the founder enjoy a continuity of culture.

Founder-controlled firms tend to remain at the forefront, reflecting the founder's involvement, provided the founder has business and market savvy and is technically competent.

. A counter view of why an entrepreneurial founder leaves is that the company may for some reason have failed to meet his or her expectations.

Failure can involve lack of product or market, team, leadership, etc., and thus, the founder leaves as a reaction to the firm-a push, rather than the lure of a new venture. This scenario is particularly common among "chronic entrepreneurs," who continually drive to found new companies.

. Multiple, competitive companies are always created as each new technology or computer class is formed or as each new product type is introduced.