Peter Norton Part VII: 7 Years to Centimillionaire!
While books are written about the anguish of growth, Peter Norton managed the process with scarcely a hitch. Peter says the growth process went smoothly for three reasons:
First, he ducked the "start-up stress" problem entirely, simply by deciding it would be neat to have a "play room" with gadgets like postage meters and multiline phones. He enjoyed the process, though he was later methodical enough about it to attend the Harvard Business School's Smaller Company Management Program.
Second, by the age of forty, Peter was feeling "over the hill" as a software inventor. He places great stock in studies showing that scientists and mathematicians do their most creative work before thirty. Whether or not that functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy, it certainly made him willing, even eager, to find bright, young programmers and "urge them to wear the laurel wreaths" --to take the lead and the glory in designing new software.
Above all, Peter says his lifelong habit of avoiding or downplaying anything at which he could not excel (what he calls "the arrogance of shyness") made him avoid the sorts of entanglements which, while they help companies grow, often end up with their founders kicked out on the streets.
That approach worked well. In its seven years as an independent company, Norton produced a string of well-regarded, sucessful products, with very few management glitches. Unlike many entrepreneurs, moreover, Peter Norton kept complete control of his company, and kept the overwhelming share of the wealth created when the company was bought, for about $70 million, by the Symantec Corporation in 1989.
Some analysts at the time argued that the sale was inevitable: The software industry was consolidating, and Norton was too small a company to stay independent and privately held. In fact, the company was preparing to go public when the Symantec offer materialized.
That's a matter for business theorists to debate. For our purposes, though, this is what matters:
Two years after the sale of the company, Peter Norton's fortune, including royalties on Norton products now sold by Symantec, had topped $100 million, and he was free to pursue his cultural/philanthropic interests almost full-time. He had gone from free-lance computer programmer to centimillionaire in seven years.
Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Publisher: WW Norton
Copyright: 1993; 1995
All Rights Reserved
Bookmark: 
