5 - The Company You Keep

Summary

You don't have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.

—Yogi Berra

It was December 31, 1976, and the crystal ball in New York City’s Times Square dropped slowly to a landing that signaled the conclusion of the bicentennial celebration of the birth of the United States. The sulfuric smell of fireworks had seemingly filled the air all Leap Year. Elton John's “Philadelphia Freedom” had commandeered the airwaves. And a couple of guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded a company named after a piece of produce. For some reason, they thought the name Apple would bear fruit.

1977 brought change. Star Wars had us dreaming of a future in a galaxy far, far away … the first Space Shuttle piggybacked its way skyward atop a Boeing 747 … and Elvis signaled the end of an era as the King of Rock and Roll passed away on the throne in his Graceland master bath just in advance of the screening of Saturday Night Fever and the dawning of Disco Mania.

In late 1976, Mark, together with Larry Baxter and thanks to a connection via Donald Levy, had encountered a New York-based family named Cohen that ran a time clock company called Interboro Systems. The father and sons behind that company had come up with a potentially game-changing concept: they would create an electronic version of a time clock designed to record worker hours. Luckily, at least for the budding entrepreneurs, the Cohen concept held merit, but their efforts had thus far been in vain.

“Their product was a kludge,” said Mark, using a term defined in the dictionary as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inefficient, difficult to extend, and hard to maintain.

Mark's brash assessment was, of course, fairly accurate, as their version of the product in question simply did not work … at all.

“They were trying to take a mechanical clock and make it do what it couldn’t,” Mark opined. Still, Interboro had a concept that Mark, Larry, and Donald saw as an opportunity. Equally as important, Interboro had been successfully distributing mechanical clocks for several years, and therefore had a network of clients in and around the Northeast region of the United States. already using those manual clocks and services.