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BY: And so I guess that explains, I was going to ask you about, in '85, you were managing director of Compufair, billed as "The Northwest's largest event focused on personal computing."

TI: Yeah, so I started Compufair my second year in graduate school. Because what I found in graduate school was, the first year was pretty interesting because it was all brand-new and I didn't know much about business. I found the second year, it started to become repetitious, that it's like, "Oh, we did this already. Why are we doing this again?" And so a professor allowed me to get credit to, it was an entrepreneurship class, actually get credit to actually start a company called Compufair. And I did this with another student, Al Bennett, and we decided to create the largest personal computer trade show in the Northwest so that people can learn about this new technology that was going to change the world. And so it was an interesting thing where we would invite the hardware manufacturers, software people, and have seminars. So it was fun; I brought people like Timothy Leary to Seattle to talk, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, I think that was his last public talk that he gave. People from the PC industry, we tried to get Steve Wozniak to come up here from Apple. And it was an exciting time where we saw our role as sharing the knowledge about personal computers and doing these trade shows, so people could come and look at all the new technology, the new software. Paul Brainerd with Aldus back then, desktop publishing was kind of the cool thing. So it was all these new things that I would get involved with, we would kind of show that.

BY: And did that lead directly to Microsoft?

TI: Yeah, it did in the sense that, so I got to know some people at Microsoft through that, and doing computer trade shows in the early '80s was okay because literally you had probably about forty different computer manufacturers, most of them are IBM/PC clones and stuff. But by '84 or so or '83, there was this huge consolidation where most of them when out of business. When you do computer trade shows, it works if you have lots of exhibitors, and so these computer manufacturers would come. But now, we didn't have that, so essentially, there was no money to made. And I think the last show I did, we lost money, and so at that point I realized I could not continue that. And so I just approached Microsoft and said... actually, I saw this trade journal, and in there, Microsoft announced that they're going to do the first international conference on CDROM technology, so the CD discs, but using it as a data disc. And so I realized this was going to open up all these different possibilities, interesting technology. So I called over Microsoft and said, "Hey, do you guys need any help? I can put trade shows on." And they said, "Come in and talk." And they said, "Great, the vice president who announced this, and the show's going to happen in three months, just announced it, and we don't know how we're going to do this. Can you work on this?" So I said, "Yeah." I worked on it, it was twelve dollars an hour or something, it was this really low contract work.

BY: What year was that, Tom?

TI: This was, I want to say '83.

BY: So let's see, if '85 you were managing director of Compufair...

TI: So by then I think I had... well, let me put it this way. So my contract work with Microsoft was under Compufair. So I still was, but I was doing, at that point, not putting so much on computer shows, but I was doing contract work with Microsoft, putting on things like that CDROM conference. And things like when they did PC Excel I did the rollout for that. So I was known at Microsoft during this time as someone who could pull off these sort of technology shows for them. So I did the CDROM conference for three years for them and then did these other marketing rollouts for some of the products. At which point I was offered a job to actually join the multimedia publishing group to actually start developing CDROM titles. Because I told them, "I can do these computer events or trade shows, but I have an engineering degree and I'm actually interested in product development." So I became first the director of operations for the multimedia publishing area. So my trade show experience got me in the door at Microsoft first as a contractor, and then once I was known in the company they offered me a job to actually join in product development.

BY: Do you remember what year you became an employee as opposed to a contractor?

TI: Yeah, it was kind of later. I think it was either '88 or '89 when I became an employee. So I was a contractor for several years before I did that, which was fairly common at Microsoft. They actually got in trouble with the IRS by having so many contractors who were essentially full time on campus, and the only thing differentiating us from an employee was, in our email, there was a C-dash to start off your email address.

BY: And then how did that impact the stock options?

TI: So the stock options, so when they offered me to become an employee, that's when I was granted stock options. Because I actually resisted a little bit because as a contractor doing these sort of, not emergency, but Microsoft was moving so fast then that oftentimes they would need someone to do a big project, their staff was just totally overworked. And so having my skillset, I could be thrown at these kind of little more intricate jobs, and so they were fairly well-paying. And so when they said, "Do you want to become an employee?" I said, "Well, I'm not that interested. I actually like what I'm doing now, it gives me more flexibility." And as part of the recruitment, they offered a stock option package, and that was '88 or '89 I got that.

BY: And you left?

TI: In '92, I think, '91, '92.

BY: So were you a millionaire when you left?

TI: I did, yeah, I did cash in. Although by then, to fully vest your stock options -- and this was something that drove my dad crazy -- you had to be there for five years, and so by the time I left, I was only vested at the two and a half, three year level, and so actually at least half my stock options were unvested when I left. But at that point, the price, the level of Microsoft stock had risen enough so that the stock options, even half of the ones I had, allowed me to, I think, bank not... I wasn't one of these super multimillionaires, but I think it was like about two million.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.