From ECsoft to OpenVision, the foundation was constructed for the creation of BEA Systems: as a business, one of the most crucial engines of transformation at the core of the digital economy, and as an investment, one of the all-time great successes in the history of venture capital. The story of BEA dramatizes the complex dynamics of the Innovation Economy. The engine of its initial growth was research funded by a state-sanctioned monopoly that, when liberated to compete commercially, had no idea how to do so. Its phenomenal growth was also a function of the maturation of the internet, offspring of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as an environment for commerce. Its competitive success was conditioned on the inability of IBM, the dominant force in computing, to cannibalize its own proprietary products and the profits they generated. And the extraordinary investment returns that it delivered were due in good measure to the speculative excess of equity investors who had recognized the emergence of a new, digital economy. BEA, that is to say, represented the apotheosis of the Three-Player Game’s fostering of the Innovation Economy.

At the more mundane level where the practitioner labors, BEA’s success both as a venture investment and as an operating business did not emerge in a vacuum. On the contrary, to identify and realize the opportunity it represented was the combined and contingent consequence of multiple strands of education: in the alternative architectures of the computer industry, in the evolving technologies of computer systems, in the different business models available to start-up companies, and in the recurrent inefficiency of the stock market’s manner of valuing enterprises under the recurrent pressures of speculation. From my perspective, BEA emerged from a context thirty years in the making.