In 1988, the once-in-a-generation investment opportunity in information technology that was to unfold over the next decade was hardly visible. IBM still dominated commercial computing. It remained the environment in which other participants, whether vendors of hardware or software or services, all subsisted. In this context, I was the beneficiary of an education in innovative scientific and technical computing, courtesy of engagement with such Eberstadt clients as Daisy Systems. And I had developed a transcendentally valuable relationship with John Seely Brown and his colleagues at Xerox PARC. Together, they had introduced me to networked and distributed computing architectures and novel applications that required sophisticated workstations.

Technical computing, as distinct from commercial data processing, where IBM was dominant, constituted a set of niche opportunities where market segments were quantified in hundreds of millions of dollars and potential users could be physically counted as occupants of functionally defined seats. A series of investments launched shortly after I joined Warburg Pincus illuminated a path forward. Not without stumbling, we incrementally conducted our own series of trials and errors, and along the way constructed a narrative of what it means to do capitalism on the frontier of technological innovation.