Sandra L. Kurtzig

Founder of ASK Computer Systems and Kenandy

• Born: October 21, 1947
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization: ASK

Introduction

The first multimillion-dollar software entrepreneur was not Bill Gates of Microsoft, Marc Andreessen of Netscape, or Larry Ellison of Oracle. Rather, it was Sandra L. Kurtzig of ASK, a company she founded in 1972 to provide inventory-tracking software to manufacturing companies, which at its peak had annual sales of $450 million. Kurtzig was a key player in establishing the business-to-business software industry. She began what is now common in the industry, the creation of easy-to-use business management software for manufacturing companies.

Early Life

Sandra L. Kurtzig was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1946. Her father, Barney Brody, the son of Russian immigrants, developed real estate, and her mother, Marian, wrote as a police reporter for a newspaper before taking on the job of decorator for the family's real estate ventures. The family relocated to Los Angeles, California, when Sandra was eleven.

In high school, Kurtzig took advanced courses graduated with an A average. She sold towels at the Bullocks department store in high school. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she majored in mathematics with minored in chemistry. Her summer job at the computer center showed her that she did not know much about computers, so her next summer job was as a mathematics aide at TRW, the aircraft systems company. She learned the computer language BASIC instead of the more difficult assembler language that had stumped her at the computer center. She graduated from UCLA at age twenty and then earned her master's in aeronautical engineering at Stanford University.

She then accepted a sales job at IBM, was dissatisfied there, went to Europe for the summer, and then married Arie Kurtzig on December 1, 1968. In New Jersey she had a few short-term sales jobs before taking a position at General Electric (GE) selling computer time-sharing services.

Life's Work

In 1972, Kurtzig left her job at GE to start a family. Because she wanted additional income and something to keep her mind occupied, she started a part-time software programming business at home. Her initial capital investment was $2,000. Her first client asked her to write a program for tracking inventory and giving timely manufacturing information. She hired several computer and engineering graduates to write standardized applications that would suit not only the first customer but also manufacturers in the local area. She took her technical background and awareness of customer needs and through her staff worked to produce the software.

In 1972, the business was based in her apartment; Kurtzig had wanted a part-time job that she could manage while the children were sleeping. Soon, however, she was working eighteen-hour days. In 1974, she incorporated her company as ASK Computer Systems, Inc.

Because she could not attract venture capital in Silicon Valley, she reinvested earnings into the company. She persuaded the local Hewlett-Packard (HP) management to let her crews use the one of the plant's 3000 series minicomputers at night, working from 6:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. By 1976, ASK was in its own building. By 1978, the company had its first salable product, MaMa, later called ManMan, a package of programs in manufacturing management. ManMan was one of the first enterprise product management (ERP) and inventory control programs. Next Kurtzig convinced HP to preload her software on its minicomputers, allowing her to market a turnkey system to managers leery of computers in the precomputer era.

The company grew, despite being unable to afford a marketing staff and brochures. It emphasized ideas, hard work, and commitment, selling systems to large corporate clients such as HP and Hughes Electronics. Having the HP tie gave ASK entré into other corporations and markets. ASK sales rose from $2.8 million in 1979 to $39 million in 1983, making it the eleventh fastest-growing American company between 1978 and 1982. Kurtzig took the company public in 1981, and in two years a small equity offering and a two-for-one split meant that earnings per share doubled.

ManMan tracked inventory and customer orders on the floor. Kurtzig had created versions for use on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Hewlett-Packard minicomputers at $40,000 to $200,000 per package. That worked during the 1970s, but by the late 1980s customers wanted portability, which meant rewriting ManMan to be compatible with the nearly universal Unix operating system. Kurtzig acknowledged that ASK was coasting, living off past successes, and living reasonably well with decent earnings and revenues. That opportunities passed ASK by did not seem to be an urgent problem. Kurtzig tried to light a fire under the board, and when that failed, she quit in February 1989.

Kurtzig left the company in the hands of fifty-one-year-old Ronald Braniff, a division chief at Tymshare and an ASK board member since 1980. He seemed a good fit, and Kurtzig blessed the choice. For four years the company did well, with profits rising. However, in 1989 sales flattened at $79 million. The product line was still ManMan, last updated contemporaneously with Kurtzig's decision to step down.

Flat sales and the prospect of ongoing stagnation led the board to ask Kurtzig to return. Braniff resigned shortly thereafter. Kurtzig revitalized the company by ignoring the hierarchy, finding the person she needed when she needed that person, heedless of the managers and supervisors in between. Morale was elevated. Kurtzig put in twelve-hour days and bought back 1.3 million shares of ASK, bringing her stake to nearly 10 percent. The stock was at $8 per share, down from its 1985 peak of $25.

ASK developed software for HP, DEC, and Sun using Unix. Marketing, which was fragmented after the 1989 purchase of Data 3 Systems (a maker of manufacturing software for IBM minicomputers), reorganized into a single department. Kurtzig went on the road to reassure investors and customers that ASK was repenting past sins and moving in a new direction. At that point the largest customer was Seagate Technologies, maker of disk drives, and Oracle was threatening to suck ASK's customers into its database software. “Kiss your ASK goodbye” was the slogan, according to Julie Pitta in Forbes. Kurtzig, however, was accustomed to competition. ASK remained the leading independent supplier of manufacturing planning software despite the best efforts of rivals Cullinet (absorbed by Computer Associates), IBM, and HP.

Kurtzig rejected the then-standard argument that a woman in a man's world had to think like a man. She refused to manage through the male-dictated hierarchical arrangement. Rather, she was honest and open, sharing information with workers, leaving her door open most of the time. She also walked the floor, provided strokes such as hugs and compliments to staff in front of their peers, allowing natural empathy and emotion to come through, something that men tended to avoid, if they even had the capacity. She was among the first to establish the softer approach to management—and negotiation, being willing to give instead of regarding a victory as winner-take-all.

In 1990, ASK purchased the Ingres Corporation. To acquire the revenues to do so, it had to sell 30 percent of the company to HP and Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and many shareholders were not pleased by the financing move. However, ASK was already using Ingres software to link its clients' accounting and manufacturing departments to the ASK database, and HP made the hardware that ran ASK's software, in return for which ASK resold HP products. Along with HP, EDS had a history of alliances with manufacturing companies that could offer business to ASK. The deal made sense, therefore, on several levels. ASK became ASK Group (consisting of ASK Computer Systems, Data 3, and Ingres) in 1992, a global company with annual revenues of $400 million, and launched an update of its main product as ManMan/X.

Nonetheless, ASK declined. Kurtzig left the company in 1993, and by 1994, it was purchased by Computer Associates. Kurtzig became a managing partner of SLK Investment Partners and mentored investors in entrepreneurial technology companies. She also taught a business for engineering course at Stanford University.

In 2008, Kurtzig was chair of the board of E-Benefits, a human resources and insurance provider she had founded with her son Andrew in 1996. In 2011, she decided to come out of retirement after talking with Salesforce.com chief executive officer (CEO) Marc Benjoff, her Hawaiian neighbor, about how the world of manufacturing management software had changed since the 1970s. Benjoff wanted software to handle the worldwide scope of the business of the twenty-first century, and she agreed to start up a new company, albeit reluctantly. Her ManMan software was still in use and had a solid reputation. In 2012, she started Kenandy, Inc., to transform the world of enterprise management software, this time designed to work in the cloud to support the community of global manufacturing companies. Her capitalization was $10.5 million. The company was named after her sons, Ken and Andy. Kurtzig stepped down as CEO of Kenandy in 2015, though she remained chair of its board of directors.

Personal Life

Kurtzig and her husband Arie had two sons, Ken and Andy. In 1982, the couple divorced; the boys were nine and six. By 1983, Kurtzig had a net worth of $65 million. In 1985, tired of the pace, she resigned all but her chair of ASK and turned her attention to her family. She achieved her goals of spending more time with her two sons, traveling, and writing her autobiography before returning to ASK in 1989.

For four years, Kurtzig did other things, including a stint with ABC's Good Morning America. She and her family built a home in Hawaii, and she wrote her autobiography. Although she returned to ASK in 1989 and stayed for only four years, during that time she set the company on a stable footing before its declining performance led to its acquisition by Computer Associates.

Kurtzig has received many awards. As the first woman to take a technology company public, she has appeared in Business Week's list of the top fifty corporate leaders. She has served on the boards of Harvard Business School, the Hoover Institution, Stanford's School of Engineering, Stanford Engineering Strategic Council, UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management, and the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Management.

Bibliography

Gage, Deborah. “Silicon Valley Pioneer Sandra Kurtzig Back in Start-Up Game with Kenandy.” Wall Street Journal 29 Aug. 2011. Web.

Hyatt, J. “Should You Start a Business?” Inc. 14.2 (1992): 48. Academic Search Complete. Web.

Kurtzig, Sandra L., with Tom Parker. CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up. New York: Norton, 1991. Print. T

Pitta, Julie. “Mommy Track, Revised.” Forbes 145.6 (1990): 158–59. Business Source Complete. Web. 4 May 2012.

“Sandra Kurtzig: The First Lady of Computers.” Entrepreneur 10 Oct. 2008. Web. 4 May 2012.