You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara. As a hobby, he had been running an electronic bulletin board out of a corner of his living room. He had four phone lines patched to a computer that anybody could dial in to and upload or download comments and software. His business plan: create an antivirus program and give it away on his bulletin board. McAfee didn’t expect users to pay for it. His real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five years, half the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt compelled to pay the licensing fees. By 1990 McAfee was making $5 million a year with very little overhead or investment.Company's like Yammer have been celebrated in the software industry for introducing a new, and very interesting, model wherein you sell to individuals first and then get enterprises to buy once there's scale. Cool to see this has actually been around for awhile.