Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in terms of getting OnShape off the ground? Did you raise venture money? From whom? 

Jon Hirschtick: I got a founding team together. Guess who’s on the founding team? Tommy and Dave. The guy who had supervised me in ‘81 and had been my SolidWorks co-founder had bought me out in ‘91 co-founds OnShape with me.

Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What prompted that decision to sell?

Jon Hirschtick: It came down to three things. My criteria are winning the market, working with great people, and making money. Both routes made money. This could help us win the market. People like going public because they’re fascinated with it.

Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Any other strategic decisions that you made in building SolidWorks? 

Jon Hirschtick: One is, we decided to sell exclusively through a dealer channel. We would not sell directly. If you want to buy SolidWorks, you have to go through dealers. That was a huge decision. It had all kinds of implications. It turned out to be a very shrewd idea.

Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Who funded you?

Jon Hirschtick: The first investor to commit was Atlas Venture. Axel, my co-founder from my first company, is the Managing Director of Bolt and an associate at Atlas Ventures. He got interested.

He introduced me to Mike Payne, co-founder of PTC. Mike and I met. We have very different personal styles, but intellectually, we totally agree on what we needed to do in this industry.

Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Jon Hirschtick: 1993. I stayed two and a half years with Computer Vision. 

Sramana Mitra: I started at MIT in the Fall of 1993.

Jon Hirschtick: So you were a freshman at MIT.

Buying Back a Business: ShareBuilder 401k CEO Stuart Robertson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the technology angle to this?

Stuart Robertson: All our plans are sold online. We enable anyone to come to the site, get a quote, and buy the plan.

Sramana Mitra: How do people become aware of the fact that you exist?

Serial Entrepreneurship in CAD: SolidWorks and Onshape Founder Jon Hirschtick (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing at this point that got you to Kleiner Perkins?

Jon Hirschtick: I started when I was 24. I was probably 26 years old at this point. I didn’t know what I was doing. Part of being an entrepreneur is, you just keep doing things. You think a bit and do a lot.

Buying Back a Business: ShareBuilder 401k CEO Stuart Robertson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Stuart Robertson: I jumped into telecom for seven years. At that time, telecom was going to be deregulated. They were hiring all these marketers. My first job out of grad school was running what is now part of AT&T. I was launching caller IDs and consumer voice mail.