Software Founders Who Solved Unfashionable Business Problems

Enterprise resource planning. Plattner and four colleagues left IBM in 1972 to found SAP in Germany, writing standard software that let companies run accounting, purchasing and stock control in one system updated in real time, rather than commissioning custom programs. R/3 in 1992 brought it to client-server computers and made SAP the default back office for large firms. Painful, expensive implementations are part of the legend too.

Statistical analysis. Goodnight co-founded SAS in 1976 with John Sall, Anthony Barr and Jane Helwig, turning a North Carolina State University project for analysing agricultural data into commercial software for statisticians in drug companies, banks and government. SAS stayed private, licensed its software annually and became known for generous staff benefits. Open-source tools such as R and Python have since eaten into its territory.

The spreadsheet. Bricklin, a Harvard Business School student tired of recalculating financial models by hand, designed VisiCalc with programmer Bob Frankston, and their company released it for the Apple II in 1979. Changing one number and watching the rest update made accountants and planners buy computers just to run it. They never patented the idea, and Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel took the market.

Bookkeeping for households and small firms. Cook, a former Procter and Gamble marketer, co-founded Intuit in 1983 with programmer Tom Proulx after watching his wife struggle with the household bills. Quicken made cheque registers simple, and QuickBooks did the same for small businesses that found accounting software baffling. Intuit studied users at home and at work to fix friction. Its TurboTax lobbying against free government tax filing is the less flattering side.

Documents that print and look the same everywhere. Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC to found Adobe in 1982 and built PostScript, a language that let any printer reproduce a page exactly, which made desktop publishing possible. In the early 1990s Warnock pushed the Camelot project that became PDF, and Adobe gave the reader away free. The format became the default for contracts, forms and manuals. He died in 2023.

Shared work across an organisation. Ozzie, inspired by the PLATO system he used as a student, founded Iris Associates in 1984 to build Lotus Notes, which combined email, shared databases and replication so offices on slow links could work from the same information. Large companies used it to run approvals and records for decades. He later led software architecture at Microsoft after it bought his company Groove.

Payroll and human resources, twice. Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 to run HR and payroll on client-server computers instead of mainframes, and it grew into a major enterprise software company before Oracle took it over in a hostile bid in 2005. He then co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, rebuilding HR and finance software as a cloud service. Both companies won on a deeply unglamorous function every employer needs.

Customer records as a subscription. Benioff, an Oracle executive, founded Salesforce in 1999 with Parker Harris and others to deliver sales tracking software through a web browser for a monthly fee, instead of installed systems that took months to set up. The model, later called software as a service, spread to almost every kind of business software. Salesforce's later sprawl of acquisitions and complex products is the other half of the story.

Issue tracking for software teams. Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 with a credit card, and their Jira tracker became the place where software and IT teams log bugs and tasks, followed by the Confluence wiki. Atlassian sold online at low list prices without a traditional sales force, letting teams adopt it from the bottom up. Many developers complain about Jira, which is a sign of how embedded it is.

Cloud accounting. Drury founded Xero in Wellington in 2006 to move small-business bookkeeping online, pulling transactions straight from bank feeds so owners and their accountants could reconcile accounts together in a browser. Selling through accountants, who recommended it to clients, spread it across New Zealand, Australia and Britain, helped by Britain's move to digital VAT returns. It showed a company far from Silicon Valley could lead a software category.

File syncing. Houston started Dropbox in 2007 with Arash Ferdowsi after forgetting his USB stick on a bus journey, building a folder that quietly kept the same files on every computer, which existing tools did badly. Getting syncing to work reliably across operating systems was the hard engineering. It spread through a referral scheme that gave free storage, though larger platforms later bundled similar features into their own products.

Online payments for developers. Patrick Collison and his brother John, from rural Ireland, founded Stripe in 2010 because accepting card payments online meant weeks of bank paperwork and awkward code. Stripe let a developer start taking payments with a few lines of code and clear documentation, then added fraud checks, billing and tax handling. Most of its work is invisible infrastructure, which is exactly the point.