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ECOMMERCE VISIONARY
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Broadvision's second customer was Prodigy which linked Broadvision to the Internet.
"I had been using the Internet for 20 years," said Chen, "but I didn't know the web was going to be such a dominant standard. It changed the whole landscape. We didn't have to change anything because we had been designing a system for network computing, for the type of systems that assume a great deal of scale."
A year earlier Prodigy recognized the need to integrate its services into the open format of the Web. It wanted to bring its clients together into a cybermall called Signature, and went searching for the best software package. One-To-One will provide the infrastructure to house "stores" like J.C. Penny, PC Flower and Computer Express. The stores provide product databases and are linked together to a common pool of subscribers.
"It was very similar to the physical world metaphor," said Chen. "But it was presented and organized in a way that is more convenient for you. If you're shopping for christmas presents for your children, you would be led through the mall accordingly."
The price for the One-To-One software package varied since clients' needs varied widely. About 20-25% of Broadvision's revenues at the time came from consulting. The mainstay was from selling software licenses for One-To-One which started at about $60,000. Today, the ratio is reversed, with the two-thirds coming from the selling of services needed for customization and upgrading and the remaining third coming from licensing.
Chen was born in Taiwan in 1957 and enjoyed what he recalls as a fun, simple childhood. "Taiwan back then was pretty rural, instead of industrial and commercial like it is today," says Chen. "We could go out all day and all night without worrying about traffic or bad people."
At age 7 he picked up the violin and started down the musical road that led him into a rock and roll band by the time he started National Taiwan University. His grounding in violin made the switch to guitar almost effortless.
Despite some success with his band, Chen majored in computer science and kept his nose to the grindstone in the hope of attending graduate school in the U.S.
"You have to strike a balance between professional interests and leisure interests," says Chen. "I never got carried away with leisure interests."
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At NTU, he ran into a classmate from third grade during a choral competition between her school of humanities and his school of sciences. They eventually married. By 1981 Chen had graduated and served the compulsory two-year stint in the military and moved with his wife to the U.S. The rest of his family had already moved to Washington, D.C., following his oldest sister who had come in 1968 as a graduate student. Pehong was the last to cross the Pacific.
Both Chen and his wife received fellowships to Indiana University at Bloomington. Both earned masters degrees in computer science before moving to Northern California. Chen attended UC Berkeley for his Ph.D., and his wife went to work for a database company called Ingres.
Right out of school, Chen was recruited by Italian electronics giant Olivetti. He was doing leading-edge multimedia research with top researchers Olivetti had nabbed from Xerox Park, an early settler to a nascent Silicon Valley.
"They were basically the brain trust of the computer age in the early 1970s," said Chen. In fact, Xerox Park research had laid the groundwork for the revolutionary graphical user interface Steve Jobs created for the Macintosh.
It was now 1988 and Chen was developing computer teleconferencing systems, which Intel now sells as ProShare. Chen had been there only three months when he became frustrated.
"The software industry was going through a big change," he said. "It was moving up the food chain, from being used to just develop systems like UNIX into building applications. And I just didnŐt feel I could get a lot of mileage staying in the research lab."
Chen finished out a full year and left in 1989 to found Gain Technology which was funded with $4000, half from Chen and half from a partner. It was enough to get a proposal together.
"I wanted to get a company going, build it, then see if I could sell it."
Chen and his partner worked contacts to wrangle a meeting with Matsushita execs to whom they proposed a multimedia software system to enhance its computer business. The electronics giant gave them a $15 million contract.
"It was really timing," Chen said. "Japan was at the peak of its bubble economy, with lots of money to spend. Japanese companies were targeting acquisitions and expansions worldwide."
The contract was no bubble-economy mistake for Matsushita. Gain developed a software package called Gain Momentum, a tie-in multimedia authoring system that allows you to create complex multimedia applications. Companies program the software to suit their own needs, creating media-rich applications.
"It was kind of like the World Wide Web today, with hyperlinks and stuff like that," says Chen. "But at that point there was no Web, so it was designed pretty much for intranets."
The company's biggest success came during the 1994 World Cup series. The 25 venues of the event were wired with Gain software. Each venue had a kiosk where reporters, for example, could tap into what was going on statistically and score-wise everywhere else. To this day Matsushita aggressively sells Gain Momentum.
"Insurance companies used our product," said Chen. "The whole U.S. Navy used our product for their on-board multimedia training. We had a very successful business."
In 1992 Sybase offered to buy Gain for $100 million. Chen sold and signed a three-year contract to be vice president of multimedia. He won't say how much he netted, but it was easily enough to let him retire in style. That was beside the point. Chen loved being on the leading edge with Gain and fired up a new venture with his vision for an age when every business would want to automate its interactions with customers. He founded Broadvision in 1993 to implement that vision.
Astute enough to understand that the big battles in the internet age are won and lost in the hearts and minds of the millions who use the World Wide Web, Chen put a version of One-To-One on the web. He called it The Angle (www.theangle.com), a directory based on One-To-One. Unlike a directory like Yahoo! or a search engine like Alta Vista, The Angle picked sites based on a user's personal profile.
A staff of experienced editors with backgrounds from The New York Times, The Chronicle and Life compiled and profiled the sites made available to The Angle visitors. The Angle targetted 10-20,000 sites, a small fraction of websites in existence. Keeping the number of included sites down to manageable proportions, Chen believed, would put The Angle a notch above Yahoo! or Alta Vista.
"Most of the millions of sites on the Internet are junk," Chen explained in 1996. "There was more dead web than live web. We target sites that are fresh and updated constantly, sites that are interactive and personalized. We know who you are, what you like and these are the sites that you will be interested in."
The Angle never caught on and was allowed to fade quietly into internet history. It now claims the distinction of being the only major concept that Chen failed to turn into a viable business. But you can bet the code and techniques developed for it found their way into Broadvision's current generation of enterprise portal application.
| "The software industry was going through a big change... and I just didnŐt feel I could get a lot of mileage staying in the research lab." |