Mike Gallup was my boss at Apollo Computer when I first started doing "professional" video editing. The year was 1984, and I was product manager for the DN590, a 3D graphics workstation from Apollo Computer that was meant to compete with Silicon Graphics. I told Mike that in addition to the typical brochure, we should make a video that the salesmen (hey, it was 1984 and they were all guys) could show to customers.
He quickly agreed, and gave me the $3000 budget that I estimated I'd need to work on a computerized editing system at Video One in Boston. In those days, we had Interleaf running on the Apollo, and I figured that if you had enough money, you could rent an "Interleaf for video" system. So I shot the video and took it to Video One and said, "show me your computerized editor, and let me run it."
They looked puzzled, and said okay. "You press 'p' for play, 'spacebar' for stop, and 'r' for rewind." I said, what do you mean rewind? They said, well, it rewinds the tape decks. Tape decks??!! I thought this was a computerized editor! It is, they countered...it's a computer that runs the tape decks.
I was crushed. I thought an Avid already existed if you had enough money. No, it turned out.
So I waited, thinking it would come any day. It didn't. But the video was a big hit, and we started making lots of them. By 1987, I was becoming painfully frustrated with how hard it was to edit on the linear editing systems. It was beyond painful. Imagine writing a short story where once you've made your first draft, you could only replace a letter at a time, and could never make the overall document longer or shorter. Any change that did mean a change in length meant you'd have to retype, character at a time, everything that came after that. Ugh.
By about May of 1987, I had figured out a solution. I showed the idea to the president of Apollo, and he said "Do it here. I'll give you money, space, and people."
In August of 1987, I had a crucial meeting with Mike. I'll never forget it. Mike asked me: "Bill, how hard is it to get the funding we need to build workstations to compete with Sun?" Pretty hard, I said. "So, do you really think you'll get the funding you need here?" I didn't answer. He went on: "If you really want to do this thing, get out of here and go do it."
I quit the next day to start Avid.
Two weeks later, the president of Apollo was fired.
Had Mike not said what he did, Avid may have been hopelessly entangled inside of Apollo. Apollo was later acquired by HP, which acquired Compaq, and Mike went on to become VP of Sales for Compaq.
I recently ran into Mike at an event for Music and Youth, where Mike serves on the board. I hadn't seen him in over 30 years, and we had this wonderful exchange on Boylston Street in Boston. Watch the video. Mike is a true Startup Hero!