But, in the end, Jerry Kaplan was convinced that he should take matters into his own hands, and make their dream a reality. Just like a romantic relationship, the birth of a company is a time of great instability, extreme enthusiasm, and a little fear.

But “the PC business is a war” says Kapor, who has already fought his share of battles for Lotus. Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996) Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994) The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013). Startup tells the story of Kaplans wild ride: how he assembled a brilliant but fractious team of engineers, software designers, and investors pioneered the emerging market for hand-held computers operated with a pen instead of a keyboard and careened from crisis to crisis without ever losing his passion for his revolutionary idea. The idea was there, a dream to create a personal computer that is as small and as easy to carry as a notebook. If only their seemingly odd ideas could be translated into numbers, formulae, microchips, processors, and real objects. In the 80’s, it was commonplace for so-called nerds to come up with new and revolutionary ideas, and these two had an idea that could revolutionise the entire computer industry and that came with many other ramifications. It was 1984, and the term computer pen did not yet exist. This would make taking notes, writing, and sending messages much quicker and easier. Flying on a private plane to the Lotus headquarters, where they both worked, the pair realised then that it would be much more convenient to have a laptop they could write on with a pen instead of having to carry screens, hard drives keyboards and mice with them everywhere they went. This is how great ideas often arise, from simple everyday problems and brilliant minds working to solve them. For Jerry Kaplan and Mitchell Kapor, the idea came to them out of nowhere.

Startup by Jerry Kaplan