Listen to Blazie Interview, Part 4
Deane Blazie (continued): Having to make ten of these required a fair amount of money so I sat down with my wife and I said, "Look, I've got this product." She knew I was working on something but she really didn't know much what my plans were with it or anything about it, so I said, "I want to make ten of these. It's going to cost us about $10,000 or $12,000 and I'm going to sell them." "How many you think we're going to be able to sell?" [she asked.] I said, "Over a period of a number of years probably a hundred or more. About a hundred, I guess I would have said.
And as I remember, it was gut-wrenching for both of us because we had just gone through the Maryland Computer Services thing but she decided, "Yeah, if you think it's worthwhile, let's do it."
So I invested this $10-12,000 and had these circuit boards made and had the plastics made and got it all going. Got them all working by the time of the convention and then at the end of the year I went to the NFB convention. I don't remember where it was but I know it will come to me.
But I took these devices thinking maybe I'd sell one, or two and I showed them to people and well when I went home, first of all, I sold all ten of them. I came home with credit card numbers and cash and checks for more of them. People just loved them. That's the first time they'd seen it. But it was enough, a low enough price to where they really could give me a credit card. And they really could write a check. They didn't have to say, "Well give me the specs and I'll go to Rehab and see if I can get Rehab to spring for one."
And so I really learned a lesson there. We were onto something and there really was, I thought there really was a market.
Tony Candela: I'm going to guess for the first time in your experience, you were at the NFB Convention, you were at a place where a bunch of blind people who had disposable income and now saw a product that they dearly loved, were able to buy it on the spot. That had to be historic, I think, not only for you but maybe for blind people in general.
Deane Blazie: I think it was. I really think it was because it was totally surprising to me that people would literally give me cash.
Fortunately, I had a pretty good reputation in the blindness business. Because very few people would give cash to anybody at a convention with a new product. Because you just don't do that. Sure, I see it there but I don't believe it.
Luckily, I had a reputation enough to where people knew that I did stuff and that it really worked for the most part. So they were willing to do that. It was just a real joy.
Furthermore, I told people. "Well," they said, "Well, I would like to have one of these. I'd like to put one on order." I said, "I don't have any money to build any more of these. The only way I'm going to be able to build more of these is if you guys pay me now and I'll get it to you when I can." And people trusted. For the most part, people trusted us.
There were those people that said, "No, I'll wait. Just call me when you have one." Which is fine. I would have been one of those. But these people trusted me and it also taught me something that taught me that when you have a unique enough product like that, you can ask outrageous things. That was pretty outrageous.
So when in the later years, that following year in 1987, when people started hearing about the devices and we started signing people up to be dealers, I would tell the dealers the same thing. I'd say, "Yeah, but cash up front with me. We take no credit." People thought I was crazy, you know. But that's the only way we could do business and I said, "That's it." And so, sure enough, it worked.
Tony Candela: Had the products been more expensive, it probably would not have worked.
Deane Blazie: That's right.
Tony Candela: The cost of the product, again, probably that's historic too. Something that costs as little as the original Braille 'N Speaks, that packed so much capability and power into them, I remember the days, I know. I think that was a landmark time for this kind of technology.
Deane Blazie: Yeah. At the same convention, there were other people. Robitron was there with their—I forgot what they called it—Remember the first Robitron device? They had it there and of course they were a lot more expensive and they were much, much bigger and I'm sure it broke their heart to see this little tiny Braille 'N Speak that could do just about everything theirs could do and for a lot less money. But that's the way innovation is. Sometimes it just happens.
Tony Candela: I remember reading, back a number of years, it could be as much as ten years back in time, in the late '70s, of a French device called the ELINFA, e-l-i-n-f-a I believe is how it is spelled. And it was cassette-driven. And it was an attempt in a direction of, I suppose it was a primitive VersaBraille/Braille 'N Speak, in combination. They couldn't make it fly apparently.
Deane Blazie: Interesting story behind that. Oleg Tretiakoff was the guy that made the ELINFA. Oleg designed the very first braille cell, based on piezo-electric crystals. Oleg is really quite a fellow. I hope you get to interview him. He is an engineer-physicist, I guess, nuclear physicist by trade. He worked most of his life for the French government, designing nuclear power plants and nuclear things. But he's always, ever since the late '70s, Oleg has had a penchant for developing devices for the blind.
He can tell you why that happened through a personal contact, but Oleg set out to design the first braille cell and he did, using piezoelectric crystals and he made it into a display of I think twenty characters, maybe twelve, and he packaged it. Oleg's problem was packaging. He didn't package it in a nice package that was reliable. But he was really onto it and in fact, according to Oleg, he went to sell this braille technology to Telesensory Systems and I gather that Telesensory thought they could design their own braille cell and avoid paying Oleg royalties. So it ended up not happening.
But Oleg is still working in this field. He's still designing devices for the blind. He's designing new braille cells to try to make a much less expensive braille cell and a full page braille display. Unfortunately, his Elinfa product had too many glitches. You had to hold it sideways to put it in record mode because it was based on an old cassette tape recorder that had a gravity switch. So only if you held it sideways, pushed the play button, then it would go into record. Which was really poor [for] human factors but there was a reason for it and Oleg chose to leave it that way.
But it did work. It worked fairly well. And in fact, Triformation at that time licensed the technology and they were going to build them. And they built a few but I guess they were having financial troubles or cash flow problems at the same time and they ended up dumping the whole project. But it was quite a neat device.
Tony Candela: I hear that one of the next great evolutions in blindness technology will have to be the braille cell. The fully functional but less expensive braille cell. So, we wish Oleg a lot of luck.
Deane Blazie: Yes. I agree that that's probably the most...If anybody wants to make a contribution that would be to me where it should go. A less expensive braille cell, where we can have a Braille Lite for under $1,000.
Tony Candela: The typical device is probably tripled in cost by the cost of the braille display and the braille cell is the unit of the braille display.
Deane Blazie: That's right. That's been my dream for a number of years and I have failed.
Tony Candela: Well the fact that Oleg lives in the area, and you're retired, doesn't necessarily make me think all doors are closed just yet.
Deane Blazie: No, they're really not. There are a certain number of people working on new braille display, braille cell technology and Oleg is just one of them.
If anybody wants to know how not to make a braille cell, have them contact me. I'd be more than happy to tell them what we tried that doesn't work.
Tony Candela: And you would not care to expound upon that now.
Deane Blazie: I'd be happy to tell you some of them.
Tony Candela: Very briefly. I think people would be interested.
Deane Blazie: Well, let's see. First of all, displaying braille using electrical stimulus instead of an actual physical bump, doesn't appear to work. Lots of problems with it. It's been tried and tried in a lot of university labs where perceptual psychologists have actually measured the differences. Nobody has been able to get that to work to where you would really want to use it.
You can make out a letter or so by putting the voltage on a pad, feeling it, but it just doesn't seem to work. Nobody's been able to make a good air jet that you can feel that feels right. Those are two of the things.
People have tried inverted bubbles, like bubble wrap, that will go in both directions. That may be made to work. I don't know but so far there's been so much fatigue in the plastic after a number of evacuations. And you need a braille cell [where] each dot [would] be able to last four or five million actuations, at least, at a bare minimum for a device like the Braille Lite.
We've tried using, some of the things that might be made to work eventually are like using air pressure. In the pneumatic braille display we built one of those and it had real promise. We just couldn't pursue finishing it. We ran out of capital and ideas. Well not ideas so much but we were too busy to finish it up.
But the pneumatic display could possibly work, either using little ball bearing bee bees, which is what we used, to have them blown up by air and latch and then blow then back down. That had a lot of potential. We had a hard time getting a good valve to work reliably and that's where we stopped. So pneumatics is a possibility.
I suspect polymers might be a good way to go. There's been some good work done by Dr. Zang, up at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn State I think it is. He's developed some polymers that have enough movement, ten times the amount of movement as the piezo reed and about the same energy requirements. I think that's probably real high on my list of something to pursue.
And there's a bunch of different polymers. Not just Dr. Zang's but others out there that have polymers that could be made to work and work well.
Tony Candela: And you would somehow get this polymer to change shape to form a braille dot, we'll say, and then instantly change shape to form something flat?
Deane Blazie: You'd use it more like you use a piezo reed. This polymer, when you put a voltage across it, expands, or contracts. This one happens to contract. So what you do is you'd put a voltage on it and it would pull a dot down. You release a voltage and a dot would pop back up, via some spring or you could invert that motion somehow.
But this half inch long polymer would easily put enough force on a braille dot to produce about ten grams, five or ten grams of force, which is what you need. So I think that's a real possibility.
I still think shape memory alloys, the metal TiNi, Titanium Nickel Alloys that change shape. I think those still have potential even though they've been tried a number of times and given up on. They're not beyond possibility, to be efficient too.
Tony Candela: That's right. They have to be very reactive. They have to be very fast.
Deane Blazie: They are fast. The problem is you have to cool them and cooling tends to be slow, people are known to use them mostly in a high energy state where it takes a lot of energy to do them. But the smaller the wire gets, the less energy it takes. And you only need a tiny, tiny wire. They produce an enormous amount of force compared to other technologies.
Tony Candela: Most of us, as we were observing Blazie Engineering moving along, developing products, I think we have the image of Deane, basically, pounding away at the programming and pounding away at the concepts. Not necessarily alone, because we knew you had staff, including your son, Bryan. I want to ask you when you brought him into the picture.
What was life like on a day by day basis for you during the Blazie Engineering years? Did you spend a lot of time in the lab, as it were?
Deane Blazie: Oh yes. We were in business thirteen years before we sold and I would say that throughout the thirteen years, I spent most of my time by a keyboard or oscilloscope or in the lab, most of that time.
For the first probably five or six years, I did all the programming on the Braille 'N Speak, virtually all of it. Phil Hall did the speech part for the first year and then he kind of bowed out. So I took it over from there. Converted most of the code to run in C language and got a compiler and met a good friend along the way that wrote the C compiler and he ended up helping with some of the programming. Bill Auerbach from the Soft Tools Company. Bill was a really good guy and he helped me through some real jams.
But a typical day was for me to sit down at the computer and add a feature to the Braille 'N Speak. Sometimes it would take a week to add it. Sometimes it would take twenty minutes. I would spend most of my day, if I wasn't programming. I would spend it on the phone with customers. So I did almost all the customer support. For the first couple of years I did all the customer support and all the programming.
Tony Candela: Which meant that you were getting instant human factors information and instant feedback on the bugs of your product and I'm going to imagine, lots of suggestions from the users out there about those features that you were adding.
Deane Blazie: That's right.
I'd like to say the Braille 'N Speak was designed by the customers, not by me. I implemented it and gave them a basic set of features but by and large, they told me what they wanted and we did it.
Tony Candela: The observation, again, from the outside is that is exactly what was happening. We thought you had a good staff and that you were good but we figured that there are so many new ideas, you must have been getting feedback from people who pounded away at using these machines, for hours at a time.
Deane Blazie: My son, Bryan, helped too. He did most of the sales and a lot of the training. The first couple of years, he was in the office and he actually put the units together. Helped build 'em. Test 'em. He would answer some customer calls and we sent him on the road to do trainings.
We had a policy where if you get ten or more people together in one spot, we'd come out and do the training for free. So we did a lot of that. He did a lot of that. I did a lot of that. And those trainings were just invaluable to us. I learned so much by sitting there and watching a kid, that's never been behind a Braille 'N Speak and I set it in front of him and just watched him. And it was just so revealing. It was just amazing to me how much I learned on every single trip.
Tony Candela: Can you think of a few that stand out? Things that you learned?
Deane Blazie: Yeah. I remember one fellow in particular had only one hand. I was watching him use it. I was pretty amazed how fast he'd go. But he said, "If I had a way to make this space bar stick down." He said, "Then I could just go like crazy with the chords." And that's where the one-handed mode came from.
You probably know how the one-handed mode works. When you put it in that mode, you can press on any key and the keys, essentially, the computer makes them stay down, internally at least. And then you can put together a chord and when you hit the space bar again, it remembers that, it takes that command.
And it worked great. And I thought, "Well, this will be just for this one guy." Well, gosh, I bet we sold a hundred or more units, to people just for the one-handed mode. That's just what they needed. There were so many people out there that could not use both hands, for whatever reason, that wanted a one-hand mode.
And that's one little example. There are so many features and commands and stuff that we added just because I talked to people and saw them use it and saw the problems they were having with it. It's really the only way to design a product. Unless you're a user of the product yourself. You really need to sit down. And even if you are, sit down and watch other people use it and see where they mess up.
Tony Candela: What made you decide to add a braille display to the Braille 'N Speak, thus beginning the next line of products, the Braille Lite?
Deane Blazie: I resisted that for a long time. I don't know why. But I do remember I had this headstrong idea that we didn't need to do that, that Telesensory had the VersaBraille and that covered that piece of the market and I didn't need to be doing a braille display.
Then I heard so many negative comments on the VersaBraille II, compared to the VersaBraille, from people. Remember the VersaBraille II? It was a fairly large aluminum box. Nice keyboard, nicely designed in terms of the human factors but it was way too big for what it did. And so, it was mostly that, and the fact that I heard so many complaints about it that I thought, "Well..."
So I called Jim Bliss and asked him to make me up a braille cell. He said he'd sell me braille cells so he sent me a braille display, based on eighteen cells, and I hooked it up to Braille 'N Speak. Jim was not averse to selling parts. He liked selling braille cells and he thought if I could buy braille cells, he was always willing to make braille cells for people.
He said, "Yeah, I'll send you one of those."
Tony Candela: Did he know that you were about to develop a product that might compete with his product?
Deane Blazie: Probably not. Jim is a smart guy. Jim is a real smart guy and he probably surmised as much, but he felt like the more people that had braille products out there, the more braille cells he would sell. And he did. He sold a lot of braille cells to us. A bunch. It was really good for their company.
Jim was a pretty cooperative guy. He was a fierce competitor but he was also cooperative in helping to advance technology.
Tony Candela: I think this was an aspect of the business that we don't think about. We think about secrets and patents and that people would be worried about their competition to the point where you would never get this level of cooperation. Is this unusual you think in the technology business or is it an aspect of the fact that this is a smaller niche market and people need to work with each other more?
Deane Blazie: I think more the latter. It is unusual. You don't see this a lot in other industries that I've been exposed to. But I think people tend to work more together because you tend to meet people more on a personal level. A lot of CEOs never meet their competitor's CEO. But in this industry, you do. You meet those guys and you start talking and you become friends.
And yes, you compete. You compete pretty fiercely but, on the other hand, there is cooperation too.
I'll never forget, I went to a conference, I think I was showing the audio tactile display somewhere and Tim Cranmer said I ought to attend it if I could. I was working for the government at the time so they paid my way to go and they let me show this calculator. That's what it was. It was the Canon calculator I did. It was 1975 and I went to this conference and set up a table, you know. And that's the first time I'd been to any technology conference.
Of course the only company in the industry that displayed anything was Telesensory. There was nobody else there. Triformations may have had a printer but I don't think at this time they did.
But here comes Jim Bliss and Rob Savoy and a couple of his top engineers. And I was just in awe of these guys because I'd seen the Optacon and I saw all the work that they had done. I remember being just sort of mesmerized by seeing these guys in person. I was a young kid, in my mid-twenties. It was pretty amazing, I thought.
Tony Candela: And I think it is that way today, although now we have companies that have merged and become bigger and some of the CEOs are coming out of non-blindness backgrounds. I guess you all, essentially, came out of non-blindness backgrounds but some of the CEOs are building their companies essentially already up and running, such as Freedom Scientific.
I wonder if the environment is changing now in say the early 2000's, if there is as much of that cooperation and camaraderie. Do you have a sense of that at all? I mean the industry has changed.
Deane Blazie: Yeah, I hear it's changed a lot. Honestly I have not kept up much in the past three years, unfortunately. It has changed.
I suspect there's not nearly as much cooperation as there was. There's a lot more interest now by non-industry people because the numbers you're talking about are beginning to be large enough to where it's feasible for it to do a public offering. So there are people out there that don't come from the humble beginnings that some of us came from.
Tony Candela: Now somewhere along the way you decided you needed a braille printer. Is that the Blazer?
Deane Blazie: Yes, the Braille Blazer.
I remember when a Braille 'N Speak was successful and we were doing well, we were making money and we were growing and I remember thinking that, "You know, I know I can't succeed at this as a one product company. I know I have to have two, maybe three, four would be great, products. If I could have four products then I felt like I could be stable, because if something happened to one, you still have another.
And I knew the braille printer market because of Maryland Computer Services. So I always kept in touch with Mike Romeo and I had heard he was not happy at Enabling Technologies, because he couldn't do what he wanted to do.
I'll give you an example of that because it's kind of funny. Mike wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays. Because when Mike got on a project, his object was to get the project done. So Mike wanted to come in on Saturday or Sunday and they wouldn't give him a key, apparently, to come in. At least that's Mike's story.
And I can understand that. Some companies are very concerned about security but it just never was an issue with us. Mike always got a key and he came in to work, every weekend. He still does that.
So Mike left Enabling Technologies and started a company up in Cocoa, Florida, with an old high school buddy of his, Carl Holberg. And he and Carl were doing oh lighting, special effects lights for some bands that they'd met and just odd jobs. Any kind of thing they could find.
So I called Mike and said, "Would you be willing to design a printer for me?" And Mike said, "Well yeah." So I said, "I'll come down and talk to you." What I described to him was a personal printer. I said, "I need a personal printer because I've got these kids buying Braille 'N Speak, using it in school. They need to do their homework and they need to print out this braille. So we need something like The Perkie, which was a Cranmer-modified Perkins," I said, "But I don't want single sheet paper, it's got to have fan-fold paper," and I said, "Mike, it's got to be really small so we don't use the regular wide braille paper, let's just use 8-1/2 x 11."
Of course everybody I told that to thought that was a big mistake. But somebody, somebody, I think it was Judy Dixon again, I think Judy. I watched people at these conferences and I'm pretty sure Judy always used narrow paper. Because you can't get binders or anything.
There you go. You have some paper in your hand there. It's 8-1/2 x 11. It's just easier. The world is made for an 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper.
So I said, "Mike, let's do it. Let's make it that size. It'll turn out to be a feature." I knew the competition would try to kill us by saying, "We can't even produce standard braille with that thing."
But anyhow, Mike and Carl designed this printer for me and it was The Braille Blazer. And it turned out to be really a great success.
It was though. That was a tough product. It had a lot of support issues. The same thing. We had people producing boxes of braille a day on this little braille printer that was designed to produce individual sheets for high school kids. But we weathered through it and it became a real workhorse. We fixed all the problems. Made it last for a long time and it was just a great product. I really loved it.
We put speech in it, which was another idea that I'd had. Let's make it different. Let's put speech inside so we don't have to have all this configuration stuff. That'll make it easier to configure it.
And I said, "We can make it a synthesizer too, so people don't have to buy a synthesizer, which they were paying hundreds of dollars for at that time. It can be all three of these in one device.
Tony Candela: So you could plug another device into a port on the Blazer and have the Blazer be the speech box, as it were, for the other device?
Deane Blazie: Yes. Right. So people were using it with JAWS, to make a computer talk. It was just one less product they had to buy.
Tony Candela: And then you started, somewhere along the way, I suspect early on, devising ways for the Braille 'N Speak to become a speech box and even a keyboard for a computer.
Deane Blazie: Yes. We had a speech box and a Braille 'N Speak. That was almost from the beginning, in fact, that we had that, where you could use that as a synthesizer. That's what made me decide putting it in the braille Blazer cost us pennies, literally. It was just software so why not add it and have that one more feature. And it just really took the market. It just became the braille printer for personal use.
And adding the speech box mode to that just gave people one more thing for a little bit of money.
Tony Candela: Does the Blazer live on? Does it still exist?
Deane Blazie: Yes. They're still making Braille Blazers. They did retract the Braille Blazer 40, Lightning I think they called it or something like that. We had a 40 cell Blazer that was much faster. They either never introduced it or they took it off the market. I do know that. But the basic Blazer is still being made. And the sales are fine for that, last I heard.
Tony Candela: Were there any more developments that came out of Blazie Engineering?
Deane Blazie: We did come out with some software for a while. You mentioned using the Braille 'N Speak as a keyboard for a computer. We had some software that let you do that. Speak Sys, I think it was called. We had another name for it too. That was used for a while, but then when Windows became very, very popular, that kind of went away because it wouldn't work with Windows. And those features were built into JAWS and the other screen readers so it just became unnecessary.
So that was one. We worked on a Windows product to compete with JAWS, for a while. But we found it overloaded the company.
That's the other thing about running a business. If you don't specialize you can easily lose focus and we were losing focus. So that product we just dropped. Plus Ted was doing a better job of it than we were so we just dropped it.
An interesting fellow helped to work on that, Dahi Lee. I think he's in California now, right near you. He's a bright fellow from the University of Michigan or Michigan State. Has a linguistics degree and he did a lot of programming for us. Blind programmer.
Tony Candela: And when did Ted leave you to go off and do what we know Ted did: form Henter-Joyce?
Deane Blazie: Ted left us, he moved back to Florida like in '94 ['84] or '95 ['85]. He just couldn't take the cold weather and he missed, I guess his family lived down here and Mel's family. That's his wife, Mel. So they moved back in '95 but Ted continued working for us on a contract basis and it was in '96 ['86], I believe, maybe even '95 ['85], that he started Henter Joyce. He and a fellow named Bill Joyce, another blind fellow, started Henter Joyce, with the idea of making the world's best screen reader. So they did.
And Bill Joyce was a silent partner for a number of years and Ted ended up buying Bill out, I don't know how many years later.
But. I kept in touch with Ted all during that time. I think he left us in say '85 and then really stopped work...He did a little bit of work for Enabling Technology, when they took over and then that lasted about six months and then he was totally on his own.
Tony Candela: And it got to a point where you and Ted both found yourselves in a position where when it came to decide whether to join a larger company, in this case Freedom Scientific, you had some hard decisions to make about the future of Blazie Engineering. That couldn't have been an easy time, deciding essentially to merge into a bigger company.
Deane Blazie: That's true. We talked about it for maybe a year before Ted actually did something about it. I was pretty adamant. I didn't care about selling my business. I just didn't want to and Ted was vacillating back and forth, for a number of reasons. But he was just getting tired, tired of it, I think. Ted'll tell you the truth from Ted's point of view.
But Ted put his company up to a company that does nothing but sell companies and he asked them to see if anyone was interested in buying them. And that lasted over a year, a year and a half. And during that year and a half, I thought more and more about selling, and I still was convinced I didn't want to sell.
And then Dick Chandler came to Ted through this company and Ted and I talked about what would happen and it became more and more palatable to me that maybe we could do something good, by combining efforts and becoming a big company and doing things differently but better.
Plus, we could focus more on what we liked to do instead of running a business.
Tony Candela: Is that what started to make it more palatable, the idea of selling and merging, I guess, is kind of what ended up happening. The ability to do more of what you liked to do and less maybe of what you didn't like to do?
Deane Blazie: It was for me. It was particularly a big deal for me.
Tony Candela: And what did you like to do and what didn't you not like to do?
Deane Blazie: I liked working in a lab, designing products, talking to customers, going out and meeting with customers and doing the trainings. I didn't like administering the business, the human resources part, the hiring and the firing. I had a very good fellow that did most of that, Doug Kissmiller, who really helped our company a lot. Doug took us from a little company to a decent size. Doug took a lot of that burden off of me, but I was still involved. I still had to be there to do a lot of that that I just didn't like doing. I've really never liked managing the business or managing people.
I really enjoy working with people, on a technical basis, but I never considered that managing. I never had to manage Mike Romeo. All I had to do was work with Mike. We'd sit and talk. We had a really loose organization. We had almost no reporting to be done, except financial statements. We didn't require employees to come and go at any time. Actually, one time we said we had a policy against policies. So there were to be no policies in our company. No hard and fast policies.
Well, we ended up breaking it. We had a non-smoking rule, and things like that. But basically, we didn't like meetings and we didn't like the bureaucratic part of running a business. So I knew what was going on in the business only by walking around every day and I'd stop at Mike's desk and "How's it going, Mike." And I'd look at what he's done and sometimes it would last twenty seconds and sometimes I'd be there half an hour, sometimes all day. We'd work out a problem. Or we'd talk about how we'd gotten off track. "That feature is not supposed to do this." "No, it doesn't have to last fifty million boxes, Mike. Five million would be quite enough." That kind of thing. "It can't be that big. It's got to be smaller." And, "Yeah. A quarter of an inch really does matter, when it comes to the size of a Braille 'N Speak." I don't know if you noticed we made it thinner one year.
And people noticed it. It was only a quarter of an inch, or less, but it was noticeable. So that's how I managed the business, by walking around and talking to people and pretty ad hoc.
Tony Candela: Management by walking around. It's actually documented in human resources literature.
Deane Blazie: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were apparently accused of that. It works. It worked well for me, I should say.
Tony Candela: In small environments, I suspect, it works possibly better than in large environments.
Deane Blazie: I think so.
Tony Candela: Because you were part of the working team. So, I think you did what was right for your environment.
Deane Blazie: Hewlett Packard still operates, as least from what I know, in that way in that they have very small teams that design products. It'll be half a dozen guys who design a printer, say. They keep it small because small works better. They can use the resources of the whole company, but the actual decision-making is done on that low level. Which I think is fantastic.
Tony Candela: What would be the right business phrase to use for what happened with Blazie Engineering, Henter Joyce and the piece of Arkenstone that became Freedom Scientific? Would you call it a merger? A buyout? How do you term it?
Deane Blazie: It has the elements of both of those. It was a merger in that they combined Ted's and my company and part of Jim's. So that way it really was a merger.
Tony Candela: And this is Jim Fruchterman?
Deane Blazie: Jim Fruchterman, yes.
And yet it was really a buyout because Ted and I ended up owning just a small piece of stock in Freedom Scientific so we do own some of that but not very much. So it was a buyout in that case.
Some people call it a roll-up, because you're buying synergistic companies in an industry to make them one big company instead of a bunch of little ones. That's the idea. To buy more companies too.
Tony Candela: Was it in the end for you a happy time, after you weighed the pros and cons and decided? What was it like for you?
Deane Blazie: It was a happy time for me because the picture I had in my mind was that I'd have this huge burden taken off me, of managing the company. And I would have enough cash to be secure. I wouldn't have to worry about earning a living. And I would still be able to do what I always loved to do, design products for the blind.
So it all had positives to me.
Tony Candela: I'm sure you consulted with Marty on this. Did you and she spend lots of time talking about it and did she ask you similar questions, like how will you feel? Things like that?
Deane Blazie: Yeah, she did. And I asked the same thing to her. "What do you think?" Marty wasn't involved in a company the last few years but she was certainly very much involved in the first say seven or eight, ten years. Side by side we worked. She did all the accounting, bookkeeping, the office management, talked to a lot of customers. When I was on the phone talking to one customer, she might be talking to another, trying to help with the question. She's not very technical but she knew a few things.
So we talked about it a lot and we just both decided it was probably the best thing for us at this time in our lives. We were making plenty of money so it wasn't that we needed the money so much as we wanted the burden to go away.
Tony Candela: It was a long time from Kentucky and a nice home through the Army back to a lifestyle that you had once been accustomed to, wasn't it?
Deane Blazie: Yes, it was really, really a long time. A long, hard road. But that's what most of life is, it's in the struggle. It's not in the attaining it.
We still talk now about how we were just as happy when we were there at the Army base. We really were. We still did things. We had parties. We were very happy. In spite of the huge struggle it was, when we look back at it. But we were just as happy.
Tony Candela: When did Bryan leave Blazie Engineering?
Deane Blazie: He left the same time I left and the same time Ted left. I think it was April of 2001.
Tony Candela: So you actually left Freedom Scientific, technically, at that point.
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: Did Bryan leave because you left? Did you all three leave at the same time for the same reason?
Deane Blazie: Yes.
Tony Candela: Can you talk about it?
Deane Blazie: Sure. After Freedom took over, things, let me see how to phrase this, things weren't exactly the way that I expected them to be. Nor were they that way for Ted, because we discussed it a lot.
Freedom was run by Dick Chandler and Dick was a very savvy businessman, successful businessman. He'd run several successful companies. And I think they were all large companies. They were none of them as small and as personal.
So the culture of the business changed. The culture in Ted's business was Ted. The culture in our business was me and our culture was just very different from Dick's. Dick hired a human resources manager right away and we had none. We just did human resources, the accounting people would do that in their spare time. We just never felt it was necessary and we paid a price for it once in a while. You'd make a bad hire or a bad fire, or whatever and we paid a price. But the price we paid was minimal, compared to the headaches that a human resources department can cause.
So that was one of the things that the culture just completely changed. It became a lot of meetings. Which again, I'm not saying any of this is bad, it's just different. It was just different for me and the products were changed in mid-stream. I didn't agree with some of the product changes and that was okay. That wasn't my, I mean I knew I gave up that control.
But it got to a point to where Ted and I, we were afraid that the business was going downhill and that there needed to be a change at the top. So we made some recommendations to the Board of Directors and to Dick and the Board thought well, with the attitudes we had that things weren't working for us that maybe we wanted to leave.
So that's what we did. We decided that rather than butt heads with management all the time, trying to keep our culture alive and our ideas alive, why don't we just come up with a way to part company and be out of it.
Tony Candela: Were you both worried about what would happen to the essence, in a sense, at least your life's work, that were you not there to kind of be the guardian angels over the Braille 'N Speak line and the JAWS line, that the products themselves would disappear?
Deane Blazie: We were concerned that that would happen, but in fact it was happening and we had nothing, there was nothing we could do about it. It wasn't like we had a choice. We made a recommendation, they chose not to follow it. They chose their own pathway. Which I can completely understand too. So it was kind of out of our hands.
And yeah, it hurt to think that a lot of this work we were doing was going down the tubes or it really wasn't going down the tubes, they were just changing. Things were going to be done differently. But it was just something we had to accept and it was difficult.
(End of Part 4 of 5)
