Godard Abel

subsidiary.

But I was talking to my father about the Internet.

I went back home for Thanksgiving 99.

I was in the Silicon Valley, which at the time was called the reality distortion zone.

Might still be that.

But I think at the time also Jeff Bezos was already famous, and everyone was afraid of getting Amazoned, which is still true 22 years later.

But as I was talking to my dad, I'm like, hey, how's the pump industry going to be disrupted by the Internet?

I think he's like, well, it's disruption.

And he just said it's not.

Because I sell these complex pumps, and every pump we have to configure a different pump with, based on the flow rate, pressure, viscosity, chemical composition of the fluid, we have to configure different pump motors, couplings, housings, and there's no way I could sell it online like a book.

But then I had the idea.

I saw what Dell was doing.

And Dell was one of the also most successful entrepreneurs in the 90s.

But Michael Dell had started selling PCs online.

And PCs were also very configurable.

You can choose your memory, your hard drive, your screen size.

And behind the scenes, they had a configuration engine that allowed you to price it in real time, make sure all the components fit together, and even order it online.

And so the basic idea for Big Machines was let's help my father do the same thing.

But my dad only had two IT people.

They didn't know anything about the internet.