I grew up in a really small town, called Farmington, Minnesota, where there were less than 3,000 people. There were only 110 people in my graduating class. I was the class valedictorian.

I also was cheerleader, which is an unusual combination. I was very active in all sorts of school activities. I wasn't very nerd-ulent, and did not even use a computer until I went to college. I was very good at math and physics and all the sciences. But I also enjoyed the liberal arts type courses as well.

I went to a small college called the College of St. Catherine and the College of St. Thomas, part of the 5-college group in St. Paul, Minnesota, which includes Hamline and Macalester and Oxberg College as well. Combined, there were maybe 7,000 students.

Control Data had heavily endowed St. Thomas College with lots of computers. So we had more computer time than anyone, even at the larger colleges. That was the first time I took a programming class. We didn't even have a computer science major. At that time, even Stanford's computer science major was a liberal arts major. Amazing! Once I figured out that there was such a thing as a computer and that programming was so much fun, I was cornered.

It was very unusual for women to be taking any of these courses and it was a big year of affirmative action. So all sorts of job offers were given to me as soon as I graduated. I was given a job offer to run a small plant for 3M Corporation, a job offer to work for the government -- I think it was either the FBI or the CIA where you went after people who were guilty of tax evasion. Most of the jobs offered to me were way above my capability and not in my interest.

One of the jobs I was offered was as a systems programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. Now that doesn't sound very glamorous, but the Federal Reserve Bank did not normally hire inexperienced people. And it was a government-graded job where you started at perhaps a Grade 7, and I would be brought in as a Grade 10, so it was pretty high up. It was a brand new building in big downtown Minneapolis. So I took that job.

It was extremely boring.

One of my cubicle mates would disappear from 2 to 3pm everyday. And, finally, after I worked there a few weeks, I asked, where are you going? And he told me: `I go home and watch `I Dream of Jeannie' on TV. Nobody ever missed him. Nobody got there any earlier than 9 a.m. And at 5 o'clock, everyone was gone home, no matter how exciting the project was or how much work was ahead.

They were just checking in and checking out. There was no commitment to build anything, no commitment to the products we were looking at. It was a job. And being sort of an overachiever myself, I didn't want just a job. I wanted to do something where you actually could create something, where it was really exciting.

So after 13 months, I resigned.

I had this idea that basically most entrepreneurs really overestimate what is required to start a company. Hey, I knew how to program. I took all those business courses. The business majors seemed not as smart as the math majors. They all came from families that had run businesses before. How hard would this be?

So I actually convinced three of the top programmers from the Federal Reserve Bank to start a company with me. Those three guys would not quit their jobs. They took a 1-year sabbatical just in case it didn't work. One was actually my boss, who supervised the projects that I was involved in.

So we started a company in 1975 and formally incorporated. It was called Open Systems, a name used quite frequently today to describe standards and systems architecture.

I actually trademarked that name in 1975.

I said, "Why don't we build a high-end accounting system for these new, smaller computers, called microcomputers." (They weren't called personal computers then.)

We did that at night. During the day, we got a large consulting contract to get paid by the hour to build some software for a large school district nearby. That gave us the money to pay our rent and pay our bills while we were building this software.

I actually applied for food stamps that first year because I could qualify. So I would go to the grocery store and buy all the food and bring it to the office, and then the guys would take it home and eat it.

At that time, there was a very small software industry, not like today. It was really considered very unusual to be a professional nerd at that time-and not a positive thing. It wasn't like "Nerds Rule," like it is today. It was very fringey. My parents thought I was off on some `finding myself' expedition, and I would come back soon and do something real in the real world.

As I know now, it's very difficult to make money your first year in business. You're mostly building product versus selling product. So to end that year with just a $85 loss wasn't so bad.

The thing then was that we had to learn every aspect of the business ourselves. We didn't have any business advisors who'd done this before. There was no thriving software community in Minneapolis. It was the same year that Microsoft got started and Digital Research was happening in Monterey. There was not a Mesopotamia of software companies.

Number two is: I look at the founders. Who is the CEO? Can they attract excellence? Here in Mesopotamia, Silicon Valley, we have negative unemployment right now. And that doesn't show much opportunity for change in the near future. Which means, if you start a company, in order to get your engineering team staffed, to hire your other executives, you've got to get people to leave other jobs. So we look at your ability to attract excellence. Will people want to come and work for you? And can you convince them that your opportunity is better than others?

Then we look closely at the products and technology to see if what you're going to deliver to market can at least for the foreseeable future deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.

Then we try to work as a trained coaching staff and trained networker to help you avoid the mistakes that I made as an entrepreneur or other of our companies have made, and to provide you with the connections.

We've gone through eras and eras of data creation. Transaction processing was one of the first software areas. That's why we built accounting software. That is transaction processing. As we moved from stand-alone mainframes to local area networks to client-server, most of what has been installed in the customer base is still for transaction processing.

We're just starting the era of what we'll call analytical processing. As the enterprise is extending beyond even the barriers of the buildings themselves for major corporations, for individuals, information plays a much greater role.

What is that data? How does that data provide us with some kind of analytical view of our companies? That will be a big change. Most people haven't noticed it yet, and they're still thinking about database-intensive applications or creating the data versus using the data.

And because the Internet extends the consumer level, information becomes really important as well. Users aren't processing transactions at home; they're going there for information or for content, ranging from education to entertainment. That's a big theme.

Some other big themes include just getting an enterprise that works. Connecting all the dots from all the different constituencies that sit in front of a computer and touch the keyboard. The number of digital eyeballs is extraordinary.

Routes of commerce are changing. Those old routes will look sort of like Marco Polo's routes.

Five years from now when we look up, we most likely will not be buying airline tickets through a travel agent. You will probably belong to all sorts of buying clubs that are digital. You'll have your own cybercash account somewhere; you won't drive to the bank anymore; digital signatures will be real. Right now, it's amazing how quickly some digital commerce companies have grown to 20-30-40 million dollars in revenues when they didn't exist a year ago.