JOMEI THE MONEY
JoMei Chang was a standout at Bell Labs, but she made her fortune
starting up her own companies.
By Deborah Claymon
From the July 1998 issue
A technology researcher can go far on brains and discipline alone. But it's
independent thinking that leads to innovation. Such is the lesson that
JoMei Chang, the CEO of Vitria Technology, a privately held developer
of Java-based application integration software, has learned over the
course of her career.
Ms. Chang's evolution into a confident leader of a company that attacks
large enterprise computing problems has been a gradual one. In 1974,
at 21, she emigrated to the United States from Taiwan to pursue
her doctorate in database management systems at Purdue
University; she was hired by AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1979.
Awestruck by the caliber of her colleagues, she was initially worried
that she would not measure up. But her fears melted away when Arno
Penzias, the 1978 Nobel laureate in physics and the lab's vice
president of research, proclaimed in a welcome address that "rules
are made to be broken." After a youth spent in rigid mathematical
studies, Ms. Chang found this invitation to intellectual freedom all
the incentive she needed.
Five years later she patented the Reliable Multicast protocol, a
technology for delivering data to multiple users at the same time.
Ms. Chang was not content simply to frame her patent and go back to the lab.
So she took a job with the startup Sun Microsystems, moving to
California and into an office with Java creator James Gosling
(who now sits on Vitria's board).
When Sun went public (Nasdaq: SUNW) in March 1986, Ms. Chang was
already thinking about her next adventure. "In my mind I was ready
to start my own business," she recalls, "but I didn't exactly know
what that would mean. I was still a researcher at heart."
Together with Dale Skeen (her husband and now Vitria's chief
technology officer) and two others, she left Sun to cofound
Teknekron Software Systems, now known as Tibco. Undaunted by the
stranglehold Reuters had on information systems for the financial
industry, she convinced Fidelity Management Research to let her
build a prototype software system to manage its $80 billion in
constantly shifting assets. Her trader workstation revolutionized
Wall Street information systems and clearly threatened the market
share of Reuters. As a result the British-based news agency bought
Tibco for $125 million in cash in 1994. (For more on Tibco, see
"A Really Big Push.")
Spurning Reuters, as well as early retirement, Ms. Chang and
Mr. Skeen founded Vitria. "I wanted to see if I could repeat my
success, not for financial reward but for the challenge of making
a thousandfold impact on business," Ms. Chang recalls. They
bootstrapped the company until last November, when it introduced
its first product, and then took a $9.5 million venture infusion
to fuel sales and marketing. Among several high-profile contracts,
Vitria has unified Charles Schwab's once-disjointed institutional
order-processing system and linked the computer systems at Federal
Express's headquarters.
With 80 employees, Vitria is still small, but Ms. Chang's vision
is expansive. When Netscape laid off 360 people in January, Vitria
posted a Now Hiring sign at its Mountain View headquarters, just
down the street from the ailing company. Ms. Chang says she has no
interest in making a quick buck by selling Vitria, nor is a
flashy initial public offering her ultimate goal. "Netscape's
example has misled the entrepreneur to think that getting rich from
an IPO is success," she says. "But what's important is lasting
value and continuous challenge. I hope Vitria will be a laboratory for that."
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