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On the first day of Comdex in November, 1991 two men approached SMART’s very modest booth in the multimedia hall. One man identified himself as Les Vadasz, senior vice president of Intel Corporation, and said that Intel had an interest in the combination of the PC and telecommunications. In the next few minutes he explained that what prompted him to stop and look at us was that we seemed to have some of the elements of a new vision for working at a distance that Andy Grove had just laid out in his keynote address.

After a short discussion Les said that he would look within Intel for a group that might want to work with us. True to his word, within a short period of time we were receiving calls from a variety of people within Intel interested in learning more about our hardware and software products. Those discussions led to Intel’s investment in SMART in 1992 and, equally importantly, to joint development and marketing efforts for new collaborative tools.

The relationship that Les started was extremely critical not just to our survival and growth but also to our development as an organization. The access that we had in those early days to some incredibly bright and dedicated people at Intel was important in our understanding of the technology industry. All of our interactions helped us in imagining and defining the type of company that we wanted to build. Some of the shared values on which SMART has been built came from the excellence that we saw and experienced within Intel. Performance. Integrity. Respect and teamwork. Competitiveness.

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Les for providing needed capital and giving us an opportunity to bring our vision to life.