In 1959, four years out of Business School, and after 1 short year as a consultant at Arthur D. Little, 3 years of trying to get VenCap, a startup venture fund, to have a hit, I took a position offered by one of our principal investors, Oliver R. Grace.
The company was called Andersen Laboratories, was based in West Hartford, CT, and had about 30 people, mostly engineers, developing circuitry for missile guidance systems.
To quote the marketing literature of the time,
“Andersen Laboratories, Inc., was founded in 1951 to meet the rapidly increasing demand for specialized high quality solid delay lines in the radar, sonar, automatic computation, missiles and rockets, nuclear, and countermeasures fields.” Seemed simple enough.
We did proposals and when potential clients were walking through we brought in friend and family to fill the workstations and we grew.
At the same time I managed to grow as well and applied to a great organization I still support today, the YPO.
