EDS

"Financial theorizing held little interest for Ross Perot, however. Like other billionaires who grew up far from New York, such as John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Warren Buffett, he was skeptical of Wall Street. One of the few investment bankers who impressed Perot was Charles Allen of Allen & Company. Perot paid him the supreme compliment by saying that like his own father, Allen had “the style of the great cattle traders.”27 In the end, Perot awarded the underwriting mandate to the most opti¬ mistic firm of the lot. R. W. Pressprich and Co., which he had never heard of until then, assured him that EDS could be launched at 100 times earnings."

"At the time of EDS’s 1962 birth, the computer industry’s services segment (as opposed to the manufacture and sale of hardware) was limited to basic processes such as billing and payroll. “Service bureaus” collected data from their customers, processed it on their own computers, and returned it the following day. Perot’s innovation was to tackle more complex tasks, includ¬ ing installation of systems and management of the user’s difficult transition from manual to automated data processing.21 After landing a contract to develop a sales route accounting system for snack food producer Frito-Lay, Perot’s young company grew rapidly and quickly became profitable."

"Perot’s charisma accounted in part for the intense dedication of EDS engineers and salespeople. He inspired the troops with his tenacity, as well as mottoes such as, “Eagles don’t flock. You have to find them one at a time.”"

"The company’s compensation plan emphasized stock options, ultimately resulting in the creation of more than a hundred millionaires at EDS.24 Employees responded to the work style and financial incentives with an intensity that gave EDS a powerful competitive edge. Adopting the motto “whatever it takes,” they put in excruciatingly long hours on projects that sometimes kept them away from home for months at a time."

"In July, EDS had taken over du Pont’s data-processing operations. It was a contract that paid EDS an estimated $8 million annually, and du Pont had become the company’s largest customer. No less significant, its business with du Pont accounted for as much as $500 million of EDS’s highly leveraged market value and, therefore, a large chunk of Ross Perot’s personal fortune to boot. It was quickly apparent to me that EDS’s fortunes—and Perot’s—were intricately tied to the much shakier fortunes of F. I. du Pont. Now all I had to do was convince Ross Perot of this."