DTC original recounts 40-year journey.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Money Matters

JACK FLOBECK HASN'T ALWAYS TRIUMPHED, BUT HE HASN'T MISSED MUCH action in 40 years' involvement with startups ranging from software companies to real estate firms to a magazine.

His advice to budding entrepreneurs: Forget focus.

"I'd like to strangle the person who came up with the saying, 'focus, focus, focus,'" the ebullient Flobeck says. "That is exactly what you don't want to do. When you focus--that's how we used to kill the ants on the sidewalk, with a magnifying glass. You'd catch up with them and ... zzzzzttt! You want to open your eyes. Keep your eyes open. That's what you want to do."

Most of Flobeck's insights are delivered in the form of stories. In the mid-1960s, a few years removed from Yale where he earned a degree in industrial engineering, he became director of new-product development for a fledgling company in the Denver Tech Center. Just the third tenant in the DTC, Information Handling Services grew from eight people working in an office above a radiator shop, to its current 2,000 employees.

The Englewood firm is now the world's largest supplier of technical, regulatory and engineering information.

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Flobeck helped IHS in its infancy, but he wasn't around for all the growth. In 1978, he joined a startup computer software company called Dakin 5. As the firm's general manager, he would talk regularly to a young man out in Seattle with red hair and glasses who was building his own software company.

"He used to call me a couple of times a week," Flobeck says of Bill Gates.

Flobeck says Dakin 5 designed the first-ever accounting software for small computers, and that almost overnight the company's revenues soared from zero to more than $14 million. The only problem was that 90 percent of its sales were to one company--Apple.

Flobeck tried to warn the company's board of the danger it was courting.

"Listen!" he remembers telling the board. "Some day Apple is going to hire a brand-new, bushy-tailed Harvard Business School guy, and he's going to say, 'What's this? We're spending $12 million on software? Why can't we do it ourselves?'"

Flobeck's prophecy came true. Apple evetually canceled its contract with Dakin 5, slowing the Denver company's revenues to a trickle. Seeking to rebound, the Dakin 5 board of directors made Flobeck chairman and CEO.

Soon after, Flobeck met with a venture capital firm in New York. He wanted the VC to invest in a new operating software called "Window Shades."

"I figured I needed...