A little "color" on Michael Dell
palmbeachpost.com
<<Dell founder still hones instincts
By John Pletz, Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004
AUSTIN, Texas -- In the mid-1980s, Michael Dell, a 20-something CEO of a tiny Austin company called PC's Limited, boarded a plane for Santa Clara, Calif., to go see the head of Intel Corp. about striking up a deal to buy semiconductors.
Carl Everett, then Intel's head of U.S. sales, went to brief CEO Andy Grove about the meeting.
"I come into his office, and he turns around in his chair and says to me: 'Why are you wasting my time with a child?' " recalled Everett.
"I said, 'Andy, you're going to have to trust me,' " said Everett, who later went to work for Dell. "He had the same questions everyone else did at the time: He didn't think anyone would buy computers over the telephone."
No one calls Michael Dell a kid now.
At age 39, when most promising young executives are still working their way up the ladder, he is celebrating 20 years at the helm of the company he started in Room 2713 of Dobie Center, a University of Texas dormitory.
Dell Inc. is now the world's No. 1 seller of personal computers, a $41 billion company with 46,000 employees.
Reluctant celebrity
Launched on May 3, 1984, the company has grown faster in its first 20 years than almost any other, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Microsoft Corp. and General Electric Co.
Dell himself has become a global business icon: He is the 10th wealthiest person in the country, worth $13 billion, according Forbes magazine, and a force in high technology and politics.
He is an intensely private person who had to be persuaded to put his own name on the company, a reluctant celebrity who has learned to live with the spotlight.
But for all his accomplishments, perhaps the most amazing thing is: He's not done yet.
Dell won't say how long he plans to continue running his company, but another 20 years is not out of the question.
"I want the company to reach its full potential, and we're nowhere near that," Dell said. "There's a whole lot of winning left to happen. I don't really think of us as number one. You can find markets where we're number one, but I like the markets where we're not number one, and I can name lots of them."
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Always pushing for more
Friends and colleagues say Dell has a quick wit, an intense focus and "an in-your-face desire to win," said Tom Meredith, the company's former chief financial officer.
Dell has always set the tempo, constantly moving the goalposts, pushing for more.
Last summer, rival Hewlett-Packard Co. said it was having trouble making a profit in PCs, signaling to investors that it wanted to raise prices. The next day, Dell slashed its prices.
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