Who Founded Autodesk?

Autodesk was founded in January 1982 by John Walker with Dan Drake and 14 other programmers, who pooled about $59,000 of their own money and incorporated the company in California on April 26, 1982. There was no single product plan. The founders listed several programs, from a desktop organizer to a filing system, and intended to find out which would sell. Walker acquired Interact, a drafting program Michael Riddle had written in 1979 for CP/M and early 16-bit machines, in exchange for royalties; it was rewritten and renamed AutoCAD. Mainframe and minicomputer CAD seats cost far more than a personal computer, so pricing AutoCAD at about $1,000 opened drafting work to small architecture and engineering firms. AutoCAD drew the crowds at Comdex in Las Vegas in November 1982 while the company's text editor drew none, which settled the product question, and it went on sale in December 1982 and earned $1.4 million in its first year. Walker ran the company as a decentralized group of programmers and circulated internal memos and business plans to all the founders, a record he later published as The Autodesk File. Autodesk became a public company in 1985 without loans or outside investors; Walker said it had been profitable from its first month. He handed the chief executive role to Alvar Green in November 1986 to return to programming and left Autodesk in 1994.

John Walker was born in 1949 in Baltimore.

Dan Drake is a software engineer and Autodesk co-founder, named alongside John Walker in the company's founding records. The two had worked together at Marinchip Systems building early microcomputer systems before Walker proposed the venture that became Autodesk in January 1982. Drake was among the first programmers to commit money and time to it, and he hosted the first founders' meeting at his house in Oakland after the 1985 public offering. His work was on the software itself during the years when AutoCAD went from an experimental drafting tool to the product the company bet everything on. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Mike Ford was one of Autodesk's 16 original co-founders. While John Walker and Dan Drake worked on AutoCAD itself, Ford worked on marketing and sales, including the dealer network that distributed the product, and on tracking Autodesk's position against other microcomputer software companies. John Walker's Information Letter of July 1985, written for the first founders' meeting after the public offering, credits Ford's analysis of the SoftLetter 100 rankings for the company's assessment that it had reached roughly seventh place in microcomputer software, against a founding goal of the top five. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).