Edward Kaplan
Co-founder 1969Background
Edward Kaplan, a graduate with honors from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a National Defense Education Act fellow, worked full-time as a project engineer at Teletype Corp. while designing machinery after hours with colleague Gerhard Cless. In 1969 the two contributed $500 each to found Data Specialties Inc., borrowing $20,000 to fulfill an initial order for 500 paper-tape punch machines built nights in a Chicago loft. Kaplan served as CEO and chairman from 1969 to 2007, overseeing the company's 1982 pivot into barcode-label printing -- the product line that became Zebra's core business -- and its renaming to Zebra Technologies. The moonlighting, self-funded origin of the venture -- two engineers pooling $500 each while still employed full-time elsewhere -- is frequently cited in Chicago-area entrepreneurship circles as a model bootstrap story, and Kaplan's 38-year run as CEO and chairman is unusually long tenure by the standards of publicly traded technology-hardware companies.