One on One with Jon Hirschtick (Part 1)

It is still Monday and I am already 2/3 done with the One on One Interviews that I had scheduled. As I wrote this morning I had my One on One with Greg Jankowski that went extremely well and was very informative. This afternoon I had the chance to sit down with Jon Hirschtick and discuss some of the history of SolidWorks, what his upbringing was in programming and how SolidWorks got started. As a kid he had no mechanical stuff in his childhood. He grew up and went to high school in Chicago but was not involved in any technical classes during this time, only a drafting class. The one thing he mentioned from his childhood was that his father taught him how to treat your customers. His father sold stamps on the weekends to collectors and from this Jon had it wired in very early to treat your customers right and with respect. When he was in high school he became interested in electronics and ordered some kits from catalogs (yes catalogs, not the Internet) and from this kind started to get his feet wet with some technological things. While in high school he saw an ASR 33 Teletype that peaked his curiosity and started learning some of the computer programming basics from this. So now you may be wondering where did the CAD come from, well I was too and we have a fellow by the name of Byron Bloch to thank for this. Byron is Jon’s uncle and one day he asked Jon what he was going to study in college and Jon answered that he was going to study computers. Well Uncle Byron had other ideas and said no, no, no and paged through the course catalog that Jon had and pointed out the Mechanical Engineering classes. So Jon majored in Mechanical Engineering and in the summer of 1981 he got a job at Computervision. Well on the first day he met a fellow by the name of Tommy Lee (no, not the Tommy Lee you are thinking of), this Tommy Lee was a quiet, wise, respected guy from China, well as time progresses and we get full circle Tommy Lee just retired and he was a co-founder of SolidWorks. Well going back a little so that we don’t get ahead of ourselves the vision for SolidWorks came from seeing what was happening in the CAD industry. Jon was a co-founder of a 2D CAD company called Premise, Inc. and from this saw the same stuff that Pro-E and other CAD companies where seeing and thus we have the seed that started SolidWorks. To Be Continued…

Be sure to check back for Part 2 on how SolidWorks was formed from this background.