CEO Carl Bass Leads Autodesk into the Cloud

The first time Carl Bass worked at Autodesk, he never imagined he would run the design software company, and he certainly never thought he would end up taking over from the CEO who fired him. The New York native had spent more than a decade studying mathematics and working in wood shops near Ithaca, where he graduated from Cornell University in 1983. After graduation there wasn’t much to do amid the gorges apart from studying or teaching, so Bass and a friend launched Ithaca Software, which helped commercialize the HOOPS 3D Graphics System developed at Cornell. Part of the first wave of technology start-ups relocating to the Bay Area, Bass moved Ithaca Software to California in search of financing, and San Rafael–based Autodesk acquired the small company in 1993.

Bass stayed on for two years as chief architect of AutoCAD, Autodesk’s flagship 2-D and 3-D computer-aided design and drafting software. He butted heads with then-CEO Carol Bartz and was fired in 1995. After a few months, however, others at Autodesk decided they needed Bass’s expertise for a new project, so they asked him to return. He stayed for four more years, until 1999, when the excitement of once again leading a start-up pulled him away to launch Buzzsaw, an online construction project management service.

Autodesk also saw promise in that company and acquired Buzzsaw in 2001. Since then Bass has served as Autodesk’s executive vice president and chief strategy officer, senior executive vice president of the design solutions group, chief operating officer, interim chief financial officer and, since Bartz’s departure in 2006, CEO.

At the time of the CEO transition, some board members, investors and analysts were wary of having Bass at the helm. But the $15 billion company has grown steadily over the past decade, during which the CEO has been tasked with steering a software giant smoothly into the era of the cloud.

为此，Autodesk宣布2月份Bass，59的重组计划，希望有助于向云转型以及向年度订阅模式销售永久许可的转变。Autodesk的股票在计划的新闻中占据了15％，达到每股42.64美元，其中包括裁员约10％的劳动力。

The changes seem to be working. Autodesk’s results for the quarter ended July 31 beat expectations, with a less-than-expected drop in revenue of 10 percent, which was related to the ongoing restructuring. The company reported a near-doubling of total subscriptions from the first quarter, including a record volume of subscriptions for software suites. Customers also purchased more perpetual licenses than expected as they took advantage of the final availability of that product. Investors responded by pushing the stock price up by more than 8 percent, to a ten-year high of $69.02 per share on Friday. Analysts raised their price targets for the company as it boosted its own guidance.

The next major milestone will be shifting more of Autodesk’s products to the云.

“如果你一直在我身边的技术行业，你毫无疑问地看到了未能创新并保持竞争优势的公司的狂欢节，”贝斯在8月25日收益呼叫中表示。“Autodesk一直是设计和工程软件的领导者超过30年，我们正在定位自己领导下一代软件。”

Bass最近与凯特琳Ugolik副编辑副编辑谈论他的背景如何讨论他的背景如何影响他向前移动Autodesk的策略。

亚博赞助欧冠机构投资者: You took a unique route to the C-suite that has involved a few different experiences with Autodesk. Can you talk about the journey?

Bass:It took me ten years to get an undergraduate degree. I went and learned how to build houses, designed and built sailboats. I worked in winters building things and in summers rafting and kayaking on rivers. It was a lot of fun, but I went back to school because it turned out that if you dropped out, if you didn’t go back in five years, you had to reapply, so I thought I’d better get my degree. During a summer job I met my eventual co-founder of Ithaca Software, which was originally called Flying Moose Systems and Graphics.

首先，我们与大学的研究合作伙伴大学商业化研究。在假肢装置和髋关节替代品上有工作，以及我们所做的工作并将其商业化并为约翰逊和约翰逊商业化。有问题的石油检测，对大数据集的分析预测找到石油的地方，我们将其商业化为斯克伦伯格。我们为一些政府机构预测地震做了一些工作。在几年内，我们将公司增长到可能的20或30人，我们意识到我们正试图运行一家咨询公司 - 我们实际上并不是在做我们最初出发的事情。

At that point, we built a computer graphics product that was something we had worked on intermittently with a lot of the consulting work we did, and we commercialized it. We sold it to companies involved in things like entertainment, making movies, the fledgling computer games industry, as well as people doing scientific and engineering things. That’s how I got introduced to all of the computer-aided design companies, like Autodesk. In 1990 we moved to California because we were looking to raise money, and in 1993 Autodesk approached us about an acquisition. When I started my first company, I wasn’t even sure I knew who Autodesk was. We were a bunch of young folks, and Autodesk was just getting started as a company at the same time that Ithaca Software started. When we sold it to them, we learned along the way.

你只是在Autodesk几年来，第一次转向，正确吗？发生了什么？

I agreed to stay for two years, and after two years I got fired. Through a really long story, I ended up taking six months off and coming back, then worked there for three or four more years. I realized I really just liked what was involved in doing smaller companies. I liked how quickly you could do things, how much control you had over stuff. I wanted to do another start-up, so that’s what I went off and did in 1999 with Buzzsaw. Start-ups have the ability to be really nimble and agile and get a lot of stuff done, but the ability to impact the market is somewhat limited. After two years it got caught in the downdraft, in the busting of the dot-com bubble. We got both sides of it. We raised a ridiculous amount of money at a ridiculous valuation in 1999, and at the end of 2001 we couldn’t raise a nickel.

How does your background in start-ups influence the way you run Autodesk?

Autodesk CEO真的是不同的。当它是一个启动时，你所拥有的控制是非常直接的，非常立即和非常每天。当您获得Autodesk的大小时，问题的规模完全变化。我们在100个不同的国家和10,000或15,000名合作伙伴中拥有8,000或9,000名员工，所以你在“控制”方面所做的一切都是非常间接的。为了混合隐喻，这就像跑车和大洋班轮或战舰之间的差异。在跑车中，你觉得每一个碰撞。如果你将手指移动一英寸，车上会剧烈地。在一个大洋划线林上，你稍后转动车轮，也许是略微不同的方向。在一个初创公司中，你们五个人坐在一张桌子上，你会模糊出来，它发生了。如果我现在走了弄脏，它就会让人困惑。 The trade-off is being able to have an impact. People say they want a big company to be more like a start-up, but I think that’s a little bit of a false promise. You’re not going to have a company of 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 people that acts like a company of 50 people. Having gone through that growth stage, even as you go from five to 50 people, some of the things that worked with five don’t even work with 50. Every attempt any company has made to do that has proven that to be true. You can simulate it, make cultures that move more quickly and kind of mimic some attributes, but they will never be the same thing, no more than a fish is going to be a gorilla. They’re just different animals. But you can try to emulate some of the best characteristics. I sometimes try to copy the attributes of Ithaca when we stayed small purposely, but I never confuse myself that a company of this size is a start-up.

欧特克如何回应des的进化ign and engineering technology?

The two biggest changes have been the cloud and all of its glory, and everything mobile. Mobile has made a second desktop for every one of our customers, whether they’re on a factory floor, tarmac or construction site. People can now do what they were doing with computing wherever they happen to be. That’s a dramatic change. And with the cloud you have the ability to have a virtually infinite amount of computing to solve complex engineering problems. Those are game changers.

一般来说，我们的产品专门为某些东西而设计，但很多人都采取了工具，并完成了我们从未想过的事情。在某些方面，这是一部分导致我们的成功，这些工具比我们明确设计的东西更广泛适用。使用我们的工具的人是来自世界上最小的公司的工程师，建筑师，设计师和艺术家，就像一个人的机器店，最大的建筑，制造，航空航天和汽车公司。许多公司专注于企业或他们称之为消费者企业，我们都有两者的属性。最大的公司占我们业务的30％，大约40％是中小型企业，大约30％的人是五个人或更少，所以这是一个巨大的混合。

How have innovations like 3-D printing changed your industry?

Our interest in this is primarily around the software used to create 3-D models that people print. A 3-D printer is no good without a 3-D model. I thinkindustrial 3-D printingis going to have huge economic consequences. The consumer is much less important — 3-D printing for students and things like that, it’s interesting as an educational tool, but I think it has been way overhyped in the consumer space and underappreciated in the technical space. I think in the next three to five years we are going to continue to see a lot of really interesting stuff driven by new and better machines and materials, not just plastics but materials reinforced with fibers. Metal 3-D printing with multiple-material printers, a combination of 3-D printing along with traditional [computer numerical control] manufacturing are going to be a big deal in the next couple of years.

I think the challenge for the 3D Systems and Stratasys of the world is not to become the early-market victims. I think the market is going to be vastly larger than it is today, but it’s unclear whether those are the companies that are going to drive it. I’m on the board of HP, but in general companies like them, and the start-ups entering the market — some of the German companies have done a lot of good work in metal 3-D printing — might be the companies that take off with it. I wouldn’t rule out some of the industrial giants entering the space as well.

What are the primary challenges currently facing Autodesk’s business?

There are two challenges we’re wrestling with right now. The first is going through a big business-model transition as we move away from perpetual licenses to a totally subscription-based business. We are now only selling subscription licenses, after more than 30 years of perpetual. That whole transition is a huge challenge. The second thing is our belief that all software is going to end up in the cloud. Making the transition from being a company that sells products primarily on desktop to one that will sell things exclusively on the cloud is the second challenge.