Hard work, skillfully applied, has always paid off for Basit Hamid.

Creating the global document company Elixir Technologies involved weaving together the strands of a lifetime of travel, connections and seized opportunities. His ability to correctly forecast document technology trends and act on them, combined with his friendships with other HVCO luminaries, has led him on an exciting and challenging odyssey.

The child of refugees, Hamid was born into poverty. But he had an advantage: a highly educated father who served as his first role model. Hamid quickly learned that he could work his way out of his humble circumstances, and financed his studies by waiting on tables, cleaning chocolate factories, and getting a full-time IT job while going to evening school. "I discovered that hard work and solving problems intelligently is a must for success," he explained.

When he met Jerry Koch, the founder of Intran, it was one of the first connections that would lead Hamid on his path toward creating a successful document company. Leveraging the lessons he learned from Intran, Hamid founded Elixir Technologies Corporation in 1985. His goal: develop a small, private and innovative company, the best in its niche, with a human, Scandinavian-type culture. As a student in Norway, Hamid developed an abiding respect for the Scandinavian way of life, which he describes as "model societies for human development and care.”

Nearly 20 years after it began, Elixir continues to embody both the qualities of competitiveness and quality of life that Hamid set out to achieve. "Most of the people at Elixir have 10 years plus tenure and remain the most loyal and diligent coworkers and friends for life," said Hamid proudly.

The early years of Elixir were fast-paced and exciting, requiring turn-on-a-dime decision making and risk taking. The company started as a garage operation with few resources and self-financing. It was also a race against time to be the first vendor on the PC platform. "I was determined to make a deal with Xerox to gain exclusivity in their customer base," said Hamid. "This was a dangerous strategy in those days (1988), because we were locking out IBM and Océ with this exclusive clause. The pressures to do these first-in-the-industry deals and build and support products rapidly can be daunting when you operate from an apartment with a handful of people." Hamid undid this exclusivity clause in 1992 and IBM and Océ became key partners as well.

Hamid's entrepreneurial financial strategizing helped Elixir reach a positive cash flow and break-even sales volume almost immediately. Development and consulting contracts helped finance the initial product. "Elixir never borrowed a dime from the banks. We did a deal with CCH-COMPUTAX a year into the business, and they paid us startup money for future software licenses. We gave them an unlimited site license and also paid them back the whole amount with interest," he said.

By the time Hamid founded Elixir, he had extensive experience working in the international sector from his days at IDA and Rank Xerox Norway. "I had the opportunity to work in global operations at a time when it was a novelty, setting up multinational projects with multilingual teams and different cultures," said Hamid.

Hamid is quick to point out the value of trusted friendships. Over the years, he has taken care to surround himself with a good network of people, and generally hires those he knows personally, or who are recommended by friends. He likes those who are "fast thinking, hard working, customer friendly at all cost; with integrity and a passion for our industry. People with a burning desire and vision and not the ‘let's-make-a-fast-buck-on-an-IPO-and-get-out' mentality.” They include Intel's Andy Grove and Elixir President Feroz Zaidi, among others.

Hamid praises his management team for successfully caring for the more than 5,000 Elixir customers spread over the globe. "We have a superb management team," he said. "It's a rare mix of managers and entrepreneurs in one bundle."

How will Hamid navigate through the coming years? "We'll nurture the Elixir customer base and those of our partners by continuing our innovative approach to building solutions, " he said. "We'll also stay ahead of the competition by remaining highly focused throughout the organization, being innovative and working smarter and harder."

Today, we take WYSIWYG for granted. When we power up a PC or view a workstation, we expect nothing less than full-color graphics, sharp focus, and a detailed and accurate view of what we plan to create. Crisp, varied fonts arrive standard on most equipment, and can be easily downloaded from the Internet.

In the early 1980s, however, such graphic views of upcoming print projects were non-existent. There were no graphic shortcuts, no preview snapshots of what the finished job would look like. So in 1982, when Intran built the first WYSIWYG workstation for the document printing industry, it raised quite a stir. Intran's font and image system allowed for much more sophisticated document creation on electronic printing systems than the industry had ever seen. It was a breakthrough that opened the door for faster, targeted document printing and ushered in the age of convergence between documents and the graphic industry.

At Intran, Basit Hamid worked behind the scenes, developing the software that produced California student reports at a service bureau using the Xerox 9700. Hamid took what he saw, translated it into a vision for the future, and founded Elixir Technologies. "Intran showed me in 1980 that there was a big void in the nascent electronic printing industry for WYSIWYG tools," he explained. "If we could build a low-cost solution, we would save customers enormous amount of time/money/effort and also make their jobs so much more "fun" using WYSIWYG tools. I studied Xerox and IBM closely to see what their customers wanted."

What made Hamid believe he could succeed with this new business? "I felt the time was right, based on my perceptions and on the deep need expressed by the numerous customers I interacted with," he said. "The fact that Xerox did not have WYSIWYG tools at the time was a significant reason for our success. In addition, the concept of being a business partner was well received by both Xerox and IBM."

Over time, Elixir's offerings evolved to meet changing needs. "Handling disparate fonts in print streams was our number one problem initially," recalled Hamid. "This was before the days of outline fonts. We also found that WYSIWYG composition tools for complex documents was a huge demand in the 90s. We partnered with a Swiss bank consortium and came out with the first complete composition and output management tool on the Windows platform back in 1993. These were very difficult projects when the technology wasn't mature enough to build them."

Today, Elixir software is used around the globe by those who value personalization and flexibility, including manufacturers, utilities, financial institutions, direct mailers and many others who power high-speed laser and other types of printers. Elixir provides them with a variety of software selections that allow them to create complex documents with customized fonts and images, conveniently generated in output accepted by most printers including PostScript, PCL, VPS, AFP and Metacode.

Editor's Note: As this interview was being completed, Mr. Hamid initiated a series of corporate transformations to re-position Elixir from a pure software company into one that also focuses on creating highly individualized, powerful and dynamic solutions for improving communications between businesses and their customers.

Aaron Kiel is the editor of OutputLinks.
He can be reached at ak@OutputLinks.com.
Jennifer Beaver can be reached at jbeaver@akprgroup.com.

* what you see is what you get

Management Bios

Basit Hamid, Chairman/CEO and Founder
Basit Hamid is a citizen of the world. Born in Kashmir, educated in Norway, with companies in the United States, Czechoslovakia and Pakistan, the founder of Elixir Technologies Corporation views the world in a unique way. Somehow, it's not surprising that he has been instrumental in helping others look at things differently, too.

In 1980, Hamid helped develop the Intran workstation, the legendary WYSIWYG* front end for the Xerox 9700. This workstation literally gave operators a new window on the world of print production through a graphical user interface. Hamid went on to found Ventura, California-based Elixir Technologies Corporation in 1985, partnering with Xerox, IBM, and Océ and delivering software that creates smart documents that work, look good, contain just the right information, and help communicate the right messages.

Anne Marie Kyle,  General Manager Global Operations
Anne Marie Kyle is the general manager of Ventura-based Elixir Technologies Corporation. She entered the fast-emerging world of desktop publishing and computer-generated reporting in the mid-Eighties, joining Langton Electronic Publishing Systems in London, the company that was the innovative leader in its market. Langton took on the Elixir distributorship, and in 1990 Anne Marie joined Elixir in product management and design positions in the UK and later the United States. An effective and visionary business manager, Anne Marie seized the reins at Elixir to help lead it―and the company’s tens of thousands of customers―into a new era of standards, replacing proprietary formats with an embrace of modern technologies.

Haviland Wright, Director
Haviland Wright is an Elixir Technologies director. A noted business strategist and technologist, Haviland also serves as an independent director of the Compass Group of Funds (mutual funds managed by MFS Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Life of Canada) grappling regularly with the challenges of compliance with securities regulations. He is also a director of Japan-based LCD technology developer Nano Loa, Inc. Haviland was a pioneer in demand publishing, having served as Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Interleaf, Inc., to which entity he had sold his SGML software firm, Avalanche Development Company, of Boulder, Colorado. Haviland received his MBA and Ph.D. from The Wharton School. He and his family live in Hawai'i.

Bruce Damer, Chief Technology Officer
Bruce Damer is Elixir's Chief Technology Officer, CEO and founder of The Digital Space Commons and a founding director of the Contact Consortium, two organizations dedicated to the use of virtual worlds and virtual communites for positive societal change and scientific advancement. Digital Space is an innovative "Corporate Commons" which has a non-shareholder "chaordic"-style structure consisting of individual licensee/members working with a pool of shared intellectual and social capital. Since 1995 Digital Space has provided virtual world platforms, content and virtual community infrastructure for a large number of innovative client projects including recent work for NASA (a virtual habitat on Mars) and Adobe Systems Inc. (Adobe's Atmosphere community).