Ashton-Tate
In June 1982 Cole hired Rod Turner as the director of OEM sales for Ashton-Tate. In a few weeks Turner solved a sales commission plan issue, that had been bothering George Tate for some time, with the top performing salesperson (Barbara Weingarten, now Guerra), and Tate and Cole promoted Turner to be Vice President of world-wide sales three weeks after his initial hire. Turner was approximately the 12th employee of Ashton Tate. Since the company was truly boot-strapped, using no external venture capital, the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic, but inexperienced. Jim Taylor was responsible for product management in the early days, and worked closely with Wayne Ratliff and the other key developers on dBASE II. In 1982 Perry Lawrence and Nelson Tso were the two developers who were employed at Ashton-Tate, while Wayne Ratliff employed Jeb Long from his royalty stream.
Ashton-Tate
Ashton-Tate's dependence on dBASE is understandable. It was one of the earliest killer applications in the CP/M world, along with WordStar and (on other platforms) VisiCalc, and was able to make the transition to the IBM PC to maintain its dominance. Its success alone is what created and sustained the company through the first nine years. However, the overreliance on dBASE for revenue had a catastrophic effect on the company when dBASE IV sales tanked.