CASE 6: Graphisoft: The Architecture of International Growth

It was late winter, 1997, and Mr. Gabor Bojar was making the five-hour drive from Solden, Austria to Monte Carlo to attend a banker’s conference organized by the investment banking group Cowen & Co. Gabor decided to interrupt a previously planned, well-deserved ski vacation with family and friends to devote one day of presenting his software company, Graphisoft, its past, present and ambitious future plans, to potential investors in anticipation of possibly “going public.” A possible IPO (Initial Public Offering), the dream of most entrepreneurs, had undoubtedly been on the mind of Gabor and many of Graphisoft’s employees, many of whom owned a part of Graphisoft, as well as CSK, a Japanese holding company, and NIF (Nippon Investment Fund), a specialized fund managed by Daiwa Securities, that together had purchased a total of 16% of Graphisoft (11% and 5%, respectively) for US$7.5 million two years earlier. Gabor had convinced his wife to accompany him for the day to the place that 23 years earlier had been their honeymoon venue, to reminisce and to remember how they had arrived in Monte Carlo from Budapest in their “Zastava” or, as Gabor called it, a “heap” that he had bought secondhand, a small, ugly, Yugoslavian car, popular at that time in Eastern Europe. On this day, 23 years later, however, Gabor was navigating himself and his wife down the winding roads of the Austrian Alps, into Italy and finally into France and Monte Carlo, in his Jaguar.