TX - TEXAS
Dr. Gary Hendrix
6401 Mary Anna Founder and First President, Symantec
Austin, TX 78746

Dr. Gary Hendrix
Tel: 512-328-6054
Fax: 512328-5879

Dr. Hendrix is a "Pioneer" nominee of Roland Tibbetts because of his long history of support and success in the SBIR program. According to Roland: "Dr. Hendrix was the founder and first president of Symantec Corporation, now a major international software company based in Cupertino, CA. In 1979, NSF funded an SBIR research project with Symantec on Microcomputer-based Natural Language Understanding. The project resulted in the first personal computer software that understood English. It was marketed in 1985 as "Q&A Software." Q&A quickly became a very successful commercial product generating millions of dollars of sales. It still is, by far, the most popular commercial application of natural language processing in the world.

NSF, through SBIR, funded a high risk, potentially high payoff, extremely complex idea that Gary Hendrix conceived when he was in his previous job as Stanford Research Institute. The almost magical breakthrough was so successful that it helped Symantec attract 12 outstanding scientists and engineers from academia, $3.5 million of venture capital from Kleiner, Perkins, and a strong marketing team.

The profits from Q&A sales supported the company's early development and Symantec grew from a small, four-person startup to a large, diversified software firm. Symantec's initial success with Q&A led to an IPO of $10.5 million that was followed by 19 acquisitions. The company had record sales of $455 million in 1995 and cumulative sales are now approximately $2 billion. Total employment is nearly 2000.

Dr. Gary Hendrix's accomplishment are outstanding examples of the scientific, technical, commercial and economic benefits, which can be derived from supporting innovative ideas that have significant commercial potential. These are the ideas that the Federal Small Business Innovation Research Program is currently funding. Dr. Hendrix and Symantec have accomplished in a major way just what SBIR was designed to do.