How ‘One Thing’ Made National Instruments Into a Billion-Dollar Company

In 1976, while developing automated equipment for a sonar application, Truchard and his small engineering team at the University of Texas saw a need for an interface between test instruments and computers. Their solution -- a general purpose interface bus (GPIB) -- gradually evolved into the cornerstone of a business.

”The main thing we carried with us was a new way of doing instruments,” Truchard told Design News. “It was a singular idea -- the one thing that all of our future decisions were vetted against.”

Today, Truchard looks back on it and draws a parallel to the 2013 book, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.” National Instruments' initial concept was a small domino that knocked over bigger dominoes, he said. In 2014, the “singular idea” resulted in $1.24 billion in revenue based on business in 50 countries.

National Instruments co-founder James Truchard watches a robot cut the cake at the company’s recent 40th anniversary celebration.

During the celebration of the company’s 40th anniversary last week, Truchard said the key to NI’s ongoing success has been the strength of that original vision. In the early 1980s, with the company still growing rapidly, Truchard and co-founder Jeff Kodosky drew on that singular idea again when they sought a better way for engineers to build computer-based test applications.

"Jeff wanted to invent a programming language,” Truchard recalled last week. “And I wanted to do for test and measurement what the spreadsheet did for financial analysis. We both got our wish.”

Indeed, the resulting product, LabVIEW graphical programming language, helped National Instruments reach both goals, but only after countless discussions about its relationship to the original vision. “We spent two years figuring it out,” Truchard said. “Jeff and I met once a week and did a lot of research. And the original idea of using computers to digitize I/O and do analysis is what enabled the LabVIEW platform to be created.”

LabVIEW, introduced in 1986, remains the company’s signature product. Now 30 years old, it has since spawned a family of software and hardware products in test and measurement, as well as in the embedded development space.

James Truchard (left) and Jeff Kodosky invented LabVIEW graphical programming language in the mid-1980s by maintaining their allegiance to the company’s original vision.

Truchard admits that the company’s adherence to the original vision hasn’t always been easy. “I like to use a military expression: ‘The best plans are simple. The simple plans are the hardest,’” he said.

The transition from good idea to successful business also presented human challenges. While still employed in a 50-hour-a-week job at the University of Texas Applied Research Laboratories in the late 1970s, Truchard worked an additional 50-plus hours per week on his new start-up. Later, he also earned his PhD in engineering while running the new company.

But, like his original idea, his motivation was simple. “I started the company because I wanted to have a job I liked,” he said. “And I succeeded in doing that.”

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Today, Truchard and Kodosky maintain their allegiance to the original vision. At the annual NIWeek show and conference every August, Kodosky can still be seen strolling the aisles alone, examining products displayed at supplier booths. And Truchard, who drives to work in a pickup truck, still sits in a cubicle on the eighth floor of the company’s corporate offices, where all employees are free to walk up and discuss issues.

Mostly, though, Truchard continues to believe in that singular idea, and in its role in NI history as the so-called “first domino.” To reinforce his point, he cites the first-domino concept at Apple Inc. “Steve Jobs had a view that was different than everyone else’s, and he followed through on it,” Truchard said. “The trick is finding the common element that persists throughout, so that you can always make decisions that are consistent over time.”

[images via National Instruments]

Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 32 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.