“You could start a company.” That offhand comment by Jim Truchard got Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin thinking. Within days, Truchard and his two employees at the Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) decided to give it a go. That was in February 1976. By May, the trio had incorporated. Today, National Instruments Corp has annual sales topping $425 million, employs more than 3100 people, sells some 1500 hardware and software products, and, for five years running, has been rated by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 best companies to work for.
At ARL, Truchard headed an underwater acoustic measurements lab. “I had about two dozen different projects, all the way from basic acoustics to pragmatic testing of military sonar beam formers,” he says. Truchard went into science because of Sputnik. “I was right on the cusp of that movement. We were all...
