A conversation with Jon Hirschtick
The following is a transcription of an episode of the Being an Engineer podcast series by Aaron Moncur, edited and published here by permission.
Today we’re speaking with Jon Hirschtick, who is a legend in the CAD industry. If you’re not familiar with Jon by name, you’re familiar with his software. Jon is currently Chief Evangelist at PTC, where he focuses on Onshape, the world’s first and only cloud native CAD and PDM system, which includes rendering collaboration, workflow, analytics and many other tools. John was the General Manager, CEO and is the co-founder of Onshape. Prior to Onshape in 1993, John founded SolidWorks and served as CEO, group executive and board member until 2011, watching the platform grow to two million users and over $500M per year in revenue.
Moncur: Jon, what a treat to have you on the show today. What inspired you to become an engineer?
Hirschtick: It was a combination of things that started when I was a child. I found that I really liked building things. There’s something incredibly cool about building something and then watching it work. However, I didn’t grow up in a household where we built things. I grew up in a small apartment in Chicago, and the only tools we had were a pair of pliers and a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer. We didn’t take apart cars or build anything around the house. But a friend of mine was into electronics, and he invited me over to work on some electronics projects with his father. We built electronic circuits, and from that point on, I was hooked.
This interest in building things was more fueled by the space program when I was a kid, which is making a comeback now. But back in the 1960s and 70s, watching rockets take off for the moon was incredibly inspiring. I also started subscribing to magazines such as Popular Science and Popular Electronics. These experiences collectively drew me toward the world of engineering.
Moncur: You eventually founded SolidWorks, a company that revolutionized the CAD industry. I’ve heard stories that the funding for SolidWorks came from experience gambling in Las Vegas. Is that true?
Hirschtick: Yes, that’s mostly true, though there’s a bit more to it. I was in a financial position to start SolidWorks because of my previous experience as a professional blackjack player with the MIT Blackjack Team. This experience allowed me to go for about a year without any real income while I was starting SolidWorks. I needed to rent office space, buy a phone system, and purchase computers, which were much more expensive relative to today’s prices. My ability to fund these initial costs came from the money I had made playing blackjack.
However, it’s important to clarify that this wasn’t company money being gambled. The money I used to start SolidWorks was all personal, earned from my time with the blackjack team. It’s a bit of a wild story, and since then, there have been movies, TV shows, and books about the MIT Blackjack Team. But at the time, it was really just a lot of hard work, much such as engineering itself. People often think gambling, especially in the context of blackjack, is incredibly exciting — and it is — but it’s also a ton of work.
Moncur: In the early 90s, AutoCAD was the dominant name in CAD, with Pro/ENGINEER also making significant strides. How did SolidWorks manage to get its foot into what was essentially AutoCAD’s market?
Hirschtick: That’s a great question, and you’re right to highlight AutoCAD because it was indeed the dominant player at the time. SolidWorks was founded in 1993, which was 30 years ago, and the world was quite different then. AutoCAD was viewed almost as a monopoly in the CAD market. It was the standard CAD system for 2D drawings, and people using it were literally laying out lines on a drawing. This was before the era of taking views of a 3D model such as we do today.
At the same time, Pro/ENGINEER, which came from PTC, was making waves in the 3D space. It wasn’t the first 3D product, but it was the first one that really worked well for engineers who needed to create product models. So, one had AutoCAD dominating the 2D market on DOS-based PCs, and Pro/ENGINEER leading in the 3D space on expensive Unix workstations, which were difficult to use with command-line interfaces and strange UIs.
The opportunity we saw with SolidWorks was to create a system that combined the best of both worlds. We aimed to have the 3D power of Pro/ENGINEER, the cost-effectiveness of AutoCAD, and the usability of Windows, which was just starting to become the standard for personal computing. We believed that this combination would be the winning formula for bringing advanced CAD capabilities to every engineer, and that’s exactly what we set out to do with SolidWorks.
Moncur: That’s fascinating. So, what were some of the biggest technical challenges team faced while developing SolidWorks?
Hirschtick: There were several major technical challenges we faced. First and foremost, nobody had ever built a solid modeler that worked on a PC or on Windows before. People had built little ones, but engineers need a lot of power in their tools, and no one had successfully created a system that could deliver that on a Windows platform. Windows itself was a bit of a “green banana” at the time — meaning it was still developing and wasn’t fully ready for what we needed it to do.
Another significant challenge was that we were the first successful production-level CAD system to use component technology. This meant we licensed chunks of technology from other companies, such as the geometric modeling engine from Unigraphics, which is now part of Siemens. We also licensed translators and other components. At the time, the prevailing wisdom among CAD insiders was that one couldn’t build a serious application using component technology; they believed that to build something real, everything needed to be created in-house. It was like saying, “If you want to build a Tesla, you need to have your own battery plant,” because no one had ever built an electric car at scale without doing so. But times change, and we were able to prove that one could build a successful CAD system using licensed components.
Finally, building a CAD system is just incredibly hard. One must be a little crazy to even try. The challenges of integrating complex functionalities, ensuring system stability, and delivering performance were immense. We were not only pushing the limits of what was possible on the software side but also on the hardware side, given the limitations of PCs at the time.
Moncur: How long did it take before SolidWorks started gaining traction with engineers?
Hirschtick: It took about three years to start gaining real traction. We shipped the first product at the end of 1995, and the first users started adopting it in 1996. However, at that time, the functionality of SolidWorks was a bit light compared to today’s standards. The feature set back then had many things were missing. But you must remember that expectations were lower in the mid-90s. People didn’t expect as much from a CAD system as they do now.
It wasn’t until about seven or eight years later that the system really hit its stride and became a mature product. By 2004, SolidWorks had become a solid product that could compete well with other systems such as Pro/ENGINEER. Engineers who had initially struggled to transition from systems such as Pro/ENGINEER to SolidWorks eventually found that SolidWorks was much easier to use and offered features that made their work more efficient.
Moncur: Was there anything that surprised you about how users were using SolidWorks, or by its success?
Hirschtick: SolidWorks largely did what we set out to do, so there weren’t many surprises regarding how it was used. We built the product with a specific vision, and it was used largely in the way we intended. However, I was surprised by the scale of adoption and the size of teams that started using it. People were building bigger things with SolidWorks than I might have anticipated, and the size of the teams using it was also larger than I expected.
As for the magnitude of success, I always had the feeling that SolidWorks was going to be huge. I remember getting into an argument with a vendor one day who didn’t believe in what we were doing. I told him, “If you make us successful, we’re going to be a bigger customer than all other customers today put together.” At the time, that probably sounded arrogant, but it wasn’t — I just believed in what we were building. What I didn’t fully grasp was how big the CAD market would get. The place in the market was pretty much what I thought it would be, but the overall size of the market grew far beyond my expectations. We once thought that SolidWorks might reach $300M in revenue, but today, it’s generating over a billion dollars annually.
Moncur: After the success of SolidWorks, what led to Onshape?
Hirschtick: The idea for Onshape came from visiting SolidWorks users and seeing the frustrations they had with installation issues, version control, and data management. I’ve always spent a lot of time visiting users and customers, understanding their problems, and figuring out how to solve them. Back when we first launched SolidWorks, it was great news — it was easier to use than Pro/ENGINEER, had a Windows UI, and ran on a PC. But as SolidWorks grew and more people started using it, new challenges emerged.
I remember visiting a medical company in Boston that was using SolidWorks to design heart valve repair systems. Before we even got into talking about the product, they spent two hours venting their frustrations about the problems they were facing. They had 24 users and were struggling with installation issues, version compatibility, and data management. They had to buy special computers for everyone, and installations failed half the time. They couldn’t get everyone on the same version of SolidWorks, which led to issues with file compatibility. They were running multiple versions of the software, and it was causing all sorts of problems.
On top of that, they had issues with their PDM (Product Data Management) system. They had set up a vault to manage their files, but they couldn’t get everyone to properly lock files.
To be continued …
