An Entrepreneur Lives His Nightmare as a Rival Cashes In on His Best Idea

To score big with the NFL...a small company named Lynx invented a cool new technology...but a funny thing happened on the way to the end zone.

- David Whitford

DOUG DeANGELIS was fresh out of college in 1988, living alone in a rented room in a Boston suburb, working at Honeywell Bull. The job came with a tuition benefit, which he was spending on graduate courses at MIT. Though not a full-time student, he managed to land a seat in a popular course for aspiring entrepreneurs called New Enterprises, offered by the Sloan School. His assignment: Come up with an idea, pitch it to your class mates, and see if you can persuade anyone to join your team.

DeAngelis had lots of ideas. He kept them in a folder he called “my folder of dreams.” He had already seen enough of Honeywell to suspect that big corporations were where big ideas went to die. That folder was his escape plan. But DeAngelis was wary. He didn’t like talking about his ideas, because he was afraid someone might steal them.

His best idea at the time involved a new kind of camera for capturing photo-finish images in track, cycling, horse racing, and other sports with finish lines, a task more challenging than it sounds. The existing technology was cumbersome, unreliable, and slow. Sometimes race officials had to wait to call the winner until the prints came down from the press box on a clothesline. DeAngelis’s concept was digital. It promised instant, accurate results.