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The persistent entrepreneur: Bill Baxter

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Bill Baxter said he was seeking professional fulfillment when he saw an opportunity and risked everything to found Bsquare.
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If Bill Baxter's approach to life were summed up in three childhood episodes, it would be these:

Episode 1, age 2: Bill's mom, Lynda, is leaving for the grocery store. He wants to go. She tells him to stay. He protests. She leaves, then returns to find Bill gone. A Cadillac pulls up. " 'I've got a little boy who says he lives here,' " she recalls the stranger saying. Bill had pedaled two blocks on his tricycle to the main street. He was headed to the store.

Episode 2, age 16: Bill wants a car. Lynda, a single parent at the time, can't afford one. He asks her to co-sign for a loan. She doesn't have the means. "He said, 'I'll go do it then,' " Lynda remembers. Bill puts on a suit, goes to the First National Bank of Casper, Wyo., and tells the bank how much he needs and how he'll pay for it. He gets the loan.

Episode 3, a short time later: Bill gets caught speeding in the used pickup he bought with the loan. Bill asks the state trooper whether his radar gun's been checked in the past six months. The trooper says no. Bill says he'll insist the radar gun be tested if he gets a ticket. That could take weeks. No radar gun, no revenue. The cop lets him go.

Baxter, 41, started Bellevue-based Bsquare a decade ago with two colleagues from Digital Equipment Corp. They bootstrapped the software company, raised financing and took it public, making Baxter an overnight millionaire.

Bill Baxter Age: 41 Occupation: Retired Education: University of Wyoming, master's degree in computer science Distinguishing characteristic: Baxter is skilled at adapting to change, a trait he picked up by moving to four different states as a child. Accomplishment: Founded Bellevue-based Bsquare at 31, took the company public.

Much of this stems from a choice he made when he was too young to appreciate its weight: to go to college.

"I remember thinking he was a bright guy and being surprised he was really into welding," says Robert Shively, a Casper trial attorney who was Baxter's surrogate big brother in high school. "That's really what he wanted to do — be the world's greatest welder."

But as one of the state's top high-school debate students, he was offered a scholarship to attend the University of Wyoming.

Baxter could have been hired out of high school at an oil field. "On the other hand, college was a very muddy path for me," he says, "because college was a set of questions; it wasn't a set of answers."

In the end, he chose uncertainty, and he wound up studying parallel computation.

Call it stubbornness (pedaling to the store at 2), moxie (getting a bank loan at 16), or persuasiveness (talking his way out of a ticket), but something in Baxter's DNA prepared him to be an entrepreneur.

So he started Bsquare in July 1994 after three computer-engineering jobs and at a time when he and his wife, Liz, had just bought a home.

"I was ready to put that all on the line because I felt unfulfilled from a professional perspective," he says. "I also saw a great opportunity."

Baxter had watched as Microsoft put its Windows operating system on a range of devices, from handheld computers to TVs. The idea of his startup was to provide software services to Microsoft and its clients in this arena.

Over time, it has grown to a company with $37.6 million in annual revenue and 140 employees.

Baxter left the company in January, and it's unclear what he'll do next. His mother says he's long possessed the will to determine his own destiny.

"He needed us, but he didn't need us, if that makes sense," she says of raising Baxter, one of four children. "He loved us and we loved him. But if he wanted to do something, he wanted to do something. And he just did it."

— Monica Soto Ouchi

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company