Nien-Ling Wacker's passion for her invention borders on the religious.
She talks about a "dream" that became a "movement." Many people "believe," but there are more to be brought out of the "dark age." Those who spread the word are "evangelists" -- otherwise known as customers.
Laserfiche is no lifesaving vaccine or cure for social ills. It's software that allows for the scanning and indexing of documents and, by employing optical character recognition technology, enables users to search all the text on every page.
The way Wacker sees it, with Laserfiche she's bettering human existence by freeing the office masses, not to mention the recycling bins.
"One piece of paper is very easy to use, but a million pages is a problem. It becomes a black hole," she says. "I decided to make a machine that will suck in all the paper."
Wacker's customer list includes all three branches of the U.S. government, Mexico's immigration authorities and Saudi Arabia's social security administration. Lawyers the world over rely on Laserfiche to dig through thousands of pages in litigation, and she says the CIA used it in bringing its case against former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
When the Chinese-born entrepreneur conceived the idea, the world didn't seem ready to let go of its dependence on paper. Persuading people back in 1987 to try the first version of Laserfiche, designed to run on the old Microsoft disk operating system, was "like trying to get a plant to grow on a rock," she says.
As one of her first customers, Jack Adams, puts it, "She thinks a long time ahead. In fact, she was too ahead of the curve."
Adams, then a lawyer for Executive Life Insurance, decided the insurer should give Wacker $80,000 for a custom document managing system. It did, and before long he was on the Laserfiche payroll as its legal counsel.
He watched the company grow slowly. The product "is not like YouTube or one of these things that take off like a rocket," he says. "It's not sexy; it's inside office management stuff."
For seven years, Laserfiche lost money. No matter. Wacker has what Adams calls a "stick-to-itiveness."
When her life savings and investments from friends and family ran out, she borrowed from her in-laws. Then she poured her children's college funds into the company.
Her husband, Chris, supported her through it all. He says he never doubted the business would take, because he had experienced firsthand the need for a system like Laserfiche.
