Before Autodesk, John founded a hardware integration manufacturing company called Marin Chip. Among other things, Marin Chip pioneered the translation of numerous computer language compilers to Intel platforms.
Some say that John's efforts "propelled" Microsoft to dominance, however this is contested. At the time, there was a "right" way to do things like chip design, board fabrication, and software integration and John was a big part of that - without personally buying into Wintel as some ultimate solution.