Founded by Brad Cox and Tom Love. Also employed Kurt Schmucker and Geoff Pascoe among others. PPI was the original bootstrapped and profitable software services company which earned enough to pay for the first few versions of Objective Cee to be built. When "professional management" arrived along with a venture capital investment, the company immediately started to loose money and tried to transform itself into a products company. Tom ultimately left Step Stone (the new name for PPI) because he wanted to radically lower the price for the Objective-C compiler and to return to profitability through generic object-oriented services.
See original on c2.com 