The Doug Burgum I Kind Of Knew...and Liked

But how did a long-haired rural software guy became a Trump veep short-lister?

I can’t say I ever knew Doug Burgum well, though until recently I still got his family Christmas card. But it’s hard for me to imagine the Doug Burgum I did know desiring to be Donald Trump’s running mate.

Burgum is, according to news reports, on Trump’s “short list” for VP. Most of the public knows Burgum as the governor of North Dakota who entered the Republican primary race for president, seemed low-key and boring during the debates while looking a little like Eugene Levy, and then quickly dropped out.

My encounters with Burgum were all in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Burgum was a fascinating anomaly in the dot-com era: He’d built a billion-dollar accounting software company called Great Plains in Fargo, N.D., a city that most techies only knew as the setting for a Coen brothers movie. He had long hippie-like hair, a big smile, and milled around with Silicon Valley preppies wearing flannel shirts and jeans as if he’d just dropped in after inspecting a grain elevator. He struck me as kind, principled and rooted in the type of warm rural populism you might get in a John Mellencamp song.

I talked to him at tech conferences like PC Forum and Agenda. He was friends with investor Heidi Roizen and I’d run into him at the enormous parties she’d host in Silicon Valley. I liked getting his input when writing columns and stories because he’d get philosophical and draw on far-flung historical analogies such as the building of the transcendental railroad or the travels of Marco Polo.

I have a printout of an email exchange we had in 1998, when I was working on a story about “internet time.” In that late-‘90s dot-com frenzy, the buzz was that the internet “changed everything,” including the nature of time – that everything was happening exponentially faster than it used to. Doug wrote:

The big change with the internet was not the pace of change, but the change of pace (and scale) in which new companies could raise capital and attempt to displace competitors (or create new categories).

At the “receiving end” of our industry, i.e. customers, there are limits for their desire and motivation to accept (pay for?) even more change in their lives. I say pushed, since most change is “pushed” by companies/start-ups vs. being “pulled” (demanded) by consumers. The real pace of change of the masses (vs. “serial” early adopters) is still limited by our nature as humans.

I love that! And, damn! It totally applies today.

Burgum was born in Arthur, N.D., and while in college at North Dakota State started a chimney sweeping business. That apparently helped him get into Stanford business school in 1978, where he not only got exposed to that area’s growing technology industry, but also became buddies with classmate Steve Ballmer, who would eventually end up as Microsoft’s CEO. Burgum went back to North Dakota, and mortgaged family farmland so he could invest in Great Plains, then a tiny software company. Before long, he and his family bought the whole business, and Burgum grew the company to about $300 million in annual sales and, in 1997, an IPO.

In 2001, Microsoft bought Great Plains for $1.1 billion – a year after Ballmer became CEO. (Coincidence? Hmm.) Burgum joined Microsoft and ran its Business Solutions Group. He left in 2007, and the person who was promoted to Burgum’s job was Satya Nadella, who is now Microsoft’s CEO.

Back in Fargo, Burgum invested in tech companies and real estate in the northern Midwest. With no political experience (though a lot of wealth), he ran for governor of North Dakota in 2016 and won. He won again in 2020. From what I know of his time as governor, he never seemed super-conservative, much less MAGA-like. (Well, he did cut his hair.) He actually acknowledges climate change and pushed for carbon-neutral policies for the state. He’s for aid to Ukraine to stop Russia. He also actually said the words: "I believe that Joe Biden won the election." How he wound up in Trump world…well, who knows how anything happens in Trump world.

Anyway, I once sort-of knew a Doug Burgum who I would never have thought would be the Doug Burgum who is a Trump veep short-lister. Or, maybe Trump is interested in Burgum because he is, in fact, that same down-home, soft-spoken, thoughtful guy who knows a lot about history. The stark contrast might help.

I quoted Burgum in quite a few stories and columns for USA Today, but they are not available online. I have no idea why I saved printouts of some of his emails back then.