It all started with the business failure of the computer manufacturing company where he worked.  Three newly unemployed programmers, convinced there was a need for good accounting programs for small businesses, came to Gossett and asked him to start his own company.

Gossett liked what he heard and plunged headfirst into the world of entrepreneurship.  The company started without a line of code (the instructions that tell the computer what to do), no product, nothing.

"The first five years were rough. I sold the farm, literally, to support this business," Gossett says. "I had inherited a farm in Nampa from my parents and had to sell it to keep Reporting to the MAX going.  Developing software is very expensive."

"Hundreds, I suppose thousands of software manufacturers have slipped into never never land. It takes tenacity and a hell of a lot of work."

That hard work has paid off.  Recently, the publication Soft Letter listed Cougar Mountain 99th in a ranking of the top 100 independent software companies in the nation. It was the only Idaho-based software company to be ranked out of the 20,000 companies that were considered for the listing..

Gossett graduated from Boise Junior College in 1943, before many of his competitors in the field of computer software were out of diapers. He took more classes at BJC in 1944 and 1945 and graduated with a business degree from University of Idaho in 1947. He also took classes at Monmouth, Purdue and the University of Georgia while he was in the Naval Air Corps.

Now 76, he recently turned the day-to-day operations over to David Bassiri, the newly promoted president, and assumed the title of chief executive officer.