In a three-year rocket ride not seen since the launch of the Mackie 1604, Line 6 has grown from just another inventor's-baby-blip-on-the-radar-screen into one of the top 5 guitar amp manufacturers. Music Trades recently named Line 6 the fastest growing company in the musical instrument industry. Now officially "pre-IPO," Line 6 is also on Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the US.

What sets Line 6 apart from the hundreds of other companies who rented their first 10 x 10 booths at the 1996 Winter NAMM? Venture capital, for one. In 1996, two digital engineers named Marcus Ryle and Michel Doidic, who had formed an engineering/product development firm called Fast Forward Designs after leaving Oberheim, decided they had an idea that was too good to let someone else take it to market. So they took it to Sutter Hill Ventures, which also owns parts of LSI Logic, Mentor Graphics, Palm Computing (yes, THAT Palm) and many other computer-related companies. Sutter Hill's Len Baker looked at Fast Forward's track record (which includes the Alesis ADAT) their application for a digital modeling patent (U.S. Patent 5,789,689) and the first product, the AxSys 212, and decided to fund the company as a startup manufacturing operation.

Another marked contrast to most MI/pro audio firms is the fact that Line 6 brought in professional management early in its growth. Ryle and Doidic sit on the board and are company officers: Doidic is Chief Technology Officer, Ryle is Chief Product Strategist and Vice President of Product Development. But they don't run the business. Three years ago, former Apple VP and Harvard MBA Mike Muench became President and CEO. Muench, who once upon a time played the trumpet for money, started his silicon career selling IBM big iron (aka mainframes). He moved to Apple in the 80's, rising to VP, US Consumer Division before leaving to head up Line 6. Since he came on board, the company's headcount has jumped from 10 to 225 employees and sales have grown at "triple-digit" rates (that's more than double) each year.

That pace of expansion could kill many organizations, but Line 6 recorded a profit during its last fiscal year. Again, the recruitment of highly credentialed managers has contributed. Manufacturing is run by another computer-industry pro, Mark Chiarappa. The recently-created Marketing VP position is held by Harvard MBA and ex-packaged goods marketer Watt Webb, while Finance is run by ex-Harman and Mattel accounting professional (and Stanford MBA) Teresa Covington. Engineering and Sales are in the hands of Alesis grads Alan Zack and Alex Nelson. Presumably they're familiar with the challenges and risks of rapid expansion.

Line 6's board of directors is equally impressive. Along with the two co-founders, it includes Digidesign founder and Redpoint Ventures partner Peter Gotcher to and Sutter Hill Managing Director Len Baker. How many other MI or AV companies can you name who have a Yale trustee on their board? For that matter, how many companies in this industry can you name who even have a board that does anything except satisfy a corporate charter?

Perhaps because they can continue to invent rather than cope with the consequences of invention, the core product team at Line 6 has held together pretty well. Three of the four patent holders (Doidic, Ryle and engineer Curtis Senffner) are still with the company and still focused on tomorrow's innovations rather than today's operational problems (the fourth, Michael Mecca, now runs his own consulting firm, Pittsburgh Digital). The premise of Line 6's product offering is stunningly simple: take the elaborate configurations of tubes, transformers, speakers, cabinets, recording environments, microphones and mic placements that produced the classic rock guitar tones, and turn them into digital algorithms that can be selected with presets instead of laboriously "dialed in" by tweaking control knobs up and down the signal chain. A Line 6 algorithm may not deliver every single subtle nuance of tone, dynamics and expressiveness that Eric Johnson achieves (or will it? Line 6's new high-end offering, the Vetta, promises to "recreate the sound and 'feel' of aged components such as transformers and filter caps"). But you won't invest man-months of obsessive experimentation and tweaking, either.

Starting at the top of the market as a smart alternative to expensive hand-built tube amps, Line 6 established its quality and tone-worthiness with artist endorsements and product reviews. The Line 6 web site lists Art Alexakis of Everclear, Kid Rock, Dixie Chicks' guitarist/musical director Bob Britt, Clint Black, session monsters Dann Huff, Eddie Martinez and Michael Thompson and producers from Jack Douglas to Rob Cavallo among an extensive list of users and endorsers. Although it limited the company's market share and growth rate for the first two years, this was a particularly astute approach, since the entire concept of digital modeling could have been pigeonholed as "cheesy imitation."

However, it wasn't. Apparently the time was right for digital modeling, because John Johnson of DOD also introduced his first modeling amp in 1996. There's nothing like a competitor to legitimatize a new product category. Once the idea of modeling amps was accepted by lead consumers (recording artists and influential magazine writers), Line 6 moved rapidly to extend its line into broader market areas. Today, you can affiliate with the Line 6 brand through guitar amps at three price points as well as guitar/bass stomp boxes, dedicated pre-amp/processor direct recording devices (PODs), or software plug-ins.