On this day in 1962, Ross Perot hit his annual sales quota at IBM. He left the tech giant that year to found EDS, which he sold to GM for $2.4B in 1984. To win his first deal, according to one source, he had to wade through 77 rejections. Talking to Fortune years later, Perot described the frustration that pushed him to leave the board of General Motors: "I come from an environment where if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is hire a snake consultant. Then you get a committee on snakes and discuss it for a couple of years."