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SHARE Back in the 1990s, the casino industry unwillingly provided the seed capital to found what became one of the major providers of 3D computer-aided design software. SolidWorks Inc. got its start in 1993 thanks to capital and entrepreneurial initiative provided by Jon Hirschtick, an MIT graduate who was part of a team of students that developed a card-counting system to win huge sums of money in Las Vegas during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The group became the subject of a best-selling book and Hollywood movie, and Hirschtick used $1 million of his winnings to found SolidWorks. After selling the company to Dessault Systems SA in 1997, Hirschtick went on to co-found Onshape Inc., which was acquired by PTC Inc. in 2019 for $470 million. He’s still taking calculated risks today, this time as president of the Software-as-a-Service Division at PTC. But now his gambles are in engineering labs instead smoky casino floors. ....