Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0A
Chapter 10
Mike Lazaridis
Cofounder, Research in Motion
Mike Lazaridis cofounded Research in Motion. It all started when Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin had a state-of-the-art electronics and shop program. Their electronics teacher had them taking apart television and converting their tuners for use at the amateur band. They knew the potentials of what they were doing. The teacher knew that computers would give them the ability to send information and it would allow them to control the RF process.
They went to the University of Waterloo where it had the massive IBM computer system, the centerpiece of the vision of the founder and the faculty.
In the classrooms they were converting from punch cards to video terminals. They started “email” to get and submit their assignments. They started working with the internet.
They were working with computer networks without realizing they are being trained with state-of-the-art technology.
Later on, he had already been doing some computer programming contract work. He was running out of money and looking for other jobs. Luckily, they got these projects with General Motors and the National Film Board and Kodak.
Some people didn’t realize the importance of their studies in high school and universities. But the “important” became “obsolete”.
When Lazaridis decided to start RIM, he called Doug up and tell him what he wanted to do he needed his help. He replied within 2 weeks.
He went to ask for a leave of absence from the president of the university who apologized because he tried to dissuade him from doing it. Twenty years later, he became one of RIM’S board members.
Mike started RIM and he has $600,000 contract with general motors. The company bought the RFM which was out for over 2 years. They had just bought Mobitex, a wireless data system, and hey needed someone to make it work. The documentation hadn’t been translated from Swedish yet. His friend Michael Barnstijn, could read that well enough, because he was from Netherlands. They got it working.
They got contract and started writing software to make it all work. That was their first chance to break out of a consulting role and start producing products.
It was the beginning of a turning point because no one know what wireless data was.
The problem was is how to intercept a market trend and industrial trend, and also how to introduce the new value to consumers.
There were many interesting things hat were being developed, but it took a lot
Of faith and vision (1) it’s going to
Happen someday, and (2) it has value, and (3) you can actually accomplish it in an economic way and promote it so that you can fund the development and growth of the business.
Today, the BlackBerry is the only system that works well and is reliably secure under different technology conditions. What he did was to come up with five improvements to the wireless data networks that will allow providing a reliable experience that was also power efficient.
The email technology was slow to adopt it because it hadn’t reached a certain critical mass so that there was somebody to send it to. The BlackBerry product is a system, and its the email posting and reception is actually low by a server.
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section:O0A
Chapter 11
Arthur van Hoff
Cofounder, Marimba
Van Hoff and Jonathan had left Sun to do a startup. They found a little office on California Avenue in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley had them started working on Marimba.
By the time, they announced they were doing software distribution. Postcard had come out, which had some similarities to what they were doing, but they were immediately filled under “push” and they had to explain to the people that they weren’t a “push” company.
Not all the publicity helped to get their deal done, but you have to keep explaining what you really do. There was so much focus on Kim, a female CEO of a technology company and so little focus on the company.
Marimba had an unfair case because when they gave them a check, they had two checks from the Kleiner fund and the Java fund-and Sami also.
Another story was they gave them the checks-the lawyers were there. Kleiner was there but this will be used to start the company, not to buy the espresso machine. All the early people that had been there 3 to 4 years were starting to leave.
Jonathan and Arthur bought the super-duper Italian automatic machine for $15,000 espresso machines. They installed the espresso machine. The people loved it.
Arthur believed that VCs are instrumental in one’s success because they give you money and strong endorsement. They gave this network of connections and they help you with deals and find the right executives.
The most frustrating thing was that they got a law suit that kept dragging on a bout a patent infringement case.
One of the problems is that you can’t sell for a certain period of time and every time you sell and stock goes down, you’ll get personally sued-share holders law suit. If you do a startup and the company goes bankrupt, the shareholders lose their money, but you don’t personally lose your house. But a shareholder see it is a personal suit if you lose then take your house. Although he was the CEO, he wrote a lot of code, he did a lot of depositions, interviewing, selling, traveling, and moving furniture.
The Sun stoc split three times since they left, and if they had sold at the peak, they would have made about as much as they did with Marimba.
Arthur takes advice from a lot of people, and that advice is not always the best advice. Very often, his intuition tells him to do something different, but then he goes with the advice from the experienced guys.
Three Things I learned
· Arthur van Hoff left Sun Microsystems. He was part of the Java development team. And he left Sun to found Marimba, a software distribution company
· Trust yourself. Do what you believe is right
· Accept advices but go with the best advice
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0C
Chapter 12
Paul Buchheit
Creator, Gmail
Buchheit created Gmail. He was the 23rd employee of Google. He was in Intel before and he find his
job therehere boring so he emailed his resume to Google. Google called him up. He came in and took a job.
Buchheit experienced that if you wanted to check you email, you’d have to go back to your dorm room. He thought that was stupid. So, he wanted to make some kind of web-based email. And while working in Google and he had worked on Google Groups. Google groups asked him if he wanted to build some type of email or personalization product. By that time it was a pretty non-specific project charter. Hey just said that it was an interesting area and of course Buchheit was excited to work on that.
For quite a while, Buchheit just worked on it by himself. He started out with some of the Groups code because he was familiar with it. He built the first version of Gmail in just 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched his email. He released that to some Googlers and people said that it was useful, and it progressed from there.
He worked mostly full-time on Gmail which is Google’s Adsense now. He made to groundbreaking things at google.
When Buchheit built his first version, he wants to create a better email program and to build something that would allow him to search through his emails. He realized that it would be better if he could search his own email. And later when they started to improve Gmail, Sanjeev Singh worked with him, and later Jing Lim also joined them. They were doing a lot of things that were new to google. First, in Google they only do web search but in Gmail, they do lots of neat products that go beyond that. They have the idea of receiving all the email and store the email. They want everything to be instant, and of course they don’t want to loose any of the data inside the email.
Buchheit’s favorite feature was the autocomplete. He wanted the emails to be sent fast and also he wanted the computer to remember the addresses. They were the first web mail provider to do it. Desktop products would have things like that sometimes, but no web mail was doing that at that time.
Their plan was to archive everything, not delete emails and have the massive storage needed. They wanted also to view every conversation and that was one of their new features. Buchheit really took the user’s perspective when he designed Gmail.
When Gmail was launched, they were about a dozen. And they still asked for more people. The product was nice, but everyday there are things that Buchheit find that he want to change. When it had launched, they had users internally. Buchheit called it Gmail, but they realized that was not really very subtle, so they changed it to Caribou. And the code name was Caribou.
Buchheit consider the launching as the most enjoyable moment when he started creating the Gmail. For him, nothing is more enjoyable and exciting than finally getting out there for the world and seeing that people like it. Before Gmail was launched, Buchheit was awake for about 70 hours because he was furiously assembling the last bits of Gmail.
Buchheit consider the people as the biggest resource as well as the systems. Buchheit had Larry and Sergey who supported him. Larry and Sergey were very open to crazy ideas more than anyone Buchheitt had ever met and another thing is that, they just get the machines or they don’t have to build the machines by themselves.
It took couple of years to say that Gmail is ready and stable. They always respond very quickly to everything that goes wrong and that was the challenge for them in the whole process.
Buchheit came up with the famous “Don’t be evil” principle. It was in 2000 and there was a meeting to decide on the company’s values. Buchheit thought of the phrase “Don’t be evil” sounds fun and also it is a bit a jab at a lot of other companies, especially their competitors. And it became the company’s now famous motto.
Three Things I Learned
- I learned that there was a Gmail. Before, I was just using yahoo mail. And now that I discovered that there was Gmail, I am now one of its users.
- I learned that Paul Buchheit was the creator and lead developer of Gmail.
- I learned that Gmail is a Google’s web-based email system, which anticipated most aspects of what is now called Web 2.0.
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