Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0C
Chapter 13
Steve Perlman
Cofounder, WebTV
Steve Perlman is the cofounder of WebTV. He has been interested in making television interactive. He wanted something beyond just changing channels up and down, to get where people can have access to content that’s more interesting, to be able to find what they want and then to be able to view it on demand.
He wanted to do all those things, and he even did a lot of the work at Apple. It was 1989 on the History Channel where they showed some of the early stuff Perlman did at Apple. He was showing a system where he had video on the screen, images moving around, and animation, and several video sources. You could pause, rewind and manipulate the things. That was a big prototype system, but they could never get it out the door because there wasn’t enough content to drive a system like that. You could theoretically bring in live video but in 1990 there wasn’t a hard disk big enough to hold the video. Apparently you could try to create to create all sorts of content for it, but who would ever create all the current if there are no devices to receive it? So they had a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody would buy the devices because there was no content, and there was no content because the devices weren’t out there.
But, there were lots of offshoots from that work; QuickTime came out of the work. They took the video decompression technology, developed it, reduced it to just a software algorithm, and that was turned into a product by Bruce Leak and his team. Bruce knew right away that it was a big enough idea for a startup. A whole bunch of other things grew out of it some of the video products were from Apple and so forth.
Then at General Magic, he went to work on PDA but, he just worked half of his time there at General Magic and half-time he was still working on how to make inexpensive delivery systems on a television for interactive TV, and work with video and games and things like that. And time came that General Magic in his last year there wanted also to do video stuff. MagicTV is what they called it. So he worked full time then try to create an interactive system for them. But they ran into financial difficulties and other problems getting the product out, and shut down the MagicTV effort.
That’s when Perlman started and cofounded with three other people. The Catapult Entertainment, which made a modem for Sega and Nintendo video games that would modify the execution of the games. He built one of the first systems for network games when he was in his startup Catapult Entertainment. But time came that Perlman leave Catapult and Netscape came out. And later, he also helped bring color to the Mac. By then, Perlman was one of the leading experts on display technology because of his works. In just one week end in 1995 he tested his theory that the Web could look as good on a TV screen as it did in computer monitor and he did it. Now, he wanted to bring the web into people’s living rooms.
After Perlman’s first prototype, Sony and Philips sold the first WebTV set-top boxes to the public. In 1997, WebTV (now called MSNTV) was acquired by Microsoft for over $500 million.
Three Things I Learned
- I learned that Steve Perlman is the cofounder of WebTV or what we called the MSNTV now.
- I learned that in a company, all talent and engineering know-how and business knowledge is not enough to succeed, the good relationship with one another should always be consider.
- Perseverance is a necessity to achieve your goal. Never stop. Don’t doubt that you are going to succeed. Just work for it and trust what you can do.
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: O0C
Chapter 14
Mike Rimsay
Cofounder, TiVo
Mike Ramsy cofounded TiVo. It all started when he came in United States towork in HP. He joined HP right out of school. He was educated in Scotland, and they had a factory over there. Through good fortune, he got a chance to come over the United States with HP and check the place out.
Mike Ramsay left HP in 1980s; He went to a startup company called Convergent Technologies. He tried to figure out what’s the attitude of a typical startup in Scotland compare to United States. He found that they are just culturally a whole lot more conservative and cautious. And somewhat lacking in self-confidence.
Mike Rimsay had a couple of stints at HP, and it was during that second stint that he met up with Jim. They were building a team inside the company, and they hired some evry talented people, including Jim, and Tom Jermoluk, who went on to run @Home. They all kind of became pals
After a year or so, Mike Rimsay realied that he couldn’t go back to a big company thing; it just wasn’t going to work. He got recruited to an opportunity in SGI, which then was a couple of hundred people. Mark Perry just joined. He is one of the partners of NEA. Dick Kramlich was on the board, and so he went over there and thought it thatwas the greatest thing he had ever seen. The technology was phenomenal. He thought Jim Clark was great. The people there were super bright. Sometimes you just walk into an environment and you know. There are no questions to be asked; you just kind of know and that’s it. And that’s how Mike Rimsay felt about SGI.
When Rimsay decided to join, he told T.J., Jim, and some others, and they were all interested. They ended up in different departments at SGI. They never worked very closely together, but they were always kept in touch socially. Jim went off and became a world-class technologist in his own field. He invested things at SGI that nobody has else had done. He made UNIX work in real time. And Rimsay was very impressed of what Jim had done.
The team’s original idea or plan was to create a network server for homes. But, they realize that it would be hard to explain to consumers why they needed one, they narrowed the idea down to one component of the original plan. The digital video recorder (DVR). They forget the network thing and forget the massive amounts of storage and high cost and hardware models and all that.
They thought the DVR idea. They called it PVR at the time, personalized television or something like that. They thought that it was a cool idea. The were fascinated by that new idea because, once you looked over the covers, you realized it was a very difficult technical problem. The fact that it was a consumer product and it had to be television meant that it had to be completely reliable and bulletproof. Jim immediately flipped into the work processing mode. He started thinking how could they made the PVR, and all his real-time UNIX an dvideo –on-demand experience started to come together, and they thought that their new idea could be very cool. So they worked on it.
The first version was launched in 1999. Later, they called their product TiVo. TiVo was ground-breaking in that it took all the information that existed on television and gave the viewers the power to manipulate it. With TiVo, you could skip commercials, pause live TV, and schedule the recording of every episode of a series. All the things one might expect to be able to do with data. But these new feautures sparked controversy in Holllywood. Networks worried about losing control over how people watched TV.
By skillfully navigating the border between what’s possible with technology and what television executives would tolerate. TiVo brought about revolution in the way people watch TV. Like Google, its name became a verb.
TiVo went public in 1999. Ramsay stepped down as CEO in 2003, but remained as chairman.
Three Things I Learned
· I learned that TiVo is a digital video recorder that delivers your favorite television shows, movies, music, videos, and more to your TV.
· I learned that Mike Rimsay was the Cofounder of TiVo
· I learned that you need to do what you can do to achieve your plans. No one will sue a failure. They won’t sue you until you are successful.
Name: Jecca Cervero
Section: 0OC
Chapter 15
Paul Graham
Cofounder, Viaweb
Paul Graham and his friend Robert Morris started Viaweb. But before Viaweb they had a startup called Artix. They want to put art galleries online. But, after a few days into writing their first prototype, they had a crazy idea: Why not have the software run on server and let the user control it through their browser? And that was the time they work on Viaweb. When they were working on it, at first of course they didn’t have any funding. They were just working in Robert’s apartment and it was in the middle of summer. Graham got the idea of making software run on a server when he wakes up one morning in Robert’s apartment. And by that, they tried working on it. Their friend Julian, who worked with them on Artix gave them $100,000 after 6 weeks, they got Trevor Blackwell to work with them. He was the smartest student in the computer science program where Robert graduated too. Months passed by, they had a web-based online store builder they could demo to investors. They launched at the beginning of 1996. Finally, by December they started trying to get users. Their first customers were a pair of technical bookstores. They gave them the software for free for as long as they wanted. They built sites for them. They were basically web consultants, because they needed users. They believe that no one can launch a thing without having any users. It turned out that the people that really wanted their software were individual merchants. The users like viaweb because it was easy to use. Another thing was, they had good graphic design. They knew that e-commerce was really about graphic design, not transaction processing. They belive that what convinced people to buy were based on how good the site looked.
One of their biggest competitors was the Icat. It is a company which is very good at raising money and seeming corporate but fortunately they were never became threat technically for viaweb. There was another computer called Shopsite that was better technically but still not too dangerous.
There are some big companies wanting to buy viaweb. Julian became their negotiator. But because of Julian’s option for them to buy viaweb for $20 million in 6 months, they just got up and walked out. Then, Graham and the company go back to business. Time came that Robert decided to work in another company and left viaweb. And after Robert left, their main angel investor decided that they needed to have a busness guy ceo and that they wasn’t going to gave them any money unless they got someone. And in the last moment, Fred Egan saved them. Graham was very impressed with him. Fred didn’t need to be their bos. He was willing to be the Coo and do the business stuff. It was a relief for them for having someone who would deal with the investors, so that they could just write software and make userds happy and that’s what they all wanted to do. After they got Fred, they raised more money. They operated out of Robert’s apartent as their office. Then after they got $100,000 from angel investors, they rented the apartmen upstairs from Robert’s. the had that for about a year and then after they got Fred and they actually rented an office and started hiring people. They really stated to look like a company. And they started growing as a company. They were starting to et mentioned in the press a lot. Within couple of months Schwatz Communication, a fabulous PR was hired to mention Viaweb whenever they had to mention a few examples of companies that related to e-commerce.
Graham came to a point where he wanted to quit. There was a point when the investors were thelling them that they were going to refinance their company but Fred Egan convinced Graham to continue working on viaweb. And after a few months, they have a great high period because viaweb get bought by Yahoo. And for them, Yahoo is an ideal acquirer.
The way viaweb really got onto Yahoo’s radar screen was through Albi Partrovi. He had a startup called LinkExchange that was talking to Yahoo that time, and their VC was Mike Mortiz, who was also Yahoo’s VC. Ali had Robert and Trevor as his teaching assistants in CS classes at Harvard a few year before.
For Graham the most surprising thing about being acquired is that, he became so weird. When he replaced the viaweb front page with Yahoo front page, he thought viaweb would never be seen again and another thing is that they all became yahoo employees. By 1998, viaweb store was the most popular e-commerce software and after viaweb was acquired by Yahoo, it was renamed as Yahoo store.
Three Things I have learned
- I never knew about this “Viaweb” until I searched about it. The site was ok. There’s nothing fancy. They made the site simple and easy to use. Viaweb is a web-based application that allows users to build and host their own online stores
- Paul Graham and Robert Morris started viaweb.
- “Make something people want. If you make something users want, they will be happy, and you can translate that happiness into money”.
-For me, making something people want is the number one rule in a company. The companies survive because they follow this rule. In a start-up company, the company follows the same rule. People want a simple and easy to use.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.