Founders at Work.pdf

174 Founders at Work
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 we 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 live video. Theoretically,
you could try to create all sorts of content for it, but who would ever create all
the content if there are no devices to receive it? So we 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
that work. We 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. A whole bunch of other things grew out of it—some of the
video products from Apple and so forth.
Then, at General Magic, I went to work on a PDA—but I worked half-time
at General Magic and half-time I 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.
Livingston: You worked on your own projects on your own time?
Perlman: On my own time. I relinquished half of my stock options. I worked
out a deal with them where 2 and 1/2 days a week I worked on my own stuff,
2 and 1/2 days a week I worked on General Magic stuff. And then what happened
is General Magic, in my last year there, said, “Hey, we want to do video
stuff too.” MagicTV is what they called it. So I worked full-time then to 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.
I said, “OK, it’s time for me to move on.” That’s when I first started—and
cofounded with three other people—Catapult Entertainment, which made a
modem for Sega and Nintendo video games that would modify the execution of
the games, so people could play existing titles with each other over the phone
line. That involved building out the network infrastructure to connect people
together—remember, people didn’t have the Web in their homes back then—
designing the hardware, and also reverse-engineering the games. So I learned a
lot about the consumer market and about getting stuff out into stores. From the
founding of the company to the point where the product was on store shelves at
Toys“R”Us and the network was up and running, was 6 months—including custom
silicon that we did, as well as shooting the plastic molds for it, boxing it, and
getting it through distribution.
Livingston: And you did it in 6 months?
Perlman: Six months. We reverse-engineered four video games: NBA Jam,
Mortal Kombat, a hockey game, and some other one. We were just working
around the clock, literally. What I would typically do is not sleep for 2 nights;
then I would get 4 hours of sleep and go back to work for another 2 days in a
row, and then get 4 hours, and so on.