Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Perlman 175
It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. Sometimes I’d take
10-minute cat naps by just laying my head down on my shoulders—just so I’d
get some REMs. As soon as the dreams come, it resets your brain a little bit and
you’re able to work again. We were sleeping at our desks. People would bring in
pizza. My wife would sometimes cook some turkey meatballs and spaghetti in a
big pot and then bring it over, and everyone would just chow down.
Livingston: Surely your wife was nervous about you sleeping only 4 hours every
2 days?
Perlman: She was. She got one of those fold-out futons that would fold under
my desk. She didn’t like me sleeping on the floor.
My admin, who came with me from General Magic, tells stories about coming
in in the morning and trying to clean up. She’d pick up a folded pizza box
and get scared because she’d find a guy sleeping underneath it—it was covering
his face. It was really bad. My dog, when my wife would bring him over, he
would find burritos, because the place was just a pigsty.
But we had the product out in 6 months because we knew we had to meet
that Christmas. It was out by September.
Livingston: So you had a deadline?
Perlman: We had a hard deadline. But, it was a great learning experience for
me. The guys that we hired to get our network software working, they just did
not deliver. They couldn’t work on that kind of schedule. So we pulled it in and
did it all ourselves. It was a matter of just cranking it out.
We used a programmable gate array that we could then freeze into a permanent
gate array to make it cost-effective. That was the only way we could get
the hardware working that quickly. Then it was just a matter of hard work on
the games and everything. We partnered with THQ, which is a video game
company who had a distribution channel to all the video game retail outlets, so
we could get the product out quickly.
I also learned about working with people, because one of the guys I
cofounded it with, it just didn’t work out between us. He had his perspective of
where he wanted to take the company; I had mine. I realized that these things
are like a marriage. When you cofound something, you’ve got to have people
that have a similar kind of perspective on where you’re going to take the thing.
Otherwise you’re just locking horns all the time.
Livingston: Had you worked with him before?
Perlman: I knew him before. General Magic was developing products for Sony,
and Sony was particularly interested in MagicTV. I’d known him at Apple
because he’d done some industrial design there. He went and got his MBA and
then went to work at Sony. And so I was seeing him at Sony. We weren’t friends,
and I didn’t know him very well outside of work, but, when I left, he said,
“They’re shutting down MagicTV. So what are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t
know. I had an idea for this thing I wanted to do with video games.”