Founders at Work.pdf

192 Founders at Work
HP and kind of moved on from there. It was definitely the American “looking
for opportunity.”
Livingston: Wasn’t the time around the start of the microcomputer revolution?
Ramsay: It was very early on. There were no PCs. The microprocessor idea had
just gotten going, and they were 4-bit microprocessors—that was state of the
art. Designs were all basically custom hardware designs, so it was very different.
I was involved in chip design at that point. That felt like rocket science. That
was the leading edge, and therefore it was the most exciting thing to work on.
When I left HP in the early ’80s, I went to a startup company called
Convergent Technologies. They had been founded before the PC revolution—
that happened during the formative stage of the company. The idea of
Convergent was to build a workstation. That notion of a CRT and a CPU and a
keyboard was brand new. Computers were things that sat in rooms and had
terminals, and this was completely self-contained. I thought that was really
exciting.
It was during that period that the IBM PC came out. I remember the entire
company was run on an Apple II—this thing that looks like a little wedge.
Because it had to do all this stuff for the company, it got too hot and it had fans
bristling out of it. By today’s standards, it was pretty archaic, but it was also very
exciting.
People like Bill Gates were young kids then. A lot of the people who are
now very famous were just young engineers that were trying to come up with a
good idea. And they did. So the rest is history.
We were definitely at the center of the universe, and that was fun. You felt
like whatever you did, you had the best opportunity and you could go to the
best places and work with the brightest people. They had energy and enthusiasm
and they couldn’t fail. There was nothing that was impossible. Culturally, in
the UK, it was much more subdued; people were much more cautious.
I was just back there, and I was looking at a bunch of venture firms and
their portfolio companies. I was curious to see what’s the attitude of a typical
startup in Scotland compared to here. I found that they are just culturally a
whole lot more conservative and cautious. And somewhat lacking in selfconfidence.
You come over here and . . . I had a meeting recently with a couple
of early 20-year-olds who have decided to drop out of Stanford because they got
bored, and they are trying to raise money to fund their startup. They believe
they can do it, and nothing’s going to hold them back. They have confidence,
they have that spirit, which I think is great and is probably unique to this part of
the world. Being part of that for so long, for me, has been very invigorating.
Livingston: Take me back to when you decided to partner with Jim and start
TiVo.
Ramsay: I had a couple of stints at HP, and it was during that second stint that
I met up with Jim. We were building a team inside the company, and we hired
some very talented people, including Jim, and Tom Jermoluk, who went on to
run @Home. We all kind of became pals.