Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Ramsay 193
After a year or so, I realized that I couldn’t go back to a big company thing;
it just wasn’t going to work. I got recruited to this opportunity at SGI, which
then was a couple of hundred people. Mark Perry just joined (he’s one of the
partners at NEA), Dick Kramlich was on the board, and so I went over there
and thought this was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. The technology was phenomenal.
I 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 I felt
about SGI.
When I decided to join, I told T.J., Jim, and some others, and they said,
“Great, when do we start?” So there was a whole exodus out of HP.
We actually ended up in different departments at SGI. We never worked
very closely together, but we always kept in touch socially. Jim went off and
became a world-class technologist in his own field. He invented things at SGI
that nobody else had done. He made UNIX work in parallel processing systems.
He made UNIX work in real time. You had to have real-time systems to
do graphics, because the flight simulator couldn’t hiccup once in a while. So he
went off and did that stuff, and I was very impressed with what he had done. I
was off doing all the low-end workstation things for SGI. I was hanging out with
the movie studios and special effects people and got to know that whole crew.
I started to get really interested in what you could do with computers in the
entertainment space, things that I considered not-boring, because most computer
applications are pretty boring. I got interested in how you can use
computing technology to do things that are really entertaining and very different
from what you might expect it to be used for.
Jim, on the other hand, coming from his technical background, started to
work on a video-on-demand system that SGI was doing with Time Warner. It
was in Orlando, Florida. They did the very first video-on-demand system,
called the Full Service Network. Technically it was brilliant, but the experience
turned him against all things institutional in the TV world, like cable companies
and satellite companies. He felt they were like monopolies and we were going
backwards. But nevertheless, he kind of liked that space.
So Jim was doing that and left SGI and went off and tried to start a company.
About a year later I left, and just by happenstance I got hold of him. I
can’t even remember who called who, but we ended up going out to lunch and
we kicked around a few ideas. We said, “It would be kind of fun to work
together on some ideas, because we come at it from different angles. Maybe
we’ll come up with something. Maybe we could do a company.”
We thought that was a fine idea, so we kept going out to lunch and talking
about it. We had some great lunches. We started to home in on this idea of
using computing technology in home entertainment. At the time, it was like
home servers and home networks. You wired everything in the home network,
and it was a little bit ahead of its time, which got us interested.
After a while, we put this together in a presentation. It wasn’t a business
plan, but we had some ideas of what we’d like to do. We came here [to NEA]
and other places and peddled it around. Most people just kicked us out because