Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Ramsay 195
immediately flipped into this mode of “How do you make that work?” He
started thinking about this, and all his real-time UNIX and video-on-demand
experience started to come together, and we thought, “This could be very cool.”
So we clicked on it.
We went back to the VCs and said, “Thank you very much for the money.
We’ve changed our minds. Here’s what we’re going to do and here’s why we
think it’s a good idea.” They said, “Oh, that just sounds like a VCR.” (Anytime
anyone says that to me, I go completely nuts.) So we had this challenge of
explaining, “It’s actually not a VCR. It’s a lot more sophisticated and uses a hard
disk, and therefore you can record and playback simultaneously and do clever
things like pause live TV, and so on.”
We then hired people who came in and were very creative and thought a lot
about the user interface and how you actually make this work internally. In a
very short space of time—like 6 months from when we got started—we had a
good-sized team of people who were all working on this from different aspects.
One of the things I worried about in starting a company was . . . you come
from a high-tech background and, depending on the technology, if it’s cool, it
attracts the brightest. If you go back in history and you look at all the different
phases of technology evolution, you find there are certain things that are in
vogue that attract very bright people. Certainly through my tenure at SGI, the
big thing was UNIX. All the best people wanted to work on UNIX. UNIX was
the sandbox that they could be creative in and solve difficult problems. That’s
where they wanted to be. So companies that did that, like Sun and SGI and
others, attracted very bright people, and therefore you got great work done.
I thought, “I’m going to start a consumer company. It’s going to be a little
box that can’t cost more than $200 or $300. It’s going to do a very simple function.
It’s got to work with a remote control. Is that going to be challenging
enough for us to attract the brightest people? Because I don’t want to run a
company that has a second-rate engineering organization. I want to run a company
that has a top-rate engineering organization.” So I was worried about that.
Then Jim hired a guy that he had known from SGI who was really bright.
That was kind of the first key hire. We’d begun to realize that inside this thing it
was very difficult, and, as we identified these great engineers and they came in,
we sort of explained a little bit about it to them, and they said, “It sounds like a
very difficult problem. Sign me up.”
I think TiVo became the first company, certainly in this area, that created a
new playground for those really great people. It was nothing to do with UNIX,
although it was a Linux-based system. It was to do with creating an integrated
system that really worked well and was inexpensive. Hide the technology from
people—that was the challenge. When you used it, you never thought of it as
anything. You thought of it as a remote control.
That, I think, really got people’s imaginations going. They said, “Yeah, I’d
love to work on that. That sounds interesting.”
Livingston: Can you tell me about some of the biggest technical challenges?