Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Ramsay 199
We were manufacturing it through a third-party manufacturer in Milpitas,
and we took the whole company over there and we all put on little blue jackets and
caps and we watched them making TiVos. That celebration was fun.
Prior to that, we had been shipping certain selective units. The previous
January, 3 months before, we had launched at CES (Consumer Electronics
Show), so people knew about us. We were in this hot debate with Replay, who
were trying to claim that they were first, and we were first. We actually released
the product and shipped first.
There were a bunch of beta users prior to that, including Geoff and Stewart,
and of course these things broke and didn’t record the programs properly and
did all sorts of crazy things. They kept rebooting. We were a bit nervous about
giving board members TiVos, but we got through that.
We had an arrangement with Philips, and they started shipping through
their retail distribution system. We were fortunate because the press loved this
idea of a young startup company that was screwing up the media industry, and
the press loved this idea that we were locked in battle with Replay. We got a
huge amount of publicity. People knew what TiVo was long before we ever put
the product out. So we started to sell it and it went well.
We had to learn a lot. I remember one weekend, we took the entire company,
which was about 60 people at the time, and we divvied them up and went
to all the Fry’s stores in the Bay Area, because they were selling at Fry’s. We set
up demo stations and the employees were giving demos. It was great because
almost everybody had no experience of what it’s really like to sell in a retail
store. So we started to do all that stuff, and it began to take off. That was the
end of March. By August/September, we had sold about 18,000 units and we
were going to IPO.
It was not a lot of units, and we were just riding the wave of this bubble that
was about to burst. We got in in September of ’99 and we got our IPO done and
we were oversubscribed and the company’s valuation went up to billions of
dollars and we thought we had died and gone to heaven.
During that period, we did a deal with Sony and we did an important deal
with DIRECTV. We started to supply DIRECTV with TiVos. That became a
big deal for the company and still is today for that matter. So we started to
branch out to some different partnerships there, and one thing led to another,
and we grew.
Everyone complained that we weren’t growing fast enough, and, if the thing
was so hot, why did it not just take off? But we were charging $500 or $600 for
this thing, and I was pretty happy with how things were going considering that,
starting off, we wanted to do this big server and we had scaled it down to a
DVR. I thought we’d sell a few thousand, and then we’d go on to the real thing.
Now this thing has got a life of its own. People love it and we started to get great
feedback.
It was interesting because the press who reviewed it . . . there were two
kinds: the technology press, like Walt Mossberg, who hated it because it wasn’t
techie enough for them; then there was the consumer press, who loved it
because it was nice and simple.