Founders at Work.pdf

200 Founders at Work
I can’t tell you how hard it was to get a bad review. It just tore the company
apart if somebody wrote a bad review about TiVo and we read it. “Oh God.
How can we deal with this?” It was a gut-wrenching time for the company. As
everyone started to review it, some people liked it, some people didn’t. But at
the end of the day, it worked out just fine.
Livingston: Back to your first customers—were there any features you were
surprised they wanted as they started using it?
Ramsay: The thing that really got them was pausing live TV. That was the hook.
You go, “Blah blah blah and it can pause live TV.” They’d look at you and go,
“Wait a minute. Pause live TV? How do you do that?” “Well, technically, you do
it this way and that way.” “That doesn’t work. You can’t pause live TV. It’s live!”
We couldn’t get people to understand it. We’d say things like, “It’s not like
the actors take a break or anything. You pause live TV.” Then you’d show it to
them, and we got pretty good at this after a while, where we’d surprise them
with this and we’d pause live TV and you could see them going, “Wow. I never
thought that would ever be possible.”
So that was a big catalyst. Once people got that idea, they realized it was
something really different.
The other things that people wanted to do—and I don’t know if it was
because we did it and then they liked it or if it was because they asked for it
and then we did it—but this idea of a season pass or a wish list where you just
put in something—a very small amount of information saying, “I want this”—
and, for the rest of your life, you get it. So if you want to see The Sopranos and
you want it every week, you do a Season Pass, and that Season Pass will look out
for The Sopranos every time it’s broadcast. It’s clever enough not to get any
repeats, so you only get the real one. And it’s clever enough to deal with times
changing and durations changing. So if you have a season finale that lasts two
hours, TiVo will automatically figure that one out. People loved this idea of “Get
me a Season Pass,” and then they can forget about it. We expanded that to
WishList, which says, “Get me all the Martin Scorsese movies,” or stuff like
that. “Clint Eastwood westerns.” Those were very attractive to people, and over
time it became pretty clear that this was something very new and different.
Livingston: Tell me a little bit about times that you were most worried about
competitors.
Ramsay: The Replay thing was definitely an interesting case in point. We were
on parallel paths, and it was a bit of a mystery to us how we managed to get on
parallel paths.
We kept hearing rumors about them, and I’m sure they heard rumors about
us. They went out with a very different proposition. Theirs was much more
techie. They had no monthly fees; you bought a box. They were really scrappy.
We were kind of taking the high ground, and they were down there doing all
the dirty tricks to try to compete with us.
During that time, both their CEO and myself were getting interviewed by
the press, and they had us doing photo shoots together with dueling remote