Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Ramsay 203
Ramsay: I don’t know what it was. I still don’t quite understand it to this day,
but it was fascinating to go through that. Though it was not without its trials and
tribulations.
I’m not sure if people still get today that the combination of the technology
development and the getting to market of a product, the development of
a channel and the marketing and the brand building of that product, the management
of the media companies and their desire to destroy you, and the
management of this highly competitive situation every step of the way, where
you had to win every day in the marketplace and worry about intellectual property—if
you think about all these massive things that we had to deal with every
single day of TiVo’s existence, you realize that it was a big deal and not for the
faint of heart. You had to kind of learn to have fun with it and not to take it too
seriously.
Livingston: Thinking back on the early days of TiVo, what surprised you the
most?
Ramsay: Probably the thing we just talked about. The fact that these media
companies got involved and embraced it and invested in it and are involved in
it today. I would not have anticipated them doing that. Given their earlier
reaction, I would have thought it would be impossible, but it happened.
So TiVo’s now a media company. It sort of transformed the company into a
media company. I think we have an appreciation for what media companies are
going through; that helped us develop in a way that didn’t cross the line. And I
think the media companies have an appreciation for what a young, scrappy,
highly competitive technology company in Silicon Valley is trying to do.
They know that is a dynamic that is driven by the human spirit; that they
ought to embrace it rather than fight it. All the resources they have in the
world, all the billions of dollars, can’t stop people being creative. There are a lot
of companies who, in one way or another, have changed the rules of the game
for the better. It’s just going to happen. I think we helped a very conservative
industry get their minds around that.