Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton founded TiVo in 1997.
Their original plan was to create a network server for
homes. Realizing it would be hard to explain to consumers
why they needed one, they narrowed the idea
down to one component of the original plan: the
digital video recorder (DVR). The first version was
launched in 1999.
TiVo was ground-breaking in that it took all the
information that existed on television and gave
the viewers the power to manipulate it. With TiVo,
you could skip commercials, pause live TV, schedule...

that happened during the formative stage of the company. The idea of
Convergent was to build a workstation. That notion of a CRT and a CPU and a
keyboard was brand new. Computers were things that sat in rooms and had
terminals, and this was completely self-contained. I thought that was really
exciting.
It was during that period that the IBM PC came out. I remember the entire
company was run on an Apple II—this thing that looks like a little wedge.
Because it had to do all this stuff for the company,...

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?”...

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...

Livingston: Your original idea was not just a DVR, right?
Ramsay: It wasn’t. It was this flamboyant, home server network thing. And we
actually got funded based on that. When we got into the technology, we realized,
“Hey, network technology isn’t quite there yet. The idea of a server is fine,
but how do you explain it to the average consumer?” We learned very quickly
that this was going to be a hard sell and a hard thing technologically.
At the time, this server had a ton of apps that we thought up, one...