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...

on the VCR and that’s all you can do with it—once it’s recorded, you can play it
back; it’s a linear thing; you can only do one thing at a time. What we saw on the
disk was—because it’s a random access device and that little head moved really
fast—you can essentially create the illusion of doing things simultaneously, so
you can record and play back at the same time.
How to do simultaneous record and playback, pause and fast-forward and
rewind and stuff like that cheaply and efficiently was the key attribute. In...

going to work. But we plugged away at it and we finally got it to a place where it
was pretty reliable, and you could download and it worked. It could drive the
DVR. That had never been done before. Nobody had ever thought of it before.
It was a brand new idea.
I remember complaining to the team once that we were like 6 months from
release of the product and we hadn’t recorded anything yet. I said, “Don’t you
think it would be a good idea to test that out?” And everyone...

wanted, and there’s all this stuff going on in the background they had no idea
was going on.
We had our fingers crossed. I remember once the thing broke, and we had
to literally go in there and change people’s DVRs. It happened very early in the
company. We responded instantaneously, and our customers hardly knew what
had happened and we got them back on air. We looked at each other after that,
and we said, “Thank goodness that happened right now, and not 5 years from
now.” We put in place some...

we had an IPO; then we got an investment from AOL—$200 million. We did a
bunch of other rounds and if you add it all up from then till now, it was about
half a billion dollars that we raised. So we were in money-raising mode from
day one.
Somewhere in that process we hired Dave Courtney as CFO, which I think
was one of the most successful hires for us. Dave had not been a CFO; he was
an investment banker. I thought, “Though the accounting part of a CFO’s job is
...