knew that a TV could not display, we would resize it in servers and send that
down to the box to make a faster experience.
Then we had to go set up a whole dial-up network. We had to make relationships
with dial-up providers all around the country, so that they would automatically
find a local phone number to dial. So there was huge range of things
we were doing to make this thing work. I don’t know, but, if I were advising a
VC, I’d see a bunch of guys with all these...

we’ve decided not to proceed with you in deploying this product.”
Remember, they had told us they had to have a 1-year exclusive. So we weren’t
very far along with anybody else. We’d begun discussions with Philips, and we
told them it was a year out.
You have to disclose this to an investor, so we went and told Jeff Brody. It
was a real seminal moment for the company. He could have said, “OK, then,
I’m not going to invest if you don’t have anyone to deploy your product.” But he
said,...

really crashing all the time at that stage. So I went back and talked to Bruce and
Phil and said, “Look, we have one last chance with Sony. Their CTO is coming
here in 2 and 1/2 hours.”
Phil said, “Well, we do have a build that’s compiling now”—it took a long
time to compile all the source and then we had to release and test it—”and it’s
going to be done in about 2 and 1/2 hours.” I said, “How do we know it’s going
to work?” He said, “Well, it probably won’t.”...

working from Japan. He married a Japanese woman, so he lived there, and he
had an ISDN line to a house in the middle of a rice paddy, literally. He was
picking up a little bit of Japanese. When we went to Japan, we got to the Tokyo
Hyatt, and I remember Bruce had a development system there—we had
hauled these big computers with us. Mark had a development system at his
place in the rice paddy. And the night before our demo with Sony, they went
and did another build. They didn’t tell...

interested in the subject area. We expanded the board then, so the board was
now the three cofounders; we had Randy Komisar as an outside director, and
we had representatives from Brentwood, Vulcan, and I think that was it. Maybe
we had one other guy.
Then we cranked. We introduced the product in July of 1996—one year
almost to the day after I got that first check from Marvin Davis to fund the company.
It had custom hardware, a browser from the ground up, proxy servers,
and so forth. The whole network was...