a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what
would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull
out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved
the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like,
“Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there.” So we got
all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story.
Then we had the famous Buck’s beaming—at Buck’s restaurant in
Woodside, which is sort of the home away from home for many VCs. Our first
round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs
showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us.
The product wasn’t really finished, and about a week before the beaming at
Buck’s I realized that we weren’t going to be able to do it, because the code
wasn’t done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up—to sort of go, “Beep!
Money is received.” But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security
company; how could I possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million?
What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I’ll have to go and commit
ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the
mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop
for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all. It was just this
insane marathon where we were like, “We have to get this thing working.” It
actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were
done at 9:00 a.m.
It was one of these things where you can’t just be done. With crypto, if you
are one bit off, nothing’s going to work. We started testing at midnight the night
before and fixed all the bugs and tested more. There were definitely some
memory leaks, but it was secure. It was one of these things where the software
wasn’t perfect, but the security path where the money changed hands was definitely
provably secure. The danger was that the Palm Pilots might crash, but
the transaction was perfectly safe. I could have bet my own life on the transaction.
The thing that was not safe was just the software was not really perfect. It
was clunky; I was worried that it might crash.
So we had stacks and stacks of Palm Pilots preloaded with the same software.
Obviously, money could only reside in one of them, but the plan was that,
if I see that any one of them is crashing, I’m going to make a fresh pair, because

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• a Palm Pilot,