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
very important, the capital-raising part is so difficult and specialized. Why don’t
I find somebody who is really good at that?” So we found Dave, and he joined
us. He had a ball raising all that money, and he got us through our IPO.
I would say that one of the reasons that TiVo is thriving today is that we
were well-capitalized. We were able to power our way through the downturn—
that early 2000 period when Replay went away. We were capitalized enough
that we knew we could ride through it. While we had to make a few adjustments
to the company, there was never a question that we were going to survive.
We knew we were going to survive.
Livingston: Tell me about the launch and the first users.
Ramsay: We launched at the end of March of 1999. It was the last day of
March, and we called it the Blue Moon event. It turns out that month was a
blue moon. Because it was such a momentous thing—our first product
shipped—we declared it a company holiday. It’s still a holiday today.
We were manufacturing it through a third-party manufacturer in Milpitas,
and we took the whole company over there and we all put on little blue jackets and
caps and we watched them making TiVos. That celebration was fun.
Prior to that, we had been shipping certain selective units. The previous
January, 3 months before, we had launched at CES (Consumer Electronics
Show), so people knew about us. We were in this hot debate with Replay, who
were trying to claim that they were first, and we were first. We actually released
the product and shipped first.
There were a bunch of beta users prior to that, including Geoff and Stewart,
and of course these things broke and didn’t record the programs properly and
did all sorts of crazy things. They kept rebooting. We were a bit nervous about
giving board members TiVos, but we got through that.
We had an arrangement with Philips, and they started shipping through
their retail distribution system. We were fortunate because the press loved this
idea of a young startup company that was screwing up the media industry, and