working from Japan....
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 me about this, but Bruce stayed up all
night working with Mark, and he integrated Japanese language support into the
code. So, literally, we arrived in Japan with an English-only browser, but by the
next morning we had it running English and Japanese.
Livingston: You didn’t know they did this?
Steve Perlman 183
Perlman: I didn’t know. Bruce told me on the cab ride over. I said, “What about
the stability? Bruce, Japanese is nice but . . .” And he said, “Don’t worry. It
won’t crash. It will be fine, it will be fine.”
We gave a great demo in Palo Alto, and now we’re going to give this demo
to the president of Sony Corporation, and we’re going to fall flat on our face!
Well, it didn’t crash. It worked beautifully. The CTO was there, and we said,
“By the way, there was one web page that you went to in Palo Alto that didn’t
work. Well, it does work now.” We typed it in, and, sure enough, it showed
beautiful Kanji, and we won him over.
Then they said, “We want to go back to the original contract we negotiated
with a 1-year exclusive.” And we said, “We would love to do that, but now we
have a deal with Philips, and so we can no longer offer you an exclusive.” They
were very unhappy about that, but, in the end, they felt it was worth doing. So
there it was. We had a deal with both Sony and Philips—at the time, the two
powerhouses in consumer electronics.
Now that we had these deals in place, we raised Series C. I think we raised
about $35 million.
Livingston: Did you get funding from the same people?
Perlman: Well, Brentwood re-upped, and I think Vulcan re-upped, and the
Davises did what they did at Catapult—they flipped. They sold their shares to
other investors. They’re not technology people, so they saw it purely as an
investment. And they were happy as clams. I think they got seven times their
money in less than a year.
And then Microsoft came in, interestingly enough, and Citicorp and
St. Paul Venture Capital. Some individual investors came in, and also Seagate, I
think, put some money in. And Washington Post Group. A lot of people were
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