History of Famous Startups. TiVo

companies got involved

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

companies got involved and embraced it and invested in it and are involved in
it today. I would not have anticipated them doing that. Given their earlier
reaction, I would have thought it would be impossible, but it happened.
So TiVo’s now a media company. It sort of transformed the company into a
media company. I think we have an appreciation for what media companies are
going through; that helped us develop in a way that didn’t cross the line. And I
think the media companies have an appreciation for what a young, scrappy,
highly competitive technology company in Silicon…

Replay probably did

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

Replay probably did us a fabulous favor when they stepped across the line.
There’s a line in the sand that those media companies think about. You don’t
know where it is, but if you step over it, they’re going to get you. Replay
stepped over it by doing automatic commercial skipping. You didn’t even have
to fast-forward through the commercials. They just found out where they were
and they eliminated them. And they let you share programs over the Internet.
That crossed the line. They got sued. They were the bad guy; therefore, we
were the good guy.
At the…

marketing it on

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

marketing it on an equal basis. It got so bad for Microsoft—they were putting
so much money into it—that they finally gave up. We thought, “This is great,
they gave up. Let’s celebrate.”
We then thought that the consumer electronics companies would come in,
and we were worried about that, because we thought it was a natural for Sony.
So what we did there was license our technology to them. We got some good
license deals and that sort of took that one off the table.
Most recently, a big competitive threat is from cable companies and satellite
companies, who…

During that time,

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

During that time, both their CEO and myself were getting interviewed by
the press, and they had us doing photo shoots together with dueling remote
controls. We knew these guys, and there was no hatred, but there was a definite,
very intense competitive attitude. Our aim was to get them out of our hair,
out of our business. This wasn’t, “There’s enough room for everybody.” This
was, “They have to go. They are the enemy and we’re not going to let anything
stand in the way of us beating them.”
While that was very angst-ridden and a lot of our…

surprised they wanted

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

surprised they wanted as they started using it?
Ramsay: The thing that really got them was pausing live TV. That was the hook.
You go, “Blah blah blah and it can pause live TV.” They’d look at you and go,
“Wait a minute. Pause live TV? How do you do that?” “Well, technically, you do
it this way and that way.” “That doesn’t work. You can’t pause live TV. It’s live!”
We couldn’t get people to understand it. We’d say things like, “It’s not like
the actors take a break or anything. You pause live TV.” Then you’d show it…

the press loved

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

the press loved this idea that we were locked in battle with Replay. We got a
huge amount of publicity. People knew what TiVo was long before we ever put
the product out. So we started to sell it and it went well.
We had to learn a lot. I remember one weekend, we took the entire company,
which was about 60 people at the time, and we divvied them up and went
to all the Fry’s stores in the Bay Area, because they were selling at Fry’s. We set
up demo stations and the employees were giving demos. It…

we had an

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

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…

wanted, and there’s

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

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 things after that that made sure that…

going to work.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

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 would go, “No.
That’s easy. That’s…

on the VCR

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:01:42 -0700

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 fact,
that idea of how you…