David Epstein

So this was 17 companies from around the world.

It was the largest consortium of international businesses in American business history.

Each had given millions of dollars in investment and were going to be part of the team.

Apple, Sony, Panasonic, you know, AT&T, like all the, it was actually, they covered so much of the communications technology world that their meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss.

in their meetings because they covered everything.

And they have this vision.

So Mark Peratt, the CEO, he raises all this money early.

The stock price doubles on the first day.

It's a Wall Street darling.

And he says his goal in raising all that money so quickly was to create what he called heaven for engineers, where they could play and create and be limited only by their imaginations.

As he said, what more could anyone else ask for?

And I think the answer in retrospect turned out to be a little less freedom because they could do anything.

So they did do anything.

Everyone who had a good idea, they did it.

Like they built and built.

They had no clear, they defined our customer as Joe Sixpack, which is very vague.

So after a few years of missed deadlines, they turned around and realized nobody knew the guy or what they were building from or what problem they were solving.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like saying Joe Schmo, you know, like random guy.

So they didn't take any time to define their actual customer.