Irv Grossbeck

Well, thank you for those kind words, some of which are deserved and almost all of which are accurate.

And I just want to point out that the Continental Returns don't hold a candle to the Asurion Returns.

So we were friends and fraternity brothers from Amherst College, and I graduated from HBS in 1960, and he graduated in 1961.

He's two and a half years younger than I. We were conducting separate searches for

for a company to start or buy, and just comparing notes with each other.

He was working then for an individual investor in Boston, and I was a case writer at Harvard Business School.

This is during the period 1962 to 1964.

And the investor for whom he worked had made a modest investment in the cable television system in Keene, New Hampshire.

It's through that connection that we first, or I first, heard about cable.

But just prior to that, we decided to start working together as partners rather than just comparing notes as friends.

It was the most...

Ridiculous, actually, in retrospect, search with no framework at all, despite our education and alleged intelligence.

We looked at plastic inflatable toys.

We looked at indoor tennis centers.

We looked at residential fuel oil.

It was just what could we find that might be interesting.

Then when he heard about cable television,

It turned out that there was a company called Spencer Kennedy Laboratories, which was about a mile from Harvard Business School.

And they made electronics for the then nascent cable industry.

It was hardly an industry.