When Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton founded TiVo, it was a ground-breaking technology it took all the information from television and gave the viewers the power to manipulate it as they wished.
Their original plan was to create a network server for homes. They found out that it wouldn’t work, So, they started with TIVO DVR, a digital video recorder.
With TiVo, you could skip commercials, pause live TV, schedule the recording of every episode of a series, all the things one might expect to be able to do with data.
They had to face the wrath of Hollywood and the media industry, but they overcame all this and succeeded.
TiVo was acquired for more than a billion dollars.
What you could learn from this episode:
- Why he immigrated to America.
- Why he moved from a big company to a startup.
- How he met this co-founder.
- What was their first idea and why it didn’t work.
- What did they do to pick their next idea to focus on.
- How they survived the economic recession.
- How they faced their competition.
- What they did to ward off big giant companies which sued them.
