From the Village to the Island

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We’ve reached the point of my mild discontent with Global Village.

It is 1995 and the company is at about the point of peak success.  We had gone public.  Our stock, having sagged early on, had rebounded and climbed above the IPO price.  We had the Apple Powerbook market in our pocket, we had made the wise decision to make the hardware for our 28.8K modem, the Teleport Platinum, as cheap as possible, making it a strong competitor in the Mac market, and we had a great relationship with the Performa team over Apple and continued to make special models for them.  Everything looked like a success.

But there was clearly something wrong.

It wasn’t the people I worked with.  I liked all of them and went on to work with some of them again down the road.  We all seemed to get along and even socialized outside of work.  This was a prime era for playing Marathon or Bolo on the company network after hours.

Management, however, didn’t seem to know what to do and even I, as oblivious as I could be 30 years back, could sense the distinct lack of anything like a real plan for the future of the company.  Sure, we could make more modems.  But the spec was out and plans were already under way for a 56Kbps modem, after which we will would hit the cap on modem speeds.

I have mentioned all of the other potential projects in a previous post, but I was sitting there in the room and could see them all either failing to gain traction in the market or failing to ship.  Plans for an ISDN product were being rejected and re-worked on a regular cycle.

It was an era of continuing to do what we already knew how to do without anything approaching innovation.  The key founders, Len, Rick, and Lori, had all been pushed out of the company by that point, and the new leadership… were not bad people.   But I wasn’t at all inspired by them.  And the company had grown and we had hired or promoted a bunch of people who were not there in the lean pre-startup era and who clearly set to work at a more leisurely pace.

A manager for one group sat in his office for his first six months planning his wedding.  He was on the phone constantly about one thing or another. (His inattention to his team was highlighted when confidential AppleLink messages were somehow including in the Read Me file on the product disk.)

My own supervisor, when he wasn’t trying to slip out of the office early, would close the door to his office and listen to music or play his guitar. (He confided this to a co-worker later, and it was all he could do to not shout, “Well duh!  We all knew that!”)

Then I would have to go to a project meeting with him and he would display a complete lack of knowledge as to what was going on, then would be annoyed with me for amending half of his statements in an attempt to maintain some level of coherence with what was actually going on.  He also had a habit of finding some issue and then bringing it up at every product meeting, but never having anything more to say than he saw something happen weeks back that looked like a bug without being able to pin it down to a build and without any follow up on his part ever.

It was frustrating and I was young and rash and prone to pointing out such things in the middle of these meetings.  I believe I earned the eternal enmity of one of the product managers when he showed up to one of the project meetings with a project schedule for the new premium modem we were working on and I started loudly pointing out problems (things like the date to ship beta units to customers came two weeks before we would have the beta boards and six weeks before we would have cases to put those boards in) in front of his boss.

A few years later I applied for a job and his wife was the hiring manager.  I did not get that job and was told, directly by her, that they wanted somebody who would be a “team player.”  Touche!

We’ll get to that.

Nothing was at all inspiring save for whatever I was working on at the moment.  I enjoyed my actual job, but the environment was one of malaise.  I can very much reflect the people I work with, and if a lot of them are just mailing it in, then I tend to slack as well.

So I was working on yet another modem for the Apple Performa line, the Teleport Platinum V, which was for “voice” and not “five,” which was a modem card with support for voice features, which were stating to be a thing.  A company called Cypress Research had software package called MegaPhone that let you make calls through your modem and would allow it to act as an answering machine and all sorts of other little things.

MegaPhone for Performa

They were making a special version for the Apple Performa models and we were building up the hardware and, as projects went, it was about the smoothest I was ever on.  We shipped all the features for Apple on time and within budget.  I think this may be the only time in my career that a project with any complexity at all… we weren’t doing anything drastically new, but there were a lot of balls in the air and Apple had a hard deadline… hit all of its marks without having to cut a feature or slip a date.

The only hitch was that Apple ran out of developer units of the actual computer before the team at Cypress got one.  But I had a couple spares because I knew the guy who handled the dev unit distribution (he worked at GV before he went to Apple), so I got one setup with the modem and drove it over to their office so they could do their own testing with the final hardware.  Or maybe they drove over to our office.  All I recall is that they were happy and relieved that I had been there for them.

This will also come into play in a later post.

That shipped, I got a pat on the back and my boss got a bonus, because that is how things work and I was just that much less motivated to do anything for GV.

Enter Rick… again.

Rick was one of the founders of Global Village and they key driving force that made it a success.  As noted above, he was pushed out of the company once it went public.  He had done his job.  He had inspired a host of very smart people and laid all the groundwork for what Global Village was at its peak.  He was also somebody whose passion and intellect inspired those who worked for him.

I could go on… I’ve written and deleted a few paragraphs here that felt like not enough to describe him… but I will say that he was the type of leader who gets the best out of people and we were all pretty devoted to him.  He didn’t have much room for slackers and would not put up with poor efforts, but he was always there to help you to be better and do better.

It is hard to describe what it is like to work at a small company with somebody who is actually inspiring, who is fun to work with, who has smart ideas and who recognizes when you have a good idea but won’t let it rest until you have refined it into the best thing it can be.

Working at GV after Rick was somewhat empty.  The new leadership could tell they couldn’t match him in person, so they tried to be fun.  The engineering team all got flown to Disneyland for the day after a big release.  That was cool.  We had a good time.  But that was writing a check, not leadership.  We got T-shirts for projects and little tokens.  I still have in a drawer a watch with the GV logo on its face (technically, not the watch they gave me as I broke that one, but a co-worker gave me his and I still have that one) and a gold plated key chain they gave out for the 5th anniversary of the founding of the company.

Global Village trinkets

My wife wonders why I have all this stuff stashed away.  I don’t know.  These were in there with the Jostens walnut pen and letter opener desk set that I received on my 5th anniversary at Safeway.  I’ve had that in its original box since 1988.

Anyway, in addition to trying to buy a bit of loyalty, they also denigrated Rick now and then, pointed out how they were doing so well and were the ones who really grew the company in that way that people who inherit the success of others do in an attempt to make that success their own.  Not exactly The Founder, if only because nobody on the executive staff was up to Ray Kroc’s level, but they would have gone that far could they have managed it… or had built even one success independent of the original team.

So when Rick called me one day to invite me out to lunch, I was happy to go.  I figured it would be some talk about old times and a chance to hear how he and his family were doing now that he had achieved Silicon Valley startup success.

But at lunch Rick said he wanted to do it again.  He wanted to do another startup.  He had some ideas, he had VC backers because he had already delivered for them once, and he wanted to assemble a team to come work at the new company.

He specifically said, an I remember this distinctly, that he had kept everything so lean at GV… part of what it survive on the initial ADB Teleport modem until the PowerBook opportunity appeared… that he felt he hadn’t been able to handle success when it came, that GV should have done better, could have done better if he had known then what he had learned since.

Modems were done.  We all knew that.  But he was going to be ready for the next phase.  ISDN was going to be the coming thing.  The next company was going to be Big Island Communications, because that was where we would retire after it went public, and we were going to make ISDN as seamless and easy as we had with fax and modem at Global Village.  He even had a name for the product, the Boogie Board, in keeping with the island theme.

Yes, Boogie Board is a trademark for the a wave board created by Tom Morey, and we would have been in trouble had we been making something that was anywhere close to that product area.  But an electronic device that has nothing to do with ocean waves… it can be done.  In fact, somebody went at did it about a decade later.  I mean, had we achieved huge success his company might have had its lawyers calling us, but that never really became an issue.

Rick also said that his departing agreement with GV said that he couldn’t come back and overtly poach talent for any new venture, but he was talking to a few people about his plan, people he wanted to bring on board when things were ready.  I was excited for this new prospect and feeling a bit surprised that I somehow made the list.

He didn’t want me to go telling people about this plan and he wanted to keep his list quiet, so he wasn’t going to tell me who else he was talking to, but if I paid attention to who wore Hawaiian shirts on Friday at the office, I might get some sort of hint.

I, naturally, began wearing a Hawaiian print polo shirt to the office every Friday thereafter, a habit I continue to this day… though, frankly, if you’ve worked with me at all in the last decade or so, you might note that I wear a Hawaiian print polo shirt almost every day.  But it became a thing for me back then.

Word, of course, leaked and the VP of engineering made veiled references in one meeting to people being lured away to some fantasy startup and how we’d be smart to stay with a successful company… looking straight at me while I was wearing my Hawaiian print polo shirt.

If you know anything about residential ISDN in the United States, then you probably know this story doesn’t end with us all retiring to the big island of Hawaii.  There were a number of factors that killed residential ISDN, and I’ll get into that.

But Rick wasn’t going to jump us straight into ISDN as the first product.  We would be working on that, and the software we would be developing would dove tail into that plan eventually.  He wanted an initial success, something not too expensive or complex, something that would appeal to users, and something he could use his legendary guerilla marketing techniques to get off the ground.  He needed a small but tangible win to get the funding to really go to town on the full ISDN plan.

So in 1996, when I put in my notice at Global Village having worked there for what seemed like forever at the time, but which was barely three and a half years all told, I wouldn’t be working on the Boogie Board.  No, I would be working on the YoYo.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

That leads me to the next chapter of my career.  Modems… analog modems of the old school form… seemed like they were in my rear view mirror.  I would be moving on, on to Caller ID.

The series so far:

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