Tag Archives: Cypress Research

Set Adrift from the Island

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By the autumn of 1997 the breaking point had come for Big Island.  The VCs were not going to give us any more money, the YoYo wasn’t selling well enough to sustain our burn rate, and the Boogie Board was a shining city on a hill that didn’t exist in our reality.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

It had been a difficult spring and summer as that reality sank in.  We had already gone down to being paid for four days a week and some of us stayed home on that unpaid day because there wasn’t a lot to be done.  I learned how to run the Visual Source Safe setup for our build system, dug into Windows 95, and answered the few support calls and email messages that showed up.

This was an especially hard time for Rick, our founder, who took his role as motivator in chief extremely seriously.  We entered a period that I think of in retrospect as the “new plan of the week” era, where Rick would lay out a new path forward for us, shifting our focus or giving us a plan with some hope.  It reached a point that I started to feel something I might call hope or enthusiasm fatigue.  You can only see things crumble then jump on board a shiny new idea so many times before it begins to wear on you.

If I had been more mature or more confident, I might have just told Rick it was okay, we knew, we signed on knowing there would be risk, that in the valley a mere one in ten startups finds success enough to even earn back their initial investment.  I don’t know if it would have helped.  Instead I tried to buy into each new plan.  It was exhausting, even at just four days a week.

So, come the autumn the money had run out.  Nobody was going to be paid at all going forward.  They key devs stayed on board for a while without pay, but most of us needed to cover rent and so the search for new jobs began.

At this point my girlfriend at the time made what I have often called one of her most ill-advised moves.  She told me I could move in with her.  She owned a condo way down in south San Jose… back in 1986 or so both of us had (completely coincidentally and independently, as we didn’t know each other then) ended up with about $10K from grandparents.

I took that money and bought a new car, a 1986 Mazda 626, which I was still driving in 1997.  She took her money and used it as a down payment on a two bedroom condo in what was kind of a cheap and seedy part of town.  She still had that condo, with a mortgage that was half the rent of my two bedroom apartment on Whisman Road in Mountain View.  That added up to $400 a month we would split, plus the home owners association fees.

We’ll get into what in the hell my girlfriend at the time was thinking, letting her unemployed boyfriend and his cat move in with her, at a later date.  But I moved in and then started looking for a job.

Well, continued looking for a job.  I had already been looking.  In fact, I had already been rejected.

Several of us had applied over a Palm, which wasn’t too far away.  Two of us got hired there, but I was not one of that pair.  The hiring manager turned out to be the wife of the half-wit product manager I embarrassed in front of his boss when he showed presented a completely unworkable project schedule. (Event noted a couple of posts back)  After noting that I had worked with her husband previously she made a point of telling me, on rejection, that they were looking for somebody who was a team player.

I suppose the upside was not having to work for the rolling disaster that Palm became… and I say that because I got to hear about it regularly for the next few years from my two former co-workers.  We had a bi-weekly card game with a few current and former GV people from 1995 until about 2008.  It ended when a critical mass of us had moved out of the area, and once you leave Silicon Valley it is tough to come back because of the price of housing.

They did get me a free Palm 5000 though.  So I had that going for me.  I still have that unit in a drawer.

It was a refurb unit that Yuji got me

Palm, where we knew some people, was my one possible safe landing.  Otherwise I was an accountant who hadn’t been doing that for seven years, who had a resume full of Macintosh related experience at a point in time when Michael Dell was telling people that the Apple board should just liquidate the company and give the investors the money.  It was a bad time for Macs. (In a mildly ironic twist, it would end up being Micheal Dell paying off investors to take his own company private some time later.)

There were a couple of other options.  I knew a few people over at Adobe in downtown San Jose.  I started interviewing for a position over there which required so many interviews… and this was a time when ALL interviews were in person, suit and tie, and all of that… that I feel as though I might still be interviewing with them to this day had I stuck with it.  The upside was that they kept inviting me back.  The downside was that I seemed to need to speak to every single person in the building.

Maybe they were not sure about me, maybe this was a corporate culture test, but either way I wasn’t that patient and saw the inability to make a decision as a warning sign, even if everybody got their own little office and there were free snacks and drinks in the kitchen area on every floor. (It was a very nice place.)

So I called up a contracting agency.  I was feeling the pinch of not being employed enough that I needed to start earning some money, even if it meant becoming a nomad, a technical temp, willing to do whatever.

And the agency wasn’t too keen on my resume out of the gate because it had all that Mac experience and very little Windows.  Yes, I emphasized the Windows product at Big Island, but my time there was pretty short and Global Village just screamed Macintosh.  But they had a place that was doing something with modems and wanted some experience in that area.  So they sent me off for an interview with Cypress Research who made a product called MegaPhone that was included on some of the Performa Macintosh models. (Also part of a past post.)

MegaPhone for Performa

I had worked with them, but that was a few years ago on a brief, if successful project, and aside from email contact I think I met two people from there in person when I delivered them a dev unit of the Performa model from the units we had received.  I was pretty sure that was such a tiny blip in the past that it would be long forgotten.

It was not.  The same team was working there, recognized me and, while I was still being screened for the position, the whole thing was more of a catching up and introductions and talking about where Cypress Research had been headed since the collapse of the Macintosh market.

They too were now on the Windows wagon.  Their MegaPhone product was available for Windows 95 and NT 4.0, but they were mostly making it via OEM contracts with companies Compaq, HP, Gateway, and the like.  They were all Mac people making their way in this new market, so I was a kindred spirit.  Also I knew modems, could program the Teltone simulator, and knew a lot about caller ID… well, when I say “a lot” it is very much the usual case of me being the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.  But I knew something and had experience in the field with it.

So they told the agency I was fine and I started the next day.

That afternoon a co-worker from the Global Village days called.  She worked for a company called Edify where she ran the QA group.  She wanted to know if I was interested in a tech support job there.  We had both started in tech support together back at GV

A lot of the job was very manual.  A company like Compaq would have a new model coming out and Cypress made the phone modem or video phone software that went with it.  So we would get a machine and have to configure it with different versions of Windows 95… which is to say, Windows 95 in different languages… to make sure the software loaded and ran and detected the language correctly and what not.  For some models Window NT 4.0 was also an option.

This is where I learned to install NT in Japanese.  For every other language, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, and whatever other Roman character set installs we had to do, you could puzzle out the whole OK/cancel routine in an install, select the right path and all of that.  Japanese… not so much.  I eventually figured it out, but made some errors along the way.

As tends to happen with my career, I showed up, found some horribly obscure bug and figured out the pattern that was causing it, which set my reputation and put me in good standing.  In this case, it was an intermittent caller ID bug.  Somebody would see an issue one day, write a bug.  But then the next day the dev would look at it and they couldn’t reproduce it.

This happened a couple of times and made me suspicious.  I was the only one in the lab who was doing much to configure the Teltone line simulators.   So I got out my configure scripts from the Big Island days and started playing with dates and caller ID to see if the error was related to that.  As it turned out, yes.  I forget the exact scenario, but if the second bit in the string used to indicate the day of the month was ON, the caller ID got corrupted due to a chip set flaw.  This turned out to be all documented by Rockwell and fixed in a later revision of the chip set, but the fact that I figured out seemed to impress somebody.

So I started getting a few more complicated tasks.  I ended up doing a lot of the testing for the WinLogo certification.  In order to get the “Made for Windows” sticker on your box (or ad, or whatever) you had to pass this certification test.

WinLogo Certified

The primary focus of it was to leave behind any 16-bit software.  You setup a system, ran a scanner application which cataloged what was on the machine.  Then you installed your software and ran a second scan which basically did a diff on what was on the drive and analyzed the new stuff.

We were failing.  That was bad because the OEM manufacturers who were including our software needed everything on the machine to be WinLogo certified to keep their own WinLogo certification, and we were in danger of messing that up.

So I spent a lot of time formatting and doing fresh system installs as we updated and eliminated problems.  Eventually it was down to dlls that InstallShield was leaving behind.  That wasn’t us, but we had to explain why this wasn’t something that should keep us from being certified.  The lab doing the certification down in Long Beach was particularly dense, so I ended up having to fly down there with an install CD and stand around while they did the install and then point at the screen a lot and explain that it was InstallShield that was doing us wrong.

We got the certification.

My contribution to that was largely my ability to patiently do fresh installs while the developer updated the files for another try and then my success at gesticulating at a monitor until the team at the lab got tired of me and probably passed us just so I would go away and leave them alone.  (I wrote a post about this back in 2015.  You can go see how much the story changed in 8+ years.)

But sometimes that is enough.  They liked me enough that they were talking to the contracting agency about how to convert me to a full time employee.  And they had plans.  To start with, they were changing the name of the company.  Cypress Research didn’t roll off the tongue all that well and tended to get confused with Cypress Semiconductor.  They were changing the name of the company to Aveo.

Aveo Logo

That image has texture because they were close enough to hiring me that they printed business cards for me.  I still have some.  I had to dig one out to get the logo because… well… things did not go to plan for them over time.

They had a product idea to solve versioning, a piece of software that would keep some new install from overwriting current drivers with older ones or old versions of DirectX or whatever.  It was a strong pitch and, as I recall, Dell even shipped the software on some systems.  I don’t know the exact details for its downfall, but I can guess; maintaining the database necessary to keep it up to date and accurate and dealing with all the possible vectors that would come in to play over time… my bet is that ramped up too fast to control.

But when I was there they were still doing the pitch that involved a fictional dragon slayer game that needed a specific version of DirectX.  I was on board for it.

Then my friend Terry called back again.  Edify had a QA position open and they really needed somebody who knew something about ISDN.  Oh, and it was an enterprise software position, which meant it paid about 40% more than Aveo was about to offer me.  Once again, a chance to be the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.  I managed to get past the interview and get an offer.  I mean hell, I had actual ISDN installed in my home.  How could they pass me up?

I told the team at Aveo about the offer and the pay.  They understood.  We parted on good terms.

I went off to Edify and Aveo… well, if you Google that name you get a cheap Chevy import and not a successful software company.  (Or, if you are persistent, maybe a Canadian software company that is using that name.

Some of the team re-formed and started The MegaPhone Company to support and sell upgrades for the software, but that couldn’t last for long.  There hasn’t been an update on that site for 20 years.  Their installed base shrank as people upgraded machines and once we got iPhones telephony on the computer… the idea of using it as an answering machine or for caller ID or anything except a dial-up internet connection if you lived somewhere without broadband… was dead.  Like the name Aveo, the name Megaphone was scooped up by another company and ended up in the hands of Spotify.

For me, following the money seemed to be the right choice, both at the time and in hindsight.

Telephone tales so far:

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: