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Michael: My co-founder now, Devon, and I were day trading at our day jobs.
We both had desk jobs. He was working at Blackberry. He sent me an email
and said, "Hey, do you want to come in for an interview?" And of course I
would love to come work at Rim. So I learned a lot about software, building
software, working with project management on securing resources from
development team, market requirements, documents, talking to customers,
figuring out that they want. All that stuff I learned at Blackberry.
I ended up getting a job at Cypress Semiconductor in Silicon Valley. And
there was this big box of smart phones. And I started taking apart the
phones and publishing the reference designs online for curious engineers
overseas and in North America to see what made these devices tick.
Unfortunately, taking apart devices before they've been released is
something that the ODM's do not necessarily like. And so, lot's of great
legal action around that one.
So wound that down, and talked to Devon, my co-founder, about a way or a
business that we could build that could make money relatively quickly. And
so, going into fourth year, I had an opportunity to work at Google in
Zurich as an associate product manager or stay locally and start a
business. And there was a couple factors weighing in on the decision to
start Redwoods Media. One was that my dad was sick and lives locally. Going
to Zurich would have been fairly *** the family.
As a student, you don't really have any risk in starting a business. I had
been careful with my finances and so I had no debt, a little bit of cash
saved up, despite a few things. My brother and I had bought a house
locally, which became the tech incubator for Pebble and Alerta, as well as
Redwoods Media. And so I thought, this is the time to go for it. I've got
four months to make a profit or build a business. And so we started a video
production company called Redwoods Media.
Alan: Right.
Michael: And our goal was $50,000 in revenue by Christmas 2010.
Alan: Okay.
Michael: And in that process, Larry Smith advised on how valuable the data
was with respect to who was watching the videos we had produced to sell
more content. And as fourth year engineering students, the mill started
churning and we thought we could build an analytics platform that could
service our customers, and that became Vidyard.
Alan: Wow.
Michael: So a lot of extraneous events that aggregated like a black hole
around this one product, this one technology, and this company.
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