Summary:

Get ready for one of the most fascinating entrepreneurial stories we've covered thus far on the show. Chris Cooper was the founder of Quote.com, which, as you'll see, powered the finance portals of everyone from the search engines to the online traders like E*TRADE. But, prior to that... let's just say Chris Cooper has done it all: degrees in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering; a job testing nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site; several years making his living as a professional gambler in Las Vegas; several years making his living manufacturing illegal drugs, Breaking Bad-style; a stint in prison where he learned to code; proprietor of a subscription-based BBS; and of course, founder of one of the web's first sources of financial information.

It turns out that almost exactly 9 years before Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone, there was another 3-in-1 device that was introduced to the world, and it just so happened that that device was also known as an iPhone.

But the company that brought the "first" iPhone to market, all the way back in 1998, was called InfoGear, not Apple.

This is the story.

Summary:

Today we’re going to go a bit backwards in our timeline, back to some of the issues we covered in our Chapter 5 episodes. All of the research I did on newspapers and their early attempts to experiment with digital media came from secondary sources. That is why I was excited to be introduced to Steve Yelvington on Twitter. Steve is a several-decades-long veteran of the newspaper industry as well as a true online and web pioneer. He gives us some great first-person perspective about how the news industry succeeded and failed in its attempts to address the challenges of the Internet Era.

We mention a recent blog post of his in our conversation. You can read that blog post here.

Summary:

So far in our project, we've mostly spoken to people who were involved in startups that went public in the dot com era. But as I've said many times, that's only part of the story. I very much wanted to speak to someone involved with a successful startup that was acquired by a larger "portal" site. So, I reached out to Ted Barnett, who was one of the founders of the early web calendar site, When.com, which was eventually acquired by AOL. In this episode, we talk about the economics and strategic considerations of a 90s startup that found overnight success, but could not scale in a way that would allow it to continue to grow without hooking up with a larger, deeper-pocketed partner.

But Ted's career is so interesting and varied, we also got to delve into a bunch of other fascinating topics: what it was like to work at Apple in the late 80s, early 90s John Sculley-era; the pre-web "bubble" of pen-computing startups; working at AOL at the height of its late-90s powers; how a company like Kodak dealt with technological disruption completely decimating its 100-year old business; and even the current prospects for Virtual Reality technology.

Because our discussion with Ted paints such a well-rounded picture of a technology career lived in full... recounting how a young technologist can work their way up the ranks, all the way to founder and CEO... I would go so far as to say this is absolutely an essential listen for young people who are starting out in Tech today.

Summary:

Maggie Mahar is an award-winning journalist who has written for Money magazine, Institutional Investor, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and in the 1990s, covered the markets for Barron’s Magazine. She is also the author of an excellent book, Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004, that has been extremely helpful for me as I begin to frame the episodes that will bring us into the dot-com “bubble” era. I reached out to her to see if she would help me kick around some of the ideas that her book raised… in order to wrap my mind the causes and context of the bubble. Of course, I recorded our conversation so that we can all start thinking about this era together.