YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Wood

lines on the record: 84
first: 2022-11-21
most recent: 2022-11-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I was definitely not thinking that way. I mean, you could say that the DVR was my best idea. That's not at all what I thought. I thought that I got lots of good ideas”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say I would quibble a bit, not say it wasn't necessarily my best idea, but it was the one that had the most mass market potential. And had the ability to change the way billions of people acted. And that actually, I think, was a lesson that I took away, which was that you can spend your time on different things. And some of them just have much bigger potential than other things. And so maybe I should factor that in. Maybe it shouldn't just be things that I'm interested in, but it should be things I'm interested in that also have the potential to impact a lot of people.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember thinking I should take a break. We had a vacation house in Oregon. So I thought, okay, well, let's go, let's spend the summer. Just relax. And so I did that, and I quickly became very impatient. So I realized I wasn't good at just sitting around. I mean, it was fun. I went biking and mountain biking and all kinds of stuff, but I was ready to do something after that.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think Ashley, many Silicon Valley executives are like that. But they're very political and they didn't respect each other. And so there was a lot of backstabbing that started happening. So it just became a very unhealthy situation.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was basically the business was a merger of Silicon Valley to distribute the platform and then a service business to monetize it afterwards. And the cultures are incredibly different, and what they respect is different as well. And so, you know, for example, this is a small one, but I remember we had a LA executive, and he told me once, like, you need to comb your hair more. And I'm like, my hair's fine. And so it was like for him, like the way your hair looks is incredibly important. Even in just internal meetings. So that's just a small example.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so replay was sort of this hybrid of Silicon Valley in LA, right? Because we had venture capital investors like Kleiner Perkins. And then we had all the major media companies as investors. And they're, I'll call them the LA culture.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I don't people say ask questions like you just asked it. I don't think much about whether something was a failure or success. First of all, financially it wasn't a huge failure. I did make money on the sale. And I invented the DVR and I learned a huge amount of stuff and it was just a great. Is a great experience, so I felt like there were times when it was very painful, but overall it was just an incredible experience. And, you know, lots of people come to Silicon Valley and they don't all have experiences like that. And we didn't, I mean, we didn't discuss all the sorted details, but there was a lot of politics as well around the investors and the LA versus Silicon Valley culture.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said we can't go public. And then at that point, because of the burn rate, we were going to be out of business in several months.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened? The dot com crash basically is what happened. So they had turned it into a business where you had to have lots of money to be successful. They had raised a lot of money. We raised a lot of money as well, but not as much as they did. Even though we raised $200 million plus, the burn rate had cranked up and we were spending, I remember some months it would be $20 million a month. The thing that changed the dynamic is they went public before us. We were just about six months behind them. But then the dot com crash happened and it suddenly became impossible to go public.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the big thing was they were going to subsidize the hardware We lost that deal that was like, okay, this is now understand we've got a competitor and they're buying the business. Like they've just changed the game. We're going to have to raise a lot of money. And it turned out actually them getting Phillips was good because we were both, like you said, at CES. They launched with Phillips. We didn't have a partner. We won Best of Show. The whole Consumer Electronics Industry realized this was going to be a big deal. And Tivo has signed an exclusive with Phillips to get that deal. So we were the open available partner. And we had one best of show, and so every consumer electronics company started talking to us. And so we ended up signing a deal with Panasonic, which was a bigger brand than Phillips.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was a big moment. Our business plan was we'll sell these things at five hundred dollars, we'll make money, we'll The price will come down over time. Eventually, they'll be very cheap, but we'll start very traditional like the way every prior consumer electronics products that's ever been launched. Yeah. Tivo, then teleworld, decided that they would take advantage that this was in the dot-com boom. They would take advantage of the fact that they could raise a lot of money. They raised a lot of money, and then they started subsidizing the DVRs.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That company, the light bulb. Back then, they made TVs and PC So we were pitching them. We were close to having a deal. So the idea was that they would build and sell it. We'd license the technology. And then what happened is Tellworld got an article placed in the newspaper about what they were working on. So then Phillips was like, oh, we got to go talk to these guys before we do this deal with replay. And then Tellworld essentially bought the deal, which was a new concept to me, like I had never thought of doing a deal that was not going to be profitable.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was definitely heady times. Like, you know, we were on Good Morning America and on TV and all kinds of stuff. I didn't feel like there was still a battle in front of us. Yeah, as far as Tivo, when we started raising money, then we started hearing about them. They were called Teleworld. And when we really learned about them, when it became serious problem for us was we were pitching early on, Phillips was a consumer electronics brand that was bigger back then, and they had an office actually in Silicon Valley. And I had gotten introduced to them and was pitching them.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over, I don't remember the exact amount, but it was like $200 million, and it was a lot of money back then. That's what I was saying after we did the”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It was kind of eye-opening how hard it is to explain a new idea. Eventually we did. I mean, we did get institutional investors. So, I mean, we did Angels at first, and then Vulcan, which was Paul Allen's venture fund, and Kleiner Perkins, Willhurst.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were pitching them, but they were not interested. It was amazing how many people thought it was a bad idea. People would say things like, no one wants to pause live TV. Why would you want to do that?”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we probably had something to demo to investors after about a year. I mean, we launched at CES 1999, so that would have been January 1999. We won best of show”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not personally. At this point, you know, I had enough money where when I decided to do the DVR, I started a company and I started hiring people.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A giant. Yeah. Giant Radio Shack for Geeks, basically. And they would put an ad on the back page of San Jose Mercury News every weekend with prices of hard drives would be one of the things. And so I'd kind of watch the prices of hard drives. And I think I decided that, okay, the hard drives is still going to be kind of expensive, but it's possible now to maybe sell something for $500, which is sort of a starting consumer price point. So I decided it was possible to do it, and ultimately I wanted one. Like I figured, you know, I had enough experience with Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists to figure out that hardware was really hard to get funded. Consumer hardware especially was super hard to get funded. So it wasn't necessarily the best business choice, but I figured at least I would get a DVR out of it.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, using a computer hard drive. It was too expensive. Like, you just think about okay, I could build this, but it costs way too much money to build, it would be very expensive. It wouldn't be a consumer price point. So, I used to just sort of watch the prices of back then, the fries was popular in Bailey. Yeah, sure.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is a pretty simple idea, but it was novel back then, oh, I want to record every episode of Star Trek, not just the one that's next Thursday, but I want to just record each episode. And if it moves around in the schedule because they adjusted the time because the football game went long or something, still recorded. Because that was one of the problems with the videotapes back then was that you would miss the beginning or end because they would move the broadcast time slightly. So, anyway, so I figured, well, certainly we could solve this problem. By using digital video and digital audio and hard drives”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's close, but not quite. I mean, definitely I felt like we were heading towards digital video. The benefits I thought were actually a lot better than what you just described. It wasn't really about digital quality. It was about the user interface would be simple, that you could have features like, you know, I want to record anything that has Harrison Ford in it automatically, for example. I just felt like it would be a lot easier to use. It would have features like pausing live TV and that”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea came to me. I mean, you have to remember, I was in the digital video and digital audio industry, right? That was the internet was kind of a sidetrack. So I used to watch TV. I watched, there was a show I used to watch called Star Trek The Next Generation. It would come on when I was working or busy. And so I would record it on videotape and it was just. Hard to do. I mean, not only programming your VCR, but even if you know how to do that, you'd have multiple things on a tape. What's on the tape, you forget. I mean, there's all kinds of problems.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like I'm not sure what motivated me or drove me, but I wanted to start a successful successful Silicon Valley company. And looking back on it, selling a company for thirty whatever million dollars is quite successful. But that's not the way it felt. Like I wanted to build the real company. I didn't want to just make the money. Felt like I had sold out. And the way I justified it to myself was I like, well, okay, I'm going to take this money that I get from selling this company, and then after my employment contract is up, I'm going to use it to start another company.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a learning experience, it was very painful actually. I mean, I was excited, like, oh, I'm going to work for a real company. You got to remember, I'd never had a job before. I had jobs like a Burger King, but I'd never had a job at a real company because I just run my own companies. Yeah. And so I thought, oh, this is cool. I can learn about how companies are run. I learned lots of stuff. I didn't learn what I thought I was going to learn. I didn't really learn about the mechanics of running a company. I learned about the politics of not necessarily bad politics, but just how things work inside. A company with lots of people and politics in the term of humans that are in a big team together, how they work and how they interact.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. So it built up a pretty good bank account balance. But I figured, well, my new company, I will fund it, but then we'll raise venture capital and kind of go bigger. And so I brought my friend in as a partner because he knew all the venture capitalists and then hired a few engineers, started going out and trying to raise venture capital. And then at the same time, we got the software up to the point where we could demo it”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going really well. But to be honest, I was getting a little tired of doing audio stuff in the audio for video business, which is our market, audio was always the second class citizen compared to the video. And then the internet was just getting big at that time.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's where my wife, Susan. I hired her. I was very controversial at the time. I started dating someone I had hired. She was hired to do printed circuit board assembly, which is kind of funny because she told me later that she had no idea what a printed circuit board was, but she figured she could assemble stuff, and so she applied for the job and at that point hired anyone who applied. And then after college, when we moved out to Silicon Valley, she was the office manager for the new version of the company. I remember it was kind of funny because I didn't really know where Silicon Valley was. I mean, I knew it was in Northern California, but I remember we had our map out driving around trying to find out where is this Silicon Valley thing. And it's not on the maps.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, so we gotta, I think we got up to about 14 employees, had a little office, and I would sign up for classes, get busy, and I wouldn't go. And they sent me a letter saying that I was on probation at one semester. And so I decided, well, I would regret not finishing my college degree. I was probably only a year away if I was full-time. So I decided that I would basically stop doing what I was doing, go back to school full time, get my degree, and kind of restart it. So that's what I did.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I remember I would make about $100,000 a year, which for a college student was good money, but it wasn't. It wasn't like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates' kind of money. And then the other thing I learned a lot about business, obviously, doing it. And one of the things I learned about business is one of my big lessons was the amount of money you have to report on your tax return is unrelated to how much cash you have in the bank. In the hardware business, you got to buy parts. You assemble them. So you got to buy the parts. You got to pay for the parts in advance. You assemble them into the things you're going to sell. And then you sell those things. And then those people that buy them, the stores, they take 30 days or 90 days to pay you. So you don't get paid for a long time after you buy the parts. And so it's a cash. You have a cash flow issue. But you pay taxes on the sales no matter what the cash situation is. So I remember being sort of outraged that I had to pay taxes on money I didn't have.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would have my friends build it. And then there was a computer store in Houston called MicroSearch. And the guy that ran it was pretty entrepreneurial, and he would distribute it, basically, and sell it. Then I figured out how you sold Tufts to stores, and so then I started doing it ourselves. And then we started adding other products besides the sound digitizer.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First product we made, I was into kind of digital audio stuff back then, which was a new thing. And so I made something called a sound digitizer that would record stereo. I mean, back then, computers didn't do that. It would basically let you hook up your CD player or your microphone to your personal computer and record it. And then software for editing it, and I called that perfect sound. And that was fairly successful, actually. That was the first product I sold.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't want to do computers because I was a little arrogant, I think, looking back on it and thinking that I kind of knew everything there was to know about computers or programming. If anything, I used to think a lot about how to, I was more interested in starting a company be a good way to make money. And I wasn't sure why I wanted money, except that I remember I wanted a better modem and I could only afford a certain kind of modem. I could only afford a 300 baud modem instead of a 1,200 baud modem. So it wasn't clear why I was motivated to have money. But other than just earning money was sort of a characteristic of our family, basically. I go out there and make some money.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing the number of media companies executives that didn't think streaming would be popular. They just thought there's nothing wrong with cable and satellite. The world is not going to change. When it was so clear that, of course, it's going to change. The internet has disrupted every industry and it's going to disrupt video as well. In fact, I viewed it as a pretty big competitive advantage that people underestimate us, and so they're always surprised when they lose.”
2022-11-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Roku: Anthony Wood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT