YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Kerruish

lines on the record: 74
first: 2018-07-30
most recent: 2018-07-30
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

“What one problem does it solve now? What one problem does it solve for people in this year? Not what they want in the future, what it's going to be their world, but what is the one thing that they solve? And they tried to do a thousand things. Right.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't trash. There was a phone. There was a Rilodex. Right. You can't keep track of all your accounts. And then you'd move through into this other world, which was Main Street, where you could go along and you could do online what became online shopping. And then there was another place. It was sort of your hallway, and that was your games room. It was an incredible feat of creativity and design. I mean, it was too much, really. And it was too much. I mean, I think that was the sort of one of the roots of the failure was that they were so enamored with the joy of making and of the creativity without the sort of stick of Steve Jobs to come and say, well, that's all very nice walking lemons, but actually let's focus on shipping a product.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because they didn't. Because things weren't ready because people didn't, there wasn't a use case necessarily. But I do remember, I don't think I could even turn it on now. Maybe I could. It had the desk and you touched the mailbox and you touched, what else was on there? There was definitely a dozen trash. There was a phone.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they tried to ship perfection. So I think that general magic and other companies like them led to this way that we develop today, this agile method of development, because they would work at this thing for two or three years and then da-da. And of course, if no one bought it, that was catastrophic, and particularly in General Magic's case.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so they were too early in terms of the actual development of the product itself because everything was too expensive, the components and therefore the price was too expensive. And they also tried to ship.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, good cognitive doesn't that. So the project itself was a handheld where these, they basically had a metaphor of your desk and a street and using Susan Kare's amazing design, Susan. I say who Susan is. So Susan is, I think the most important designer of her age. Everything you interact with pretty much his influence from the original desktop icons on the Macintosh. Yeah, she worked at Apple with the original Macintosh team, now at Pinterest. She designed this beautiful world that you'd interact with all the things you'd need to do and communicate, make calls, make little beautiful notes. They designed emojis, like these incredible walking lemon emojis that even today far exceed what we have on our phones, but that was sort of the genesis of that idea. So so many important ideas came together in this one device, the problem of that device was, as you know, clunky and big and very expensive. It was $800, I think, the original sales price. And it was just, and it was also...”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it sounds like now. So they did this, and we're creating this product. Talk a little bit about the product development at the time. What were they doing? What were they creating? Because I have one of them in my basement. What was it called? It was the magic leap, right? Magic.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, then they raised. So there was the initial funding from the partners, and then they went public. They were the first concept IPO. Basically, they didn't have a product. They just had an idea, and they raised $96 million, right? And the first day on the stock exchange?”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the RTC Clark quotes it as there any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And then the second part of it was that there was General Electric, there was General Motors, will be general magic, will become a household name. So between those two. Phrases.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dream with, you know, every, but I mean, he was saying, you know, normally you build on the shoulders of giants, but they were starting from the, you know, toes all the way up. It was insanely ambitious. They were trying to do all this 17 years before, you know, the iPhone 10 years before.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, like, you know, taking fat, taking facts and, you know, turning on its head and trying to work out. I mean, you know, software modem was invented there. I mean, there's a line that Kevin Lynch says, Kevin's the VP of Technology at Apple.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is strange to me because in the film these are your words that say this back in the film. The other one that says so there's no Wi Fi, there's no phones, there was nothing that we rely on today just did not exist. There's an incredible sequence where Diving through the cupboards and brings out this walk about device that's huge, but she's talking about pressing on it and saying that you need to balance the X and the Y axis to be able to create touchscreen because touchscreen hadn't been invented before. So, I mean, everything that there wasn't.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I work there and he sold more than $30 million of sort of shares in one week. It was just crazy the demand and it was unprecedented building this sort of collaboration of industry partners that had never been done.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six million doll So it's a lot of money. Yeah, but it was also at a time when it's like, well, we're running out of money, let's bring in a new partner, and then let's bring in a new partner because we need more money. So suddenly this thing that felt very nimble and very agile of maybe just working with three partners had swollen to 16. So that was one aspect of it.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they raised finance through two different ways. The first switch was an idea that Mark had was that in order to create this infrastructure, you had to partner with the sort of global industries at the time because, you know, this was a time before wireless. So in terms of being able to kind of get a device that talks to another device, you needed to go to there. There was no Wi-Fi. So you have to go to the biggest. And that's AT&T. And then they spoke to Sony in terms of actually building it and then Motorola for their own device. And so with all these known as founding partners, and there were 16 by the end of it that all put $6 million into the entity. That was their first way of raising finance.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you talked about being a time traveler that he went off into the future and he saw that everybody was interacting with this device that would enable you to talk to anyone anywhere across the world. And yeah, I mean, this reading it and saying that we won't use names to kind of interact with each other will interact through photos and it will be called the face space. I mean, I remember reading that when I first started working on the project and I was like, what? You know, it wasn't just that it looked remarkably like an iPhone. It wasn't that it had all the apps and all the economies that are all used through iPhones.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was an academic and he was at Stanford. And so he just sort of, he's a classic visionary. He sort of went into the visionary wilderness and came back from the mount with this literally this spellbook, an extraordinary large red tome full of visions of the future in incredible detail, not just a smartphone with apps, but something he called face base, which sounds awfully like Facebook. It is today a remarkable document.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much like all the sort of middle lines of the Macintosh bill was kind of dominated the whole way through that machine. So he did all the stuff for quick paint, but then he also kind of worked with hypercards. So yeah, I mean, these guys were the sort of the originators and people really, really looked up to them. So when people found out that Bill and Andy and Joanna were working on this secret project, they didn't know what it was, what it could be, but they just wanted to work with these amazing people.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Macintosh. The Macintosh. Yeah, I mean, they were the rock stars. I mean, people told us about that Rolling Stone article where they're seeing engineers in a Rolling Stone magazine. So Andy was the software wizard, Joanna responsible for the international marketing. And then Bill Atkinson was responsible for”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Andy and Joanna really were the sort of core team that built the original Macintosh. Jo Hoffman, Halfman. Yeah. He was played by Kate Wensler in the MSOKIN movie. And so they were really worthy original. I view them as Steve Jobs' disciples. They were the people who took that learning and wanted to go when Steve was fired. They were sort of in exile and wanted to build the next great thing. And for them, it was taking the desktop and putting it in everybody's pockets. That was the vengeance.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when Scully was in charge of Apple. Jobs have been fired. Yeah, jobs have been fired. And Scully was looking for the next big thing. You know, Macintosh sales was steady, but he was looking for his legacy project. And there was a guy there that was working that was called Mark Perran. And he was walking around with some diagrams and a sort of bolster model of what looks like the smartphone that we hold today. And John said, well, let's do it. Let's do it inside of Apple. And Mark said, well, if we're going to do it, we can't do it in Apple. It will just be killed by too many cooks. And so I said, we need to spin out. So John gave us money and they rented a smaller enclave just out in Mountain View. And they started putting together the engineers and the designers to kind of make the smartphone so they had Andy Hertzfeld, they had Bill Atkinson, they had Joanna Hoffman, all veterans of the original Macintosh project.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General magic spun out of Apple to make essentially what was the first smartphone. Right. And John Scully famously said it's the most famous company or the most important company in Silicon Valley that nobody's ever heard of. And so it was this incredible team of people that went on to build that thing that we use every day that everyone has in their pockets. But we don't know about it because they had, first, went through what was a spectacular failure. Before the people who work there went on to build the Android and the iPhone and eBay and work CTO for Obama. So I went on to do extraordinary things.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, talk to me about this project because I'm in the movie. Let me just full disclosure. I'm in the movie because I'm a genius about these things. But it's an astonishing story. I want to give a background of what General Magic is, one of you, either one of you.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as the person who tricked every venture capitalist into wearing those stupid puppy vests back in the day, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Reco Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today I'm delighted to have Sarah Karouche and Matt Maud in the studio that the directors of the new documentary called General Magic of which is about a pioneering tech company of the same name, which really started Silicon Valley in a lot of ways. You may not know about it, but you should. Sarah and Matt, welcome to Reco.”
2018-07-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'General Magic' directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT