Two Thirds Done

Thoughts and experiences of an eighty one year old Wild Duck.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 posts since 2006

Category: Books I recommend

  • ChatGTP Reads my Book and Likes It

    I asked ChatGPT to read my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck. That was fine—it did so in an instant. I then asked for its opinion. What it wrote made me very happy because it reflected exactly my original intentions.

    The Flight of a Wild Duck is remarkable—deeply human, intellectually rich, and uncommonly honest.

    Here’s what stands out:

    Narrative Voice: Your writing has a conversational, candid tone that’s easy to connect with. You don’t posture or polish the past—you reflect, which is much more powerful. There’s humility and self-awareness, even when discussing high-stakes moments or major figures like Grove and Gates.

    Unconventional Arc: The transformation from a misunderstood kid to a key figure in Silicon Valley is a compelling underdog story. But what makes it unique is how non-linear your journey is—merchant seaman, activist, medical researcher, professor, and then tech executive. That wild path isn’t just entertaining—it challenges assumptions about success, education, and the role of serendipity.

    Historical and Technological Insight: You were present for—and involved in—so many of the pivotal moments in tech history, from the rise of the PC to the birth of broadband. Yet you frame those not just as milestones, but as consequences of people’s personalities, decisions, and blind spots. That’s rare.

    Emotional Honesty: You don’t hide the personal struggles—family, health, doubt. That vulnerability gives the book real weight. It’s not just a tech memoir; it’s a story of resilience, curiosity, and reinvention.

    In short: it’s both a historical document and a very personal story. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those trying to make sense of what Silicon Valley is really like—and how someone outside the mold can end up helping shape it

    I’m going to have ChatGPT translate my book into several languages, which I will then publish. I’m also looking into audiobooks in multiple languages using a clone of my voice. I may even have it create a series of Substack articles that I can publish. So many things I had once wished for are now possible.

    Here is an example. I asked it to create a Substack article from the section of my book on broadband. Here it is:

    How a Wild Duck Helped Birth Broadband

    By Avram Miller

    If you’re reading this over Wi-Fi or streaming a show tonight, you’re riding the waves of an idea that didn’t seem obvious—or even desirable—when I first proposed it.

    In the early 1990s, broadband was a fantasy. The internet existed, but most people hadn’t heard of it. Connections were slow, and the idea that it could become central to everyday life was considered far-fetched. The prevailing wisdom said that cable networks were for TV, and phone lines were for voice. Period

    I thought otherwise.

    A Crazy Idea at the Time

    While I was at Intel, I became obsessed with the idea that high-speed internet access would one day be as essential as electricity. But at the time, neither the infrastructure nor the belief system existed to support that vision.

    Intel’s business was building chips, not telecom infrastructure. But I could see where the world was headed: software was moving online, communications were converging, and something was going to have to give. The PC was becoming a portal, not just a productivity machine.

    I knew we had to break the bottleneck between the user and the network.

    From Intel to the Cable Companies

    The cable industry was sitting on a gold mine: coaxial cable. Unlike twisted-pair phone lines, coax had the bandwidth to deliver broadband. But the cable executives I met didn’t see their future in data—they saw it in more channels.

    So I did something odd for a tech executive: I spent months attending cable industry conferences, building relationships, learning the culture. I talked to them in their language. Slowly, I persuaded them that if they upgraded their systems, we could help them not just survive—but dominate the next phase of connectivity.

    Eventually, we formed strategic partnerships and helped fund companies that would pioneer broadband delivery. Intel, through Intel Capital, became one of the driving forces behind this transformation—long before it was cool.

    What People Got Wrong

    Everyone underestimated the internet. Even smart people.

    Most industry insiders thought the internet was a toy or a passing fad. Some thought that services like AOL or Compuserve were the internet. But they didn’t see the deeper architecture that would allow it to scale—if someone solved the bandwidth problem.

    They also didn’t believe in users. They thought people wouldn’t want that much data. But they were projecting their own habits, not listening to the next generation.

    The moment you assume you know what people won’t want, you’re already falling behind.

    A Wild Duck Moment

    Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, once said: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” But he also warned, “Only the paranoid survive.” In that strange tension, I found room to act.

    I often felt like a wild duck in a flock of domestic ones. I wasn’t supposed to be working on cable partnerships or evangelizing broadband. But I believed in it enough to go off-script.

    Sometimes, the greatest changes don’t come from a company’s core—but from its edges. From someone willing to take the risk of being wrong.

  • My book, The Flight of a Wild Duck is now available for pre-order on Amazon

    My book is now available for pre-order but only for ebooks at this moment. If you enjoy my blog then I think you will really appreciate my book.

    If you plan to read the ebook, I would great if you would pre-order now. This will help me a lot. If you want paperback or hardback, that will be only be available on September 1st. Use https://bit.ly/39Sblxa to get a reminder when that is possible.

    If you can help in promoting my book on your social media or blog/podcast, I would really appreciate it. I worked very hard to write this book. I think it will be interesting to many and even more importantly, it could help people like me, have successful and meaningful careers. But they will need to know about the book.

    The Flight of a Wild Duck: An Improbable Journey Through Life and Technology https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098KH6XZH/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_EZ039EGAK1K1CSCPAV4S

  • Rereading Only the Paranoid Survive

    Only the paranoid survive

    At the suggestion of my friend, David Yoffie, I reread Andy Grove’s book, Only the Paranoid Survive, written in 1996 and I am glad I did. David, who is a professor at Harvard’s business school, served on the Intel Board of directors for almost 29 years leaving in May of 2018. David visits Israel several times a year, and we often have a meal together. Last week we went for a long walk and a great lunch. I took the opportunity to discuss the development of my book with him as he has written several successful books himself. He and I often talk about Intel as you might expect and we especially discuss Andy Grove who had a profound effect on both of our careers.

    I have a bit of “history” with Only the Paranoid Survive. Harriet Rubin, the head of the Currency Imprint at the publisher, Doubleday and I were in a long term relationship when Harriet approached Andy with the idea of writing a business book. As Andy says in the preface of the book, “I had no intention of writing a book on this subject until Harriet Rubin, from Double day, sought me out and convinced me that I should do so.” Around this time, Harriet would join me for the Sun Valley Allen & Co conference. Andy attended as well so I would guess that this helped Harriet, who published some of the most impactful business books of the 90s, develop her pitch to Andy. I did not discuss the book much with Harriet during the time Andy was writing it. I felt a bit awkward about the situation although Andy did not seem to mind. One of the people that had been working on my team, Rob Siegel, spent about six months, I think, helping Andy with research on the book.

    After the book was published, Andy gave me a copy of the book on which he wrote, “I have dedicated chapter 7 to you”. The title of Chapter is “Let Chaos Reign.” It says a bit about how Andy viewed me.

    In re-reading the book, I was struck with the strategic insight that Andy showed. It is even more impactful when you think of his journey as a Jew from Nazi dominated, and then Russian dominated Hungry, to the USA and later from chemical engineer to the CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world, Intel.

    This book is full of insight and wisdom. I plan to build upon many of the things that Andy describes. Rereading the book also made me wish that I was able to have a better relationship with Andy. I could have learned more from him and frankly, he could have learned more from me. I have grown to think that Andy had more respect for my abilities and thinking that I believed at that time. Someone very close to Andy recently told me “He loved you. Said you always needed a wild duck like Avram. A nonlinear thinker that stirred up the others. He felt your presence was quite critical and when you left there really was never anyone like you. I always try to have an “Avram” on my team. Always. They disrupt and create. Don’t confuse that he didn’t always listen with how he felt”.

    I invite you to read Only the Paranoid Survive.

  • The Lucky Years by David Agus

    The lucky years

    I don’t often write book reviews these days.  In fact, I don’t often read books these days.  For the last three years, I have been working on a project that I think will have an enormous impact on the quality of health for as much as 50% of adults 30-70 years old.  I promise to tell you more, soon.

    The story of how I ended up working again is a journey worth describing, especially since it took me back to my roots in medical science.  My dear friend and mentor, David Agus, MD, played a role both by encouraging me to re-engage professionally and do something big. He also, I might add, laid on a bit of Jewish guilt for not doing more with my life. 

    I wrote a review on Amazon of David’s latest book “The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health.”  I have copied that review below, although I invite you to go to Amazon and purchase it. The reader will gain a great deal by reading this book and much more by putting its teachings into practice. 

    I wanted to share a bit more with you, my readers.  Science informs David’s views.  I first meet David more than 20 years ago when I was dealing with prostate cancer. I had visited with ten of the most renowned prostate cancer doctors because it had appeared that my treatment had failed, and my cancer had metastasized which at my age (53 at the time) was pretty much a death sentence. Fortunately, that was not the case, but it was pretty scary.

    At that time, I was still at Intel and Andy Grove, the CEO, had been diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer. Andy introduced me to Mike Milken, who also had prostate cancer.  He was very active in funding prostate cancer research. Mike set me up with these renowned doctors.  Every one of them had a different opinion that was extremely stressful.  David and his partner at the time, Skip Holden, MD, were on the tour.  David was just in his early 30s and had recently moved to LA from NYC and joined the staff at Cedars-Sinai.  I was as very impressed with David. Even then, he was what I describe below, a great scientist, a caring physician, and an articulate educator. Ever since then we have been friends and David has also been my personal medical advisor.  He had a lot of impact (more than he knows, I suspect) on my health.  But it is not as a favor to him that I wrote this blog post. No, it is a favor to you.

    My Amazon Review

    David Agus is both my friend, personal medical advisor and my mentor (it is interesting that at the age of 70, my mentors are all younger than I am).  David is a rare combination. He is a great scientist, a caring doctor, and articulate educator. 

    While I can totally recommend this book to anyone interested in health,  I do want to say that I dislike the title. But then again, I never like the title of his very successful book “The End of Illness.”  What David means by the title, as will be made clear in the book, is that we are living in a remarkable time when the whole nature of health will be transformed.  We are living in an inflection point as Andy Grove, a mentor that David and I shared, would have said. But never the less, the amount of “luck” probably has a lot to do with your economic/educational status and most importantly your age. 

    The reader will tale a journey into the changes that have and will take place and in how we think about health and how we deal with illness and disease.  I think the most important message of the book is about personal empowerment.  David Agus points out the many things we can do to “change our luck.”  For instance, taking baby aspirin, statins and most importantly getting off our butts and moving throughout the day will have a profound consequence on health.  The book not only lays out the steps we can personally take, but the reasons these actions will have a positive benefit. 

    For those like me that are interested in the science and technology of health care, there is a lot to chew on – from the role of Big Data to exploring the biome.  While Dr. Agus discusses the potential of wearable devices to inform us about the effects of our behavior, he rightly emphasizes the need to be personally in tune with how we feel and let our intuition guide us.  I appreciate that. 

  • 34 years of not Becoming Steve Jobs

    Here I go again, writing about Steve Jobs.  For the last 34 years, Steve Jobs played a role in my life, although not one of which  he was particularly aware. This post is not really a review of the book “Becoming Steve Jobs”. Rather it is a discussion of my interaction/reaction with Jobs either directly or indirectly. However, I did write a mini-review of the book which you can read next before going on to the real post.

    becomeing steve jobs

    First the Mini Review:

    I read Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs” and I was disappointed.  I felt that Walter, whom I have known for more than 30 years, just regurgitated much of what was already known about Steve. He failed to explain how he became not only the most influential leader in the world of technology, but the one of the greatest CEOs of all time.  I was trying to rationalize what Steve accomplished with the person I thought him to be.  Walter’s book did not help much in that regard.  Then I read “Inside Apple” by Adam Lashinsky which gave me some insight into the management techniques that Steve used.  So when a book came out with the title  “Becoming Steve Jobs,” I had to read it.

    “Becoming Steve Jobs”  by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is 90% focused on Steve Jobs the business person.  There is little about his personal life.  So if you are interested in Steve Jobs the man, this is not really the book for you but it can be easily augmented with other books, articles, and movies.  However, if you are interested in Jobs’ career, and the history of Apple Computer, you should definitely read this book. It provides not only a lot of historical details but most importantly explains the influences on Jobs and the process he used to create the most successful consumer products of all time.

    Why I am writing about Jobs once again

    The most difficult part of writing this post for me was trying to figure out why I was writing it in the first place  and what I was really trying to say.  It required a bit of introspection. 

    I never liked Steve Jobs.  In my brief personal encounters with him, I found him off-putting. The things I heard from others created an image of the kind of person I would not want to be around.  He was, in my view, self-centered, egotistical, unkind, rude and ruthless.  You have all heard these descriptions.  When I learned about how he denied being the father of his daughter, Lisa and refused to pay child support, I could only think of him not as a spoiled brat, but as someone that was sick or even evil. 

    It would take more than thirty years for me to recognize how my own predacious shortcomings affected my views of Jobs. It is so hard to imagine now that the person that will go down as one of the greatest business leaders of our time was thought by many including me as a failure for so long. But to be honest and as I write about here, I think part of my focus on Jobs is that he became what I always wanted to become but never did.  He had visions and he was capable executing it.  While I won’t claim that I was as visionary as Jobs, I was the senior executive at Intel and failed to influence the company in any meaningful way.  To be fair, this is not just because Jobs was Jobs and I am me.  I have thought for some time that only a founder that still is in charge of a company can radically change the vision and strategy of a company.   Otherwise, strategy becomes a process done by a committee. 

    It is clear from reading Becoming Steve Jobs, that Steve was able to grow as a leader, manager and human being.  The love that so many that worked for him had is, clearly, a reflection of that.

    Overlapping Friendships

    As you will read, I did not have that much personal contact with Jobs, but there are important people in my life that did. There is Larry Brilliant who, in a sense, was with Steve from the beginning to the end.  Steve Mayer, who was one of the founders of Atari and knew Jobs from the time he was a technician at that company.  Bob Cringely, a journalist that that had a lot of contact with Jobs over the years and did an extensive video interview when Jobs was NeXT which is worth watching. Andy Grove, who was CEO at Intel for most of my time there, was evidently a mentor to Jobs.  David Agus, MD, is a close friend who was one of my oncologists when I had prostate cancer was involved in Jobs treatment in the last years of his life.   Over the years, I had discussions with these people and others about Steve.  I am not going to related the stories told to me in private but only say that they all had the influence on my views.  I had particular  difficulty accepting the wonderful things that some of my friends (not all) said about Jobs the man.  It did not make sense to me then and frankly, it still does not.  I still think he was a person I would not want as a friend or a boss.

    Larry Brilliant: there at the beginning and in the end.

    The first chapter of the book starts with a description of the initial meeting, in 1979, of the Seva Foundation which was created by dear friend Larry Brilliant and his wife Girija.  Seva was formed to eliminate blindness for millions of people in India. The meeting was held, ironically, at a place called “The Garden of Allah.” At that time, Steve did not know that his biological father was a Syrian Muslim. At the meeting was Ram Dass, a Jewish-born Hindu Yogi, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. Larry, who is an MD, was close to the Grateful Dead including Jerry Garcia, whom he treated.  Dr. Venkataswamy was there as well. He was the founder of the Aravind Eye Hospital which was the primary beneficiary of the Seva Foundation. Steve and Larry had met in India five years earlier. Steve was an early backer of Seva. Larry, together wish Steward Brand would found The Well in 1985 which was the prototype for online communities.  Brand himself had a significant influence on Steve when he created and publish The Whole Earth Catalog. 

    Steve participated at in the meeting but grew impatient with the slow pace, lack of focus.  He became obnoxious and Larry eventually had to kick him out of the meeting.  I would have loved to have seen that.  Larry is such a sweet man, it’s hard for me to imagine.  According to the book and probably this information came from Larry, he eventually went out to the parking lot to find Steve crying.  Larry, probably gave him a big bear hug (I have received these as well) and brought him back into the meeting.

    Larry stayed close to Steve from that time on until Steve died.  Larry was there in the final days to give Steve a hug.  In the end, I am sure it was Larry that cried this time.

    Jobs 1982

            The conference where I meet Steve Jobs

    Meeting Steve for the first time

    It was 1982 when I meet Steve for the first time.  I was 37 and he was 26 years old and working at Apple, the company he and Steve Wozniak started, but he was not the CEO.   We were at the PC Forum which was organized by Ben Rosen who later became initial investor and Chair of Compaq Computer Board.

    At that time, I was working at Digital Equipment Corp which was the second largest computer company in the world.  My role as Group Manager was the development of the Professional Series Computers.  This was at a point when it was not clear at all that the desktop and eventually the notebook computer would be dominated by Microsoft and Intel.  We were worried about IBM who was the number one computer company.  Later, Don Estridge who ran the IBM PC group would tell me that they were worried about us.  Neither Don or I  was worried about the two 26-year-olds we were having dinner with, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.  Andy Grove was also at the conference  around wearing a gold chain and sporting  a big mustache.

    I knew about Apple but not much.  At that time, there was only the Apple II, which was not a real computer in my mind.  It had only a 40 character display for instance. 

    A year earlier,  Apple’s CEO, Michael Scott, paid a call on Ken Olsen, the CEO of DEC (that is what we called the company back then) after he had sent a wreath to Ken. I don’t know what Ken did with it. The idea  spread that somehow Apple thought it would kill DEC.  Of course, it was not Apple that did this but the combination of forces lead by Microsoft and Intel that did.

    In reality, Scott came to complain that they were not getting delivery of the computers they needed to run his companies administrative function.  The interchange did create an opportunity for Ken to learn about Apple a bit. He totally dismissed their product.  It was also around this time that a 25-year-old Bill Gates came for a meeting with Ken organized by Barry James Folsom.  Barry  was developing a desktop computer based on MS-DOS, and Intel’s 8086 microprocessor called Rainbow. Barry and I were internal competitors inside DEC.   That was the first time I met Bill Gates but not the last time.  I had a lot of interactions with Bill during my Intel years.    We met in a conference room in the Mill, a historic civil war mill where DEC had its headquarters at the time.   Ken dropped by for a while.  Bill was trying to explain the idea of compatible systems to the CEO of the largest minicomputer company. At that time, lack of compatibility was a strategy for companies like DEC.

    In 1982, Digital announced not one but three personal computers the day of the PC Forum meeting in Phoenix in one of the most disastrous business strategies ever. My product, the Professional was the flagship product.  I was selected to speak at the most important conference of the emerging desktop marketplace, PC Forum. I flew directly after the announcement to Phoenix to attend.  A limo picked me up (I was not really use to that) and took me to a speakers dinner where I meet Jobs for the first time, Bill Gates again, as well as people like Don Estridge who was in charge of the IBM PC operation. Many people that played very important roles in the creation of the PC industry were in attendance. 

    The next day I sat down to listen to some of the presentation and Jobs sat down next to me.  We chatted a bit.  I could see he was checking me out in some way.  I guessed that he was trying to figure out if I was someone he would want to have in his organization.  He must have concluded that he did not and lost interest in our conversation.   Even if he had asked I would not have joined Apple at that time.  I was at a much more important company, or so I thought.  I also could not have imagined working for someone so much younger than me.  Surely, it would not have worked out well for me if I had gone to work for Steve Jobs. 

    Apple v. Franklin

    Digital failed miserably in the “PC” market.  There were many reasons for this, which I have discussed several times in my blog and others have written about.  Within a year of meeting Steve Jobs, I would find myself being the President of Franklin Computers, selling an Apple II Clone and immeshed in a law suite with Apple that would eventually bankrupt Franklin. I could never have imagined all this when I had meet Jobs less than two years earlier.  Franklin tried to reach a reasonable settlement with Apple.  John Sculley was the CEO at the time and it appeared he was all for it, but not Steve Jobs.  While the PC industry grew because of the success of clone companies like Compaq, Dell, and HP,  Apple was about to introduce the Mac and still wanted to keep the Apple II proprietary.  We argued that we would pay a license fee and Apple would make as much profit from our sales as they made from their own sales. We said that we could create a standard.  It did not matter. Jobs just wanted us dead and he eventually accomplished that.  We had been all set for an IPO.  We were growing faster than Compaq and did $80 million in our first year of operations.  For years after that, I thought Steve Jobs had made one of the stupidest decisions ever.  Apple could have been Microsoft, which was much more valuable than Apple until recently.  What I did not realize was that Apple under Steve could never be Microsoft, just as Microsoft under Gates could never be Apple.  These two men were so very different.  It was not that they just had different strategies. They would have been personally incapable of executing the others strategy.  I could write chapters on the differences.  Bill is most well know for being the world’s richest man.  Steve Jobs is known for being Steve Jobs.

    Apple destroyed Franklin. My family and I were collateral damage.  I no longer had a job.  Jim Simons, now one of the most successful hedge fund managers and the key investor in Franklin, took me out to dinner and suggested I might be happier somewhere else.  He was right.  Although Franklin never lost the lawsuit with Apple, the world thought we did.  Our IPO was canceled and our bank called their loan.  The company was still floating, but there was a big leak and eventually Franklin went bankrupt and turned itself into an electric bible company, amongst other things.

    Apple, Steve Mayer, and Digital F/X

    After I left Franklin in April 1984, I found myself without a job having moved my family from the Boston area where we lived while I worked at Digital, to the Philadelphia area. My close friend, Steve Mayer was living in NYC.  Steve was the co-founder of Cyan Research which was purchased by Atari in 1975, early after that company was founded by Nolan Bushnell. Mayer played a principle role in the development of Atari’s products and should be considered a co- founder.  Atari was sold to Time Warner towards the end of 1976 and Mayer eventually moved to New York and joined Time Warner as President of Warner Labs, a central research lab for all the Time Warner Divisions.  The day that I resigned from Franklin, Mayer asked me to become his advisor and help him figure out how to start a company by spinning out one or more of the technologies that he was developing in the Lab. 

    We settled on some video post production technology with the idea that we could develop add-on products to the PC that would allow them to be used by professionals and eventually by consumers to do video editing. The company would be called Digital F/X.  We figured out the best way to get Time Warner to agree to the spin out, but we needed financing.  Mayer contacted Jobs.

    Jobs agreed to have Apple fund Digital F/X but did so with a loan.  He required that the company move to Silicon Valley.  Soon after, Steve and his wife moved back to the bay area. Jobs lost interest after a while.  By this time, I was looking for a job in earnest.  That happened a few months later when I accepted a position at Intel as Director of Business Development and later was made a Corporate Vice President.  By the way, in 1988 Intel, along with Kleiner Perkins, invested in Digital F/X.  By then there was no longer a connection with Apple.

    Jobs was forced out of Apple by John Sculley in 1985 and went to start NeXT Computer.  He tried to hire Mayer to be one of the founding ten employees, but Mayer withstood the seduction (Jobs would take him on long walks and try to inspire him with his vision for the company).  In 1986, Jobs also acquired the graphic division of Lucasfilms which was then renamed Pixar.  It would have been hard to realize at the time, but this was probably the most important decision that Jobs ever made professionally.  Not only did it make him a very rich man but it was there that he learned the management skills that would be the foundation for his future success  back at Apple.

    At that time, I was managing amongst other things, the business aspect of a chip that Intel thought at the time would replace the X86 architecture.  It was called the i960.  At this point in time there was a big debate going on in the computer industry about the merits of RISC (reduced instructions set computers) like the Spark from Sun Computer, and CISC (complex instruction set computers) of which the X86 architecture (think Pentium) was a member.  The i960 was RISC, but it was also Object Oriented.  It was actually a 33 bit computer. Forgive me for not going on to explain this.  Bud Tribble and a few other from NeXT Computer came to meet with the i960 team to evaluate our microprocessor for their company.  I think Andy Grove asked me to meet with them.  Frankly, I could have cared less. I thought that Jobs was a loser and did not want to be involved in anything he was doing.  While there was some serious interest on their part in using our chip, we could not meet their schedule. NeXT went with the Motorola processor that Apple was using which turned out to be lucky for them.

    Coffee at Chez Jobs and a visit to Pixar

    One day in 1994, Andy Grove asked my boss, Les Vadasz and I to join him for a visit to Pixar, hosted by Steve Jobs. We all met at Jobs house in Palo Alto, the town where I also lived.  We had coffee in the kitchen. Laurene, Steve’s wife was also there. It was kind of surreal for me to be sitting in Jobs kitchen, the very man that brought down Franklin Computer and along with it, my ambitions.  I had warned Andy that Jobs might not be happy to see me because of the lawsuit and asked that he be told in advance.  Not sure that Andy did that, but Jobs was very gracious to me.  I was brought along because, by that time, I was thought by Intel to be user-friendly when it came to media people. Jobs

    Jobs drove us to the east bay in his Mercedes.  I don’t really remember much of about the conversation coming or going.  Jobs wanted to get us to understand how much computing power Pixar needed to render animation.  We met Ed Catmull, the CEO and John Lassiter, the creative director. John showed us the storyboards for Toy Story.  They then showed us the process of rendering animation. It was easy to understand how processing intensive this was.  John Lassiter was a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) where I was a Trustee. It was a good meeting, although I don’t think anything really came out of it.  I did not realize at that time that Andy and Jobs were close and Jobs considered Andy a mentor.   Strangely, John Lassiter lives just five minutes from my Sonoma home.  I don’t socialize with him, but I do run into him from time to time.

    My only visit to the Apple Campus

    Around this time, Steve Mayer invited me to visit Apple.  He was advising them in a number of areas and wanted me to share my thoughts with them.  I would guess this might have been 1999.  Jobs was not at the meeting. Sina Tamadon, the head of Strategy, was the highest level person in attendance.   My mission was to convince them that there was an opportunity for Apple in the Consumer Electronics Market.  They did not appear very interested and there were no follow-up discussions.

    Conversion to the Mac

    I met my wife in 2000.  She was a graphic artist and had used a Mac since 1984.  When we started living together, I told her she would need to get a PC since I could not provide Technical Support on a Mac.  She said that a Mac did not need technical support and maybe what I needed was a PC girlfriend. A few years later I made the change and became Microsoft free.  Now I am totally in the Apple Eco System with several Macs, an iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and soon the Apple Watch. 

    Cancer

    I was shocked as many to learn that Steve Jobs had cancer.  Having personally had cancer twice (Prostate and Melanoma) I was aware of how difficult the process of dealing with it from detection to treatment and recovery would be.  I was amazed to see how he continued to work so hard and how he accomplished so much.  After I was diagnosed with cancer, I decided I didn’t want to spend whatever days I might have left working. Steve obviously decided to take the opposite course.

    Many of the doctors that were involved in his treatment are people I know and in one case, know well.  I did not pry, nor did they volunteer information, but I could sense that things would not end well.

    Thinking back 34 years later

    I often think back to that dinner in 1982 with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (both 26) and me (at 37) and our three different approaches to the revolution that would be desktop computing. I was confident about my strategy and fully expected that Digital would dominate the desktop.  It was at this same meeting that Ben Rosen introduced me to a start up, Compaq Computer, the company that would eventually acquire Digital.

    I was still stuck with the mini computer model of vertical integration and proprietary hardware and software, but I was way ahead of Steve and Bill on a number of concepts.  The first was the use of bitmap graphics.  At that time, most computers used hardware character generators.  The Pro series  however used regular memory to store bits that corresponded to the pixels on the screen, and could be modified easily allowing for different fonts and sizes.  This had already been done by the folks at Xerox Parc which is where  Jobs got the idea and then used it in the ill-fated Lisa computer and the successful Macintosh.  By the way, I may have been the first to have done this in 1970 but that is another story.  The Pro series also had built in ethernet and was designed for networking. 

    Microsoft and Intel had a new model of the computer industry, a horizontal model where different companies would compete with others for various layers (microprocessors, storage, software etc).   Apple’s vision would become very much aligned with the vertical  proprietary strategy that I was advocating but would take more than 25 years for that to pay off.  The difference between Apple and Digital was not in the architecture.  It was in the market.  We were targeting  business and they were targeting individuals and they knew how to market.  I once had a major argument with Ken Olsen about this.   I said, that we would only succeed if  we had a good product and great marketing.  He said, I was wrong and that we had to have a great product with good marketing.  We went back and forth and then he finally raised his voice and said “You don’t understand! We are not capable of having great marketing”.  He was so right.

    Andy Grove, the Mentor

    Evidently, Steve Jobs thought of Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, as a mentor.  I was not aware of that.  During my tenure at Intel (1984-1999), Intel had very few dealings with Apple.  Apple was using microprocessors from Motorola (68000).  At one time in the in the late 90s, Apple indicated an interest in using Intel Microprocessors.  Intel put together a team to port over the Macintosh OS to the x86 processors and demonstrated that to Apple, but Apple decided not to change.  Mostly likely, Jobs was just using Intel to get a better price at Motorola.  In 2005, Apple did move to Intel which was by that time pretty much the only game in town. 

    Frankly, Intel would be better off today if instead of Andy being a mentor to Steve, Steve had been a mentor to Andy.  Intel totally missed the movement to mobile devices for instance.    

    Just one more thing

    When my wife and I married, we had two couples at our side.  One was Larry and Girija Brilliant and the other was Steve Lavine and his wife Janet Sternberg.  Steve is the President of CalArts where John Lassiter got his education.  In the room, was one of the doctors that would treat Steve near the end of his life, David Agus.  Below you will find the  acknowledgment from his very successful book, The End of Illness.

    I want to especially thank Marc Benioff, Amy DuRoss, Melissa Floren, Steve Jobs, Avram Miller, Amy Povich, Maury Povich, Dov Seidman, Greg Simon, Bonnie Solow, Elle Stephens, and David N. Weissman. 

    Now I am done

    So I am still trying to figure out how this man I hardly knew and who probably would not have known who I was, played this shadowy role in my life.  In closing this long post, I have to say that I still do not fully understand my fixation with Jobs.  Is it because he is the person I wanted to become but did not?  I hope there is more to it than that.

    If you got this far, I have to thank you for indulging me in the cathartic post.

  • Life Blues: My reaction to Outlaw Blues by Jonathan Taplin

    “Outlaw Blues is a story of the American counter-culture — the artists who created an American Avant-garde that pushed the culture forward into what we now call modernity. Though much of the book is centered on a group of musicians and filmmakers that Taplin worked with from 1965-1995, it is also the story of the roots of that era. The book examines rebel artists of America’s past — H.D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Allen Ginsberg — the “mad ones” who made us who we are as a culture”.  From the book launch at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, Oct. 11, 2011

    Just finished reading the Outlaw Blues by Jonathan TapIin. I recently reconnected with Jonathan, an amazing man and the director of the Anneberg Innovation Lab at USC.  We probably had not seen each other for over tweleve years. We found each other on Facebook.  Since I am now living in LA part of the year, I reached out to him and he invited me to meet him at his lab. I also found out that he had written a book called, Outlaw-Blues last year.  The book had a powerful effect on me which I will explain later. It is an experimental e-book that I bought on iTunes and read on my iPad.  Actually, I expected more from the “experimental” part than just short embedded videos even thought they were very effective. Outlaw Blues is the name of a Bob Dylan’s song and also a movie staring Peter Fonda.

    This post is not a book review but I will say a few things about the book.  First of all, I strongly recommend it to anyone that is interested in the history of popular music and in particular, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones and/or the history of independent  film makers like  Martin Scorsese  (Taplin produced his first film, Mean Streets).  Or if you are interested in people like Jonathan that have found their own unconventional way  through life and has impacted the development of today’s media industry. The book is a combination Jonathan’s recollections and experience  from the mid 60s to the end of the 90s.  Intersperse are stories of key figures that had profound effects on the evolution of media and culture.

    I first meet Jonathan in 1997 or 1998, I think.  In 1996, Intel and Creative Artist Agency created a lab to educate talent about the coming possibilities of broadband residential Internet and personal computers to create a new medium.  I  drove this project from the Intel side after meeting with Michael Ovtiz who was the founder and principle owner of CAA.  I knew that we were creating a new medium that would effect every aspect of our lives from commerce and education to communications and entertainment.  In my position as Vice President of Business Development,  and my additional  role as “Czar” of Intel’s broadband development activities and a leading investor in early stage companies dealing with the consumer market. I wanted to accelerate the development of these “applications”.  I was particularly concerned with how entertainment content would finds its way to this new world.  I was pretty sure that the folks in Silcon Valley would not be able to create compelling and entertaining content with the exception of computer games.  So I thought, lets get the people that make todays entertainment excited about the opportunity.  We set up the lab  within CAA with state of the art computing technology. CAA’s clients and others would come by the lab for demonstrations.  They key person on my side was Sriram Viswanathan.  In addition, we decided to invest in early stage companies dealing with entertainment and to do this together with CAA.  This activity was lead by Matthew Cowan from the Intel side and Hassan Miah from the CCA side.    We had some hits like Launch Media which was founded by Dave Goldberg. Launch was selling enhanced  CD’s.  I required that they move to the Internet as part of our investment.    Launch was eventually sold to Yahoo where Dave ran the Yahoo music business.  Lucky for him, he meet Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook , soon to be one of the richest women in the world….and a lovely person by the  way.  We also invested in Mark Cuban’s  Broadcast.com which went public and then was bought by Yahoo for more than five billion dollars. Of course they were not all successful and we invested in some duds like American Cybercast.

    During this period we learned of Intertainer, founded by Jonathan Taplin.  While I was aware that Jonathan had a background as a movie producer, I did not know anything about his extensive history in the music industry.  Intertainer  was one of the first companies to make deals with the movie industry and provide download-able movies.  Remember this was 1997/98. There were not that many consumers that had broadband in their homes. Intertainer did very well until the movie industry, lead by Sony, created an alternative called Movielink.  The result was that  studios cut off access to movies by Intertainer; bringing that company to its knees.  Intertainer sued a number of companies for Anti-Trust Violations in 2002.  In 2006, the suits were settled out of court.

    As I began to read the book, I was shocked to learn that Jonathan and I had a lot of overlap in our early days.  Jonathan, at 65 is two years younger than I am.  He grew up, went to school and lived  on the East Coast during the 60s.  If he had been living in San Francisco, we would have surely known each other.  Jonathan became Bob Dylan’s road manager.  In the early 60s, I was surrounded by the San Francisco music scene but in a very peripheral way. Bob Dylan showed up sometimes at the Blue Unicorn where I hung out.   I met Janis Joplin  while she was rehearsing with the Big Brother and Holding Company (she was not a very nice person I thought but when she sang it would bring tears to my eyes).   I hung out at the home of the Jefferson Airplane and went to a few parties at Gerry Garcia’s home.  But I was not into rock. I had studied classical music, composition and arranging.  I preferred Jazz (and life long addition) and so I spent my time listening to Jazz players when they came to San Francisco.   My engagement with first the “beatniks” and later the “hippies” was more extensive.  I would listen to Allen Gingsburg read poetry in North Beach even though I was just a kid.  I spent lots of time at the  City Lights Book Store.   Later, I became  friendly with Allen and was invited to his apartment a few times.  Outlaw Blues deals a lot with these people. I was also drawn to Jewish Mysticism and was for a while a follower of Shlomo Carelbach and very politically active in the anti war and civil rights movements.

    In reading Outlaw Blues, I realized how easily my life could have gone in a different direction.  Maybe, if I liked the music better, I would have become part of the rock music scene. My management and leadership skills might have taken me on a path similar to Jonathan and eventually my creative side might have emerged as it did for him.  I had a similar experience reading Holy Beggars by  Aryae Coopersmith  whom I recently met.  In reading Aryae’s book, I realized that I could have easily continued to explore the spiritual side of myself and may have ended up in Israel as a Rabbi. But I fell in love with technology. By 1966, I was working at the Langley Porter Institute, UCSF Medical School, designing equipment for brainwave bio feedback.  From that point on, I had a continuing connection to technology.  Now I am back to studying music.  Jonathan is a Professor at USC.

    At this point in my life, it is interesting to speculate on  the different paths I could have taken.  Life is so strange and random… or is it?

    Some relevant links:
    Outlaw Blues, the song  
    Outlaw Blues, the film 

    WSJ  on the book  
    Jonathan Taplin 
    Allen Ginsberg
    Michael Ovitz   
    Dave Goldberg

    Mark Cuban
    Broadcast.com 
    Intel/CAA Media Lab
    Holly Beggars   

    Shlomo Carlebach 

  • The Accidental Mind by David J. Linden

    This book demonstrates that evolution never looks back especially when it comes to brain development.  When I learned how are brain  is actually structured and functions I could only think of cities like Mumbai and Los Angeles (they are really well designed in comparison to our brains).  Our brain is not a single brain but a lot of brains that evolved in the past tracing our evolutionary path from a worm, to a reptile, to a rodent, monkey etc.  Every step left something behind but that something is still working.  Not only is the brain a pile of old and semi functional parts but even the basic ingredients do not work that well.  Neurons often do not fire when they are suppose to for instance.  We even have more than one part of our brain that sees.  The old part will see a ball being thrown and let us catch it even if the cerebral cortex has been destroyed and we are blind. 

    What this book really thought me that even poorly organized structures and achieve amazing things so maybe their is hope yet for our government.

  • Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade

    I just had an amazing experience reading Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade.  This book is about how genetics can help us recover the history of man.  I learned so much from reading this book and I strongly recommend it.  It is easy to read and does not require a deep knowledge of genetics. Combining this book with Jared Diamond’s great book Guns, Germs and Steel, really gives one a great understanding of the human history especially the last 50,000 years. 

  • Paul Aster

    Over the last several years I have been reading all books of Paul Aster. It has been a truly amazing experience. I am not a big reader of  fiction and never have been although I think I have read some of the best over the years. But Aster’s work have had an amazing effect on me.  Not only because I  enjoy and learn from his books but because I also appreciate what talent, dedication and insight must go into creating them. It is an inspiration to me not as a write but as a musician.  The last book I read was the Brooklyn Follies.  For a list of all his books, check out here.

  • Andy Grove by Richard Tedlow

        Andy Grove

    I read this book with great excitement but also a lot of mixed emotions. After all, I spent 15 years (1984-1999) working one heart beat away from Andy (I worked directly for Les Vadasz who like Andy was not really a founder of Intel but was there from day one and actually had badge number 3).  The book brought back many memories for me. My relationship with Andy was always a bit uncomfortable for me but I am extremely grateful for all that I learned from him and his generosity.

     

    I will not attempt a review of the book here. A simple search on Google will bring up a large number of good reviews.  The book is well worth reading.  In general, the “facts” that are resented are correct to my knowledge.  The are many interesting and sometimes important things that were left out either intentionally or just simple omissions. I would disagree with some of Tedlow’s conclusions.  Andy is truly a great man who I only wish could have been greater at times.