I was in this lab at University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and I was — I was stuck in this dark lab. And Elliot was giving me everything, and then we were starting that company. And so I’m sitting there. I’m starting the company, and we’re working through it, and we’re selling our wares. And a company in — here in California said, “We’d like to sell them for you. We’d like to distribute it.” I said okay, and Elliot knew the person, so I flew out here. And I started flying back and forth doing a business development deal with them. And they ended up selling and actually buying the software we had and selling it. And I was reading all the time in the backs of magazines about the Macintosh. It was called MacWEEK. Every week — ’cause we didn’t have the Internet back then. So you could just — all you could get was this — this sheet, this — it was all the news about the Mac and Apple every week. And I would read it religiously. And there was a back column, and that back column was by Raines Cohen. I remember. He’s an author and he’s still around, a writer.
And I would read it religiously. And it would tell about the team that created the Mac, and it would say where they’re at and what they’re doing now. And they started this company called General Magic. And I was like — and it was totally secretive, and everyone’s like — you would — you could hear it was percolating out in the valley just by reading a thing, and I’m like, oh, my, my. My heroes are there. They’re doing something cool that’s — you know, we don’t know what it is, but it’s gotta be something cool. I gotta go find out what they’re working on. I gotta work there because when I was starting that little company, I found myself being a very big fish in a very small pond. And I wasn’t learning anymore. I stagnated and every single time was failing at everything I tried. Because I hadn’t had the experience. I hadn’t seen different things, and I didn’t have really any mentors around me because we didn’t have a startup environment in Ann Arbor in the ’90s. It just wasn’t there, at least accessible to people my age at that time. And so I wanted to go to the fountain of knowledge. I wanted to go work for my heroes, and ultimately, I got, after a lot of perseverance, into General Magic, and I was employed at, like, 30 or something like that and got to work with my heroes and learn everything.