Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Apple Stole The Iphone The Real Story

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Mike Birkhead was apart of the company that created the original iPhone, he tells the story of how apple stole the iPhone. ⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Mike's Website https://iphonekindness.org/blog/about/⁣ ⁣ 📧Sign up to my newsletter to learn about Real Estate, Credit, and Growing a Youtube Channel: https://mattcoxcourses.com/news⁣ ⁣ 🏦Raising & Building Credit Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/credit ⁣ 📸Growing a YouTube Channel Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/yt⁣ 🏠Make money with Real Estate Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/re⁣ ⁣ Follow me on all socials!⁣ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/⁣ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrime⁣ ⁣ Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7⁣ ⁣ Send me an email here: [e-mail]⁣ ⁣ Do you want a custom "con man" painting to show up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrime⁣ ⁣ Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart⁣ ⁣ Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox ⁣ ⁣ Check out my true crime books! ⁣ Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF⁣ Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM⁣ It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8⁣ Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G⁣ Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438⁣ The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K⁣ Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402⁣ Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1⁣ ⁣ Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!⁣ Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX⁣ ⁣ If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:⁣ Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69⁣ Cashapp: $coxcon69 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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going on here and just telling you things that I haven't told anybody. You won't hear this story anywhere else. I can guarantee you that. What we're talking about today, which is, you know, a unique story about the original manufacturer of the iPhone. Largely unknown. Apple did not come up with the concept for the iPhone, but there's a, you know, really small story, unique, funny, sad of the company that actually came up with the iPhone concept.

the original one, probably 10 years before Apple even brought it out. So it's really interesting. So how did it all lead up to that? And I got in the back you can see, these are the original iPhones behind me from the manufacturing plant. A lot of them are one-offs, you know, where you can't just buy them. They're from the labs. And so that's where the story almost ends. But I guess the original story started with me, you know,

growing up in southern Arizona, lived in the big cities, Tucson, Phoenix, and, you know, largely was raised there, a single mom. Dad wasn't in the picture. It was actually just more of, well, truth be told, he was an alcoholic and womanizer

and all the stuff that you just hear about in stories, true crime stories, that is. And he just wasn't in the picture. And so we were left to, you know, my mom and my three brother, brothers. But we ended up, the funny part, after, you know, long-sorted moves back and forth, we ended up in a small town called Naco, Arizona. And that, just for the gigles, I checked the population today. And today, it's 864. So I don't know if it's gone up or down since I was

there, but that was in, I think, 1982 is when I was growing up there. And it was a unique experience. The reason why I kind of brazed that up against everything else is that such a small town and it was split by the border between Mexico and Arizona. So we went to school on the U.S. side, but the other half of our life was spent in Mexico growing up with, you know, locals and speaking Spanish all the time. And just there's a different way of growing up. And, you know, you look at, you look back on and think, boy, that was unique. at the time it kind of didn't didn't wasn't that fun you know because your new culture you know sometimes fighting and all that stuff but it turned out to be probably one of the best experiences that helped kind of grow me uh today you know if you will just because the the adversity and

the newness of a culture it's like you're being taking well we were almost taken to a different country and said you know here it is have fun you know the kind of thing yeah so but that was where also the tech, I got into the technology stuff. I started dealing with at the very onset computers in high school and whatnot. Typical high school, nothing dramatic there. Ball player, baseball, football, track, varsity, all that good stuff. You know, pretty well in it, state finals. And really enjoyed it there. And then once you get out of high school, you start all over again figure out, okay, now what's life going to bring to me? Yeah, so one unique story that I had from the living on the line, you know, what they said is the Mexican side or the

Mexico side was called El Otrro Lado, which literally means the other side. So whenever you said, hey, let's go to El Otrolado. It's like, hey, let's go to the other side. So it's almost like a different different geographic location, not just a cultural, but like you're going to another place that's different from where we are in the U.S., which was always, always at the time you didn't notice any difference, but now I look back and think, boy, that was kind of crazy times. But anyways, all of our time was spent across the, across the line, in the other side. You're going to say, I wonder if that happens now. Do people kind of go back and forth like that as easily now? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, good question. I'm sure they'll,

get checked a lot more frequently because back then we would just walk through the border and say you know you a citizen and you come over a couple times it wasn't that easy you know one time i had a knife on me you know kid 15 year old and uh i don't know as midnight was coming through and the border patrol just out of the fluke said step on in and so he stepped on and said they empty your pockets and you know 15 16 this was after you know on the other side any age is drinking age so you could Right. You just do whatever you want over there. And pretty much we did.

So I emptied my pockets and, you know, I had a switchblade, which it thinks you think it's, oh, and ah, switchblade. But everybody had a switchblade down there because they were so cheap in Mexico. So anyways, he said, hey, you know, you can get a lot of trouble with this. Let's walk out back. And back then, you're like, oh, this guy's not going to do anything. And so he just took me out back and he said, all right, open your blade. And I opened it. And he said, put it in between these two metal bars.

and I did and he goes right now twist it and break it and I said break it. And I said, if you don't, he said to me, if you don't, then we got to go the different route. And that's all the bad stuff. And I said, we break it right now. And from that point on, every time I came through the border and he was there, he kind of took an extra second to look at me and said, are you good? Are you good? Like US citizens, sir, you know, I'm clean.

I'm clean this time. Except for one time. And that was, not proud of it, but kind of like your other guests. I don't know, I feel like I'm a cathartic experience is going on here. I'm just telling you things that I haven't told anybody.

But this one I've told a few folks. So it was probably 1 a.m. 2 a.m. And me and a couple of the local boys are looking for food. And, you know, we figured, okay, in Mexico and, you know, we kind of had an idea what we're going to do. And, oh, man. So, walked up to the taco truck, asked for three dozen tacos. And, you know, they brought them over, put them on the,

on the countertop. Then I asked for, you know, a couple of orange sodas. And as soon as they, obviously turned around to grab the orange soda, I grabbed the three dozen tacos and started heading for the border. Literally, I was heading for the border. Literally, I was heading for the border. I don't know. Maybe that's where Taco Bell got that. I don't know. But anyways, I was gone and it was, you know, it was on. And so I started hearing clanking of kitchen utensils and stuff like, and I heard, you know, cursing in Spanish. So I was moving and I got to the border border line and I had to slow down because they had to hear me say US border, our US citizen. So I slowed down and tried to restrain my breathing just to make it look like I wasn't doing anything. Ran up to him and I saw that

one guy, the one guy. And he said, you know, I'm Eagle. I said, US border or US citizen. I'm good. And he goes, he looked. He goes, okay. And I went through. And I think it was probably had to have been a minute later. Somebody from the taco truck was probably looking for me. And, you know, so I by luck, I happened to get away with it that night. But because it's such a small town, everybody knew everybody. And so. So they knew my, the buddies that I was with. And so some guys came across from Mexico for a little, you know, good old fashioned justice. They, they didn't find me. Luckily, I was known as a Luedo, the white guy.

And, but they didn't find my buddies and he got beaten up. Not too bad, but enough to give some respect to to that taco truck. And I never did anything like that again, scared the hell out of me. I don't know if he, you know, my buddy ever did it again. But that was one of those things where it was a pivotal. moment in my life like, okay, it was close. I don't even want to be that close again to, you know, getting on the, the wrong side of the law. Was he with you when you grab the tacos? He was waiting on the U.S. side because he's a U.S. citizen too. Okay. So he was kind of like him and a

couple of other buddies were just waiting in his backyard of his house. And so I was the guy said, I was, I was the one that had run track and did all this stuff. And I'm like, all right, you're the guy, Mike. I was like, okay. So, you know, That was probably as bad as it gets on the international side of things. I didn't do anything like any other guests. No big drugs, no fraud. Nothing really, really interesting. You know, nothing true crime level, if you will.

Have you done anything in Mexico? Have you been involved in anything to Mexico? No, I've been to Mexico, but just as a tourist. Oh, that's no fun. I wouldn't dare. Well, nowadays, especially. Be afraid I'd end up in a Mexican prison. That'd be horrible.

Yeah. Yeah. You ever watch Locked Up Abroad? Yes. I love Locked Up. That one too. That one gets me and just reminds me like how it could be. That's what out of all the, you know, true crime, true crime, um, uh, you know, series. Like that's probably the best, the best, uh, made series. Yeah. I agree. It's got a good pattern to, you know, they'll live in large. And then they find out. that they got to do the thing and then they do it. They get caught. My favorite part is when you don't know if they got away with or not. And then they pull black their background blanket and you see that they're still in prison or they're still not free. That's that's the part that scares the hell out of me. It really keeps me like, are they free? Did they make it? Yeah.

So that's a good true crime. I think I'm not even sure what the allure is of true crime either. I mean, I really like it. I watch it. But why do people like to hear about other crimes? or other fraudsters that get caught and then go talk about it. What, what is it? I don't, I don't know.

I mean, I know that violent, I've said this many times because like violent crime or true crime that's based on, you know, some type of violence like serial killers or murders or 70% of the people that watch those are women. Really? I think it might even be higher than that. So it's like, you know, it's like two and a half times as much as men. Yeah. But my, you know, my channel, most of the people to watch is like 92% of the people that watch this is, is, is, are men.

Mm-hmm. So. Interesting. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I'm fascinated by people that I think wouldn't, wouldn't accept their, their plight, I think. Yeah. You know, and then they, they went and did something that was reckless and illegal. And then I'm always curious to know how it caught up with them and the things that.

The things that came up in their life that they had to overcome to continue doing whatever it was, whether it was bank robbery or fraud or drugs or, I don't know. But anyway, so what, so did you end up going to college? Did you, like, you graduated high school? Yeah, so good questions. So, you know, I was in, I was in, living in NACO when I was in high school, part high school in Bisbee, left there, I think as a junior, moved back to Tucson, graduated from there, you know, did the sports thing again, you know, lots of friends, all that good stuff.

And then, you know, that was a, so 1983 and 84 and 85, I was back in, in regular high school, if you will, you know, U.S. high school. In high school, you know, it's always always tricky. You don't know what's going to happen. you got easily end up with the wrong crowd and stuff like that. I was lucky didn't get into too much trouble. 1984, that was a year before I graduated. Dad came back in the picture.

He had just been arrested on counterfeit and was in the prison for a while. Came back into the picture. I was, I think, 17 at that time. And my younger brothers were 16 and 15. And he just figured out that he'd missed it. I mean, he wasn't around for our upbringing and we kind of grew away from him. And I think he realized that real quick. And, you know, on my birthday, 1984, he killed himself.

Shotgun right through the bottom. Oh, wow. I thought you were going to say he started coming around. No, no. He realized that was, he just missed the window. We'd already grown up and realized what he'd done all those years. And so, you know, like you said, hey, what I wonder what happens to these folks. after they've already lived their life, he went and did things that he wanted to do.

He was a fraudster. He would come home with broken arms and broken legs. He was a big gambler. Sometimes he came home with a preacher, caller on saying he was a preacher. Other times he was a paddle seller or a diamond seller, insurance. I mean, he did a lot of shit. Yeah. So I got to be aware that genetically there's probably something in me to

kind of, you know, that saw that. And I know some of my other brothers are a little bit more loose with the ethics and whatnot. But yeah, so when he came back and realized that he did, he went and lived life without the family. And we grew up without him. I think that was the last, the last, you know, ticket for him because he had nothing. I mean, you get out of prison. All you got is your support system. And, you know, we were, we were already grown up. So, you know, that was a rough one. I'll tell you, even though he was going to, on a long time. You know,

the stilly dad and, you know, all the memories of ball games and all that stuff kind of still come up. My, I have a, have a, have a 21-year-old girl and through her teenage years,

you know, I don't know if you've had, have teenage girls or have ever had them. They're tricky years for dads, you know, and I compare it with, you know, friends of mine that also have teenage girls.

But yeah, at that point, you know, she was making me question. On game day, pain can hit hard and fast, like the headache you get when your favorite team and your fantasy team both lose. When pain comes to play, call an audible with Advil plus acetaminopin and get long-lasting dual-action pain relief for up to eight hours. Tackle your tough pain two ways with Advil plus acetaminopin. Advil, the official pain relief partner of the NFL. Ask your pharmacist at this product's rate for you.

Always read and follow the label. my own sanity. And so she said, you know, all right, well, if I'm going to try therapy, you go try it too. And I was like, okay, I'll show you. I'm not crazy. And I'm not the one that's talking crazy stuff. So I, you know, went to the therapist. And he said something like, well, you know, okay, the whole thing with your daughter, that's fine.

But this whole thing with your dad, we got to talk about that. I'm like, that's what I don't want to talk about. I guess I've, in his words, repressed things. and things of that going on. But I seem to be doing okay right now. So I'm just going to keep traveling forward. And probably one day I'll crack up and we'll know why. Maybe it's right now.

Maybe it's Tay. Do you know, do you know any of the times that he got, do you know all the times he got arrested or what he was involved in? Well, not all the times. I was younger until, you know, when he went into counterfeiting, got busted there.

But a lot of it was gambling. He ran up some gambling bills and, got busted up for it. I mean, we come home from Vegas, really messed up, a big drinker. You know, we had noticed that,

and I have no evidence, just pictures of him hanging out with what looked like mafioso type guys in Mexico. You know, you can kind of tell the tinge, but he just said they were good friends. I don't know,

but he was in stuff that we didn't even know about. He had whole families, like in Michigan, whole other wife, whole other brothers and sisters. I mean, he was, he was a crazy dude. Yeah, you know, it's just one of those things. And just, unfortunately, racist is all get out too.

So he just, it's really a testament that he wasn't around because we probably would have turned out a little differently, you know. Right. Growing up with mom, you're a little bit more sensitive towards females and in general people's feelings. And so I think I got more of that than if my dad was around who's kind of a tough bigot, you know, if you want. You know, and I won't even say rest in peace to him now because it's, it's really not a good feeling that he wasn't there for, not just me, but my younger brothers who really probably needed a little bit more. But, yeah. So enough of enough of that stuff. So 85 graduated high school, had a choice, you know, got a scholarship to a no-name community college.

I said, I don't want to do that. So moved to California with family. did the general education stuff, then went to transferred into Berkeley, went there for three or four years. Love that. It was fun. You know, a lot of people watching. Berkeley's crazy.

You know, at that time, there's still a lot of activist parades and all that stuff. I don't know if you're familiar, but there's a people's park there that the university and the community have been fighting over for like 40 years. The university wants to make a parking lot, which I think they finally won the lawsuit.

And the community wants it to remain a homeless freedom space area. So that was always interesting to see what's going on there. There's always, you know, tear gas bombs going off or flares and stuff. So you walk down there during between classes, see what's going on, then go have lunch. And, you know, so it was pretty cool times at the university at that time. I was nice to go see the, what's going on at People's Park. I walked graduation in, I think it was 1989. You know, family friends were there, you know, throwing up the hats and tassels and it was awesome.

That night, it just went and got hammered with other graduates. And that night was a crazy night to start with because, you know, we had just finished this big exam. I barely finished it in time. And I'm talking to my buddies. And I said, well, yeah, you know, yeah, that was pretty good. Because the, you know, the course that we were in, it was you just write for two hours. It was a legal briefing class. So you just write.

You know, they give you a couple questions. You just write. And so I barely got out of there in time. And I remember, you know, my buddy was getting the beer. And he goes, yeah. So what did you think about that second question? I was like, second question. What?

It was a second question. He said, yeah. That was the harder one. I was like, oh, boy. So I thought, all right, well, I'm going to drink tonight. I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know if I'm going to graduate now because of that class. Luckily, I did. I got to be in the class.

I'm not sure why, but I ended up getting to be. But that set the whole tone for the night. Like, well, I'm going to just get hammered. And we did. And I had given my key to my car key to one of the guys because I knew I wasn't going to be driving. And it was probably 10 o'clock at night. We're at the restaurant. I get up, don't know what happens.

I leave the group somehow and start walking towards my car. And I was like, well, I don't have my keys. Well, drunk me, I found my spare key in my wallet. And so I got my key, got my car, and started driving home. Unfortunately, I didn't have the alarm clicker. So for the whole 12 miles home through Berk, through Oakland, my bright yellow Toyota Celica was with the lights and honking and the horn honking all the way down at that was at 1 a.m. all the lights on. I'm surprised I didn't get stopped earlier.

But about two blocks from my house, I sat through a stoplight and I got stopped for a DUI. And that was like the real deal. You know, you're going to clink. You went in there and I spent some time to get sober and stuff like that. Again, that was another brush with the law that I thought, man, I just can't be doing this anymore. And luckily, nothing happened from that, you know, cost you money. And back then you didn't get attorney's fees. You just go to school and, you know, be ashamed of yourself and all that. Nowadays, it's serious. Yeah.

You get caught. It's, there's no doubt. And luckily, nobody got hurt. It was just me sitting through a couple of cycles of the stoplight. And that's how they got me. I was like, you didn't notice the blinking lights and the horn. He goes, oh, that was a second. That was a second side that something was going on, Mr. Burkhead.

So those two things were the things that kept me kind of on the straight and narrow, if you will, at least this side of the straight and arrow. You know, I did. I was watching one of the episodes, the Thief of Hearts came up. And that was really intriguing. I didn't know that was you. You look so different. I mean, it would, I was like, no kidding and more street cred.

It's funny. The reading the comments on that episode are hilarious. What are they saying? Oh, I mean, you know, they're they keep joking about single mothers and, you know, you know, being just joking around, you bastard. You know, that's how could you? That's not true. Exactly. Yeah, I'm sure they sensationalized it to the hills.

But it's the, you know, it's the, it's the comments that are making, you know, jokes and laughing that are so funny. Yeah. Well, and I thought, well, the dynamic that was funny was you commenting on yourself saying that that wasn't true. But oh, yeah, that part was, you know, at this point, it was like, I was honest. That's kind of true, you know, like, that's not what happened exactly. Exactly. They sensationalize it and make it make you look as bad as possible. Like there's a reason.

At least there's a reason that this happened. But either way, it's, it's silly. It's like arguing, it's like a serial killer arguing. You know, I didn't kill 13 people. I only killed 11. Right. Exactly. There's still a douchebag.

You know, you're still so. Yeah. But the 13 will get you a couple extra readers or some extra subscriptions. You know, and I learned that the hard way as well, you know, in this, what happened when I was at Cisco. So see where I. So I graduated. walked, got hammered, got the DUI, got a job.

I think I remember that. And then, you know, they don't give your certificate, your diploma for like six months. Not sure why. Again. I was English with a pre-law emphasis, legal brief writing, all that good stuff. And so six months later, I go back to the registrar's office to get my diploma. And they say, okay, yep, Ms. Burkid, the way right here. And I was sitting there talking to the lady and, you know, just kind of making small chat.

And I said, you know, has anybody ever not come back for their certificate? You know, because they just spent four years doing it or whatever. I said, oh, it happens all the time. You know, they just don't need it or something. I was like, yeah, that would be, I don't see how that would happen. And then the, you know, administrator comes back and says, well, Mr. Berkey, we don't have a certificate for you. I said, well, that's strange. I got all my, you know, credits in and everything.

like you got to go talk to your counselor. And at this point, I'm six months out of college. I got a job. I'm, you know, on to life. And so I go back and, you know, make an appointment, everything. And they say, oh, yeah, you're short like three or four credits. And I was like, what? So at this point, I'm officially a college dropout.

How is that possible? They let you walk? Well, so the walking is different from the graduating. It's not tied because sometimes they'll, they want you to walk, even though you're going to graduate in the summer. And so the walking really isn't tied to the graduation part. It's just part of the sequence of getting it. The hardcore requirement is enough credits, obviously, to graduate.

And so I was like, what? I don't know. So they said, oh, well, yeah, you didn't finish statistics. And I said, well, how come I, how did I miss it? That's what counselors are for. I was here. Well, we don't know, you know, blah. So I couldn't go back to school because I had a job.

everything. So short, you know, long story short, it took me 15 years to complete college, 15 years. You just didn't go back for that one class. You could take it on that class. I didn't. I couldn't. It was one of those things. Like I had a full time job, you know, and it wasn't, I guess, a priority. I already had. I was already doing my thing. And, but I knew I had to go back and clean up because, you know, you don't just leave after, whatever, 118 credits with three shy and, you know, all that money spent. So, um, well, now you also know that your job doesn't verify people's college degree that well I think back then this job didn't need it but and it was harder back then to verify it you know you couldn't just

plop up a internet page back then you had to send something or call someone and the verify and all that stuff so but that did bite me a couple times later obviously in some some job hunts So I was off to the races. By this time, it is, let's see, 19, to graduated. Oh, yeah. So got a job at, and this was the first place that it bit me, a place called Benham Capital Management. They no longer exist. They were bought a while back.

And I was hired as a cabling technician. And I would do ads, moves, and changes on big telephone switches. they're called DMS 100s. And I was being mentored by a really cool guy named Barry. Hey, shout out to Barry. He's a good telecommunications guy. And so there, after three months, they went to verify my college graduateness. And they said, hey, Mike, we're having some issues here.

Can't find what's going on. I was like, oh, well, you should just call them. And so I had given them, I gave them a, back then, pagers were still a thing. Cell phones were just coming out, but it wasn't like standard that you had a cell phone yet. So I gave them a pager number and said,

call this and the administrator will call you back. They called the pager. The pager, it went to a voicemail. He, thank you for calling administration, blah, blah, blah. And then I got the voicemail. And then what I did is I just called them back and said, oh, yes, Mr. Burkhead has a graduate, undergraduate degree in a Bachelor of Arts in this,

and he's left in standing, good standing. I thought for sure they were going to say, call me, call bunk on that. They didn't. So I got to stay there. And just by fluke, like a month later, an opportunity came up where I got taken up and moved a larger account and working with in San Francisco.

So it was close. I felt it. So that was like a sign that I had to go back and clean up that, that mess, if you will. Yeah, so that was, so my now is off to the, to the, off to the races on, on tech. So cabling, a lot of computers, just because the job put me in the middle of it, wasn't anything that I really wanted to do. In fact, I really is going to sound sad and can't believe I'm saying it. I wanted to be an attorney back then. So I was all prepped.

And then I saw all my friends after I got out and I saw them doing 80 hour work weeks, you know, losing all their hair, getting all the way. And I'm like, man, I don't know if I want to do that anymore. So I ended up in computers that way, which eventually led to my, my time at Infogear, which built the iPhone. Okay. Yeah. Is that where we're at now? That's where we're at now. Okay.

So what happened when you first got there, when you first got to that project or? Yeah. So you got moved with the project you got moved to or was there another? Well, there was another one, but it was closer to, uh, to the same company. So I got moved into San Francisco. I was working outside of San Francisco. Moved to, uh, Goldman Sachs, big account, you know, very well known name. Um, at that point, we were at top of the 33rd floor in San Francisco.

So great views, great food all the time, you know, the, those brokers and those, uh, stock brokers, they live life pretty good. And we were the Schleps. So we were the technicians, you know, my peers were the janitors. You know, we were kind of low on the totem pole. But every morning, I had to be there at 5.30 in the morning for the open of the market. So all the big stockbrokers and their big telephones, which are called turrets, they were working and everything. So, and, you know, during the dark in San Francisco, you see things that you don't see during the day. And like any big city, Now it's a little bit worse than it was back then.

But I remember one time, you know, I had to take the bus in from the East Bay. One time I got off of BART, the train that runs through San Francisco, I got off the bar and I got up on the escalator and I noticed a whole family sitting there asking for money. I mean, two kids, the wife, the husband, and it was dark, cold, and it just struck me. You know, I'm passing this person, this group, this family. who have no money. And I'm about to go up 33 floors to probably some of the richest people in the Bay Area that live in Atherton, that live in San Francisco, Knob Hill.

And it's just that contrast. I don't know why. It just struck me as, I don't know, seriousness. Like something's going on. I don't understand it. Where do I fit in? I just, it was one of those things. I don't even know what to take of it.

But it's stuck with me all these years as a reminder that, there are always two sides. Obviously the halves and the half-nots, but there's a lot that don't fit into either one of those and where, you know, where do you fit in, Mike? And, you know, it's just one of those things. So I gave them some money and I knew it wasn't going to do anything. I just gave them some money and went up to the 33rd

and they have open breakfast for everybody. And it's just one of those things that just struck with me when you're looking out, you know, over San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, in the background and all the lights are on it, you just kind of forget about everything else that's down on the floor. And I try not to these days, especially when it's people that aren't as lucky as we are. You know, I learned that recently just in a recent trip.

But anyway, so Goldman Sachs, 1992 to 1994, we did some big things there, move them from the 33rd floor to the 45th floor. Really gangbusters, it's really nice to have all the money in the world when you have that client and they say just buy it spend it do it like okay so it made a lot of money there well relatively a lot of money for the time compared to my buddies who were running for partner and everything I was making a lot of money and they were kind of pissed off because they were working hard and they had law degrees and everything took the bar and here I am you know a university dropout playing with computers making more and so it's it's one of those things like okay am I

where do I fit in? Am I in between? It's just, and I was young. I was probably 20-something. So it's still trying to figure out life, you know, and not far from it, too. I just didn't know what's going on. Yeah. So now I'm in San Francisco. So a lot easier to traverse to other jobs and look around and you get a little bit of, I'll say a little bit of cash a, because now you're in the city. So other clients or other big companies are in the city. Say, okay, he's already working within the area. He doesn't have to come in. from suburbs, even though, you know, I still lived across the bay. So I still had to take either drive in or take the shuttle or the Bay Area Rapid Transit. And so a couple years later, you know, we, after we did this big installation for Goldman Sachs,

we were pretty much done there. So time to move on. And that's where I ended up at a company called Pacific Telesis. And that was the telephone company for, all of California. They owned a couple of subsidiaries, but it was Pack Bell. Have you ever heard of Pac Bell?

Yeah. So it was one of the big regional Bell operating companies that was formerly AT&T that broke up in 1984. So now there was, you know, a regional Bell operating companies. There was Pacific Telescence, Southwestern Bell. There's like, I think six or seven of them. And Pactel was one of them.

So we worked there for a couple years. And then we got moved over to in San Francisco. we built out the internet service provider, the first one for the state in California. So we had engineers running around with routers all times a day or nights, installing them in the central offices, the telephone central offices, really cool times. I was the, I was like the business guy within the engineering team. So a lot of my peers were engineers, network engineers, safety engineers, and, you know, long hair, blue hair,

piercings, even back then, a lot of piercing. So I was like the standout, the oddball. Like, well, why is that guy a collared, guys got a collared shirt on? Why is he hanging around with all these other guys? But we were technicians at heart. So we were able to talk the same lingo. But when the business needed inputs from us,

you know, what's our roadmap business plan? We know, what do want to do? That's when they pushed me out there. And I was the liaison, if you will. And so there was a funny story about that because my goal was to be the break, the buffer between our engineers so they can do the work and the business. So whenever they wanted accounting actuals and all that stuff, they would send up one of their accountants. So we were on the eighth floor. We overlooking San Francisco, gorgeous views and everything, just really blessed big screen monitors with the network operation center.

We were watching everything, all the heartbeats. And they would send up their accountant. And the guy's name was Langbaum. He's still around. He's not at AT&T, though. And so every time he would enter the eighth floor, all you would hear was people yelling, Langbaum, Langbaum, look out. Because as soon as he gets a hold of an engineer, he wants to know, what are they spending,

what are they spending it on. And so that was my cue to hop up, you know, look across the cubicles, find him, intercept him, and then get him into a conference room. And then I just start giving him what he needs. hopefully giving him what it needs or redirecting him to another another source so so today i just hear the word langbaum and i can't stop laughing he's still going though uh i think i'm going seen i'll you know after 34 years you start to maybe laugh at things that aren't so funny well no so so what happened so what at what point so i mean are you at this point are you working on the iphone or

Okay, good question. I'll quickly segue. So we, Pack Bell, we get purchased by SBC. So big company buys little Pack Bell because they're now getting together like AT&T was. So they're re-recombining themselves. So myself and the lead, the director, engineer who basically led the whole ISPs install. His name was Shaheen Bukshande, great guy, very good friend at the time, still is. And we just decided, We're not going to, we don't want to be managed from Texas. We're, you know, California, it's just not going to mesh. So we did, there was an opportunity that came up through one of the mayors of the local towns. And we decided to just go take up the opportunity. And the opportunity was to go to the Philippines and do a presentation to the president of the country on rebuilding this place called Clark Air Force Base. And it was a Clark Air Force Base, it was a former, it was a, it was a, vacated by the U.S. a couple of years earlier.

And now the Philippines wanted to build out a technology and business park so they can start attracting other business and become a hub, if you will, on the Asian pipeline. Bro, you've just gone a long way from being in a little town on the border. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You ever kick back and say, the fuck did I get here?

Exactly. I'm supposed to be an air conditioner, you know, repair man or something. Like, you know. No doubt. Yeah, I feel that way sometimes. And I think probably what I attributed to is just being flexible. I kind of look at myself as, okay, a little bit like a leaf in the river. You know, it's getting moved left and right and you can be hard and withstand some of

things, maintain a for, you know, a trajectory or try something new. And I didn't want to leave a good gig then either. my buddy said, hey, this is good. Let's go try it. And I had no kids. I was just going to ask that, are you? Were you married? Did you have kids?

I had a girlfriend, who's my wife today. And no kids. So no mortgage. I mean, very little, very little of anything to risk, including very little money. So it wasn't like we were making a ton of money at a pack bell. But it came up. And we said, well, this is kind of crazy. Let's do it.

So you could have everybody's mouths dropped when we said, we're leaving. because the acquisition still hadn't happened and it was a big deal. And, um, but we just decided to try something different. I don't really know what his core reasons were. He wasn't married either. Didn't have kids, uh, want to try something new or he just didn't want to be managed from Texas. I don't know really what it was.

We, uh, didn't drink a lot of beers around that, but we did have a lot of fun on the, on the trip. Um, so we went over there real quick. Back then, this shows how old I'm at, I am. Back then they still had smoking on. the international flights. Wow. And so there was a smoking section in the back and a non-smoking section. And the smoking section was separated by a curtain. And so I don't know, if I can't make this up. And so I wake up, you know, my back is to the to the curtain. I wake up. I feel like I

smoke 10 packs of cigarettes, but we're in Manila. So we get there and we're doing our thing. We go, we're part of this big entourage, which is pretty cool. They already had the, buses lined up or you know executive vans we were traveling with the mayor of milpitas and his entourage so and we were the we were the dancers that they were looking for they wanted to know about the internet and how to build it and all that stuff so we were like the the pretty girl at the show which we'd never felt like that before and so we were being taken to these different villages to meet their mayors and their directors and it was really cool and so we eventually ended up meeting with the uh went to the presidents. It was the airport, but he was landing at the his, his special area. He landed and there

was a big fanfare and everything. And then we went into a big conference room. We exchanged gifts. Well, we didn't exchange gifts. We gave him and his wife, you know, wine from Napa Valley and some perfume from, from San Francisco. And I think they enjoyed it. And then, and then later we had, we gave our, it was a couple days later, we gave a presentation to his cabinet about what, it was to build out Clark Air Force Base and how to do it and all the stuff. And the interesting part was at that point, we were being shuttled between nice hotels and, you know, nice dinners and all this. We're like, hey, this is kind of nice. We're going from, you know, hanging out with the janitors to, you know, doing some big things. And so just when, you know, it's probably like four or five days into it.

We then have the presentation to the president, executive staff, all that stuff. I mean, really a lot of hoopla. We're wearing suits. Even though it's hotter than hell down there, we're wearing suits. because that's what you do when you're meeting with the president. And a day later, after that presentation, someone, I don't know if it was their local services, they found a whole bunch of hazardous waste material on Clark Air Force Base. And so when we heard that, we're like, okay, well, they're going to clean it up. They're going to do something. They weren't asking us for an answer.

We were just saying, this is probably what they're going to do. Well, they went back and asked the government or told the government, I don't know, U.S. government, you got to come back and clean it up and the U.S. government said, nope, we're just giving you that. That's yours. And they're like, oh, really? And like, pretty much, yeah. So the next day, we were picked up to go to our next hotel, except this time it was just Shaheen and I. There was no mayor. There was no entourage. There was nothing. Just us, too, in the van and the bus driver. And so we unceremoniously get dropped off at what looked like, was a garage with a sign.

We're like, oh, this is different. This doesn't look like where we just came from. And the driver didn't speak in English. So he's like, hey, you know,

go on in. So we went in and it was bad. It was one of those hotels where, like, you know, you can see the rat scurring. And we could put our arms, open our arms up and touch both walls at the same time. That's how big the bed area was.

That's when we knew we got, I don't know what they called. the Manila Two-Step or something, but we were no longer the pretty girl at the dance because the U.S. was not willing to clean up the base, and there was no Clark Air Force base renovation now. So we made a quick decision like, hey, we can't stay here because we're going to get eaten by rats. So we didn't have any money either. All we had was a couple credit cards. And so we said, basically agreed, hey, we got to go back to that other hotel we were at because that was nice and, you know, really something we could get used to. And so we went back and what I

had to do was, well, that's been 43, 34 years. I went back and basically drafted up a form that said that we were on official business from Pacific Bell and to give us corporate discount rates. And so we did that. Fax did, did some international kind of technical maneuvering. And then they gave us a good discount so we could then stay there for the remainder part of our time on on shaheen's credit card i didn't even have a credit card he it was his credit card so we were trying to watch our food intake at that point uh but we didn't really do a good job of it all i remember from that last part was there was a six dollar can of pringles and we kept walking by it like oh man we can't do it finally he just said let's do it so we had the six

we just started racking up charges and we, I'm not even sure how we paid for it later, but we got out of there. Luckily, we didn't have to do any work. We didn't get, we didn't owe any money. But it was one of those things where you quickly find out, wow.

And the funny part was after they dropped us off, we didn't ever hear from the mayor again, the entourage, which were so buddy, buddy with us. We were like, yesterday's news. So it was like very interesting on how that works out. You know, one day you're the,

the prettiest girl and the next day you are, you know, linebacker that they don't, they don't need. Yeah. So iPhone. That intro is to the iPhone. We came back jobless. My friends from Pacific Bell went on to other companies and a couple of them went on to a company called Infogear and it was a startup and their thing was at this point internet was still pretty new so what year was this this was so when i 1997 was when um info where i started info gear but the the internet piece where we installed the infrastructure for the internet it was dial-up internet too at in california so it was still dial-up was the main thing and here's a little you know trivia for you so back in the day they they used to have a pack bell would have

a product that was called a T1 and a T1 was a you remember you know those I at my office we had a T1 it was like one or two lines that suddenly became 20 lines right and how much was it? I was super cheap like it was like a I want to say a tenth of the price to have individual lines or like a 110 dollars or something so you needed you know whatever it's going to be seven or 800 bucks and instead you spent 150 bucks like it was yeah yeah yeah Well, the dedicated T1s that you have for like, for your backbone traffic, like say, Akamai wanted to move their data from one central office to another, those would be dedicated or they call nailed. And so those were like three or four grand each per month. And the throughput is only 1.5 megabits. Only 1.5 for three grand. Now we get, I get 384 or almost a gig for 80 bucks a month. Can you? I want to say we went from like, let's say I forget exactly, but now they think about it,

I think we had like 10 or 12 lines and it went from like whatever, $12 or $1,300 down to a few hundred bucks. Yeah. Yep. Through the phone machine or the phone switch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So nowadays, I mean, now it's it's a commodity.

That's why the telephone companies, they had to switch their models up. This was like, this was in 2000 when I got that. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's good. In 2001, yeah. things were getting better then. I mean, at that point, so one of the projects that we had at Pack Bell was the first DSL test. So digital subscriber loop gives you high speed bandwidth over the

existing two pair of copper cabling. So that means all the existing infrastructure, you know, the twisted pair, they call it, that goes to your home, can be utilized for high speed instead of just the 56K dial-up. So that was the big next. step and we demoed that at Pack Bell and it was big reviews. And so that was a precursor to like high speed bandwidth, high speed access like cable modems. DSL is still out there, but it's just not as clean as like cable modems. But anyway, so in 1997, a couple of my buddies that had left Pack Bell said, hey, we're looking for a project manager over here. Be interested. And of course, it's been about a month since I had a job, like, yep, let's check it out.

You know, five interviews later, you know, I had to kind of, I put the, you know, regard to my college dropoutness, I put, you know, University of California, Berkeley, and then a real small font in progress. So that's all I could do to try and finagle around it, but obviously you can't hide it. So they were willing to take me as a dropout, given that I had a reference from some of the folks that worked there. And that was a little bit of a contrast, too. You're coming in from Pacific Bell, big buildings, big views of the Bay Area.

And here it's in Redwood City, which is a suburb, many miles away from San Francisco, flat. We had, it was an office that had just beat up furniture and just, you know, it wasn't one of those places like, wow, I get to come work here. But, you know, my buddy said, hey, you know, his paycheck and all that stuff. Like, okay, I'm here. and then they hired me. And I said, okay, well, where's the product?

And so, well, he said, we don't have it yet. Like, well, what do you mean? It's you, you talked about it. You talked about the tech, you know, everything like that. Where is it? And he showed me a picture. It's like, here, here it is right here. I'm like, okay, well, where is that that you just took a picture of?

And he said, well, that's a clay demo. And I have a right over there. That's the clay demo. We don't have a unit yet. And I was thinking to myself, oh, man. Man, I don't know if this is going to last because got no product to sell. We're on VC funding. I don't know what our burn rate was or anything like that.

So VC funding, venture capital funding. Yeah, venture capital funding. So they had as part of this business, they had gone out to the market and they had some of the biggest VCs in the area working on it. And one of them is a guy named Kramlick, Dick Kramlick, big, big name in the area. And so when I saw that, it was just a picture and there's nothing else. And I said, okay, well, here's, I'm going to change my perspective. I'm coming here to learn. I'm coming here to learn.

And this is in my own mind. And this happened in the three seconds that he showed me the picture and said, we don't have a, we don't have a product. Originally, you go to a startup to make a lot of money. You get, go IPO after having a whole bunch of stock options, go big. When I saw that they didn't have a product, this was going to be many years before anything was going to happen. So that's when I changed my inner perspective and said, well, it's not going to be money.

I want knowledge. How do you build a business? How do you fund it? What does a CEO do? What does the CIO do? What does it work? So my perspective changed right in that moment. And it made things a little bit easier because I knew money was four years, five years out, if at all. I mean, I think it's the odds of going IPO for a startup is very, very small. And so anybody thinks, oh, I'm just going to go start a company, go IPO. it's really difficult. So that's when I realized, okay, I'm just here to learn. So everything I did was about learning how it was done. So when I showed up in the office, I was the first one in the morning.

I always checked the fact machines. I always checked the printers. And I always checked just to see what was going on the night before. If there was charts on the whiteboards, if there was leftovers, left in the boardrooms. So I was really kind of like just something. someone who's learning about the company inside out. And so I did this for several years. It took a year and a half before we actually had a real product. And it was the one that was in the picture, luckily. And it was, yeah, so the first product was a dial-up iPhone, iPhone, they call them internet appliances

back then. And it had a 7.4-inch diagonal screen monochro or no, 16 gray scale. So it wasn't color and it wasn't just black and white had the different gray scales and it was able you're able to have a electronic roll decks you could surf the internet and you can make phone calls obviously because of a single line you could only either make phone calls or surf the internet you couldn't do both at the same time so that was the hot latest thing and there wasn't anything else out on the market like it in terms of combining the two obviously the the um the photos that you're showing you know clearly are not this. Correct.

So, I mean, like an iPhone, just to make sure people don't understand because when I was, you know, I showed somebody one of the photos that you had sent and they're like, that's not an iPhone. I'm like, no, no, you have to understand. These aren't even mockups. These are, this is just the components and how they work. Once they get it working perfectly. So when you're pointing at like what looks like a desktop or a telephone, you know, that's like, okay, this is how it works.

works and then you go through and the engineers figure out how do I take all that and shrink it down into this. So the stuff that you're showing when you say iPhone, iPhone is the technology for the iPhone and the concept of the iPhone prior to it being jammed into an actual iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. And also prior to the technology even existing. So the iPhones that we that I'm showing now are what we went to market.

with. So we sold roughly 70,000 to 100,000 units of those big screen, the big screened phones that you see now. And there was two models that we had. One was, they're both touch screens, but they're huge. You can't just put them in your back pocket. They are stand, you know, they put it, you put them on your desk or in an office. And so we, the technology for the new, the small iPhones that Apple did with a small screen, smaller chip set, that was an available for another nine years. So we had built the concept and showed it and marketed it and got VCs and we spent millions of dollars on marketing, went around the world, all this stuff. And then it didn't happen because the tech wasn't there. So we, so and that's where I think the,

the, the fund starts is when they start looking at, okay, well, this isn't going to be an IPO. What are we going to do with it? And so there's, you know, so what do you do? with a startup that is before it's tech, the concept is there, but you can't go any further. Do you develop it? Yeah. Well, you could. Yeah. So the most expensive piece of the phone was the screen.

And I think the screen on the phones that we developed, like this one right here, with the big screen, that was about $70 for the screen itself. And then the rest of the components were smaller costs. And that phone, those phones, all the phones that we built for Infogear, they only have. had three megabytes. It was one megabyte of RAM and two megabytes. I'm sorry, one megabyte of DRAM and two megabytes of memory. That would store your record, you know, your Rolodex and your names and all that stuff. So only three megs. Can you imagine that? Right. And it was the precursor to the SaaS model because the phone would connect to a server in the network. And the server, which we called server gear, pre-parsed the request, took out any data that it didn't need,

like the color and sizes and frames and stuff like that, and then made it viewable on the phone. So that's how it was working back then. And that was, again, what we now call today cloud technology or SaaS. But back then it was kind of like some bailing wire and some duct tape. And we said, hey, it's the internet. Right. And back then, for context, they were. We're selling dog food on the internet because it was just coming up, dry cleaning.

And so we were putting all that stuff on the phone to make it look like it was useful. And hey, I want to check my dry cleaning. Let's just go to my Rolodex and press this big, nice button. And so it was, you know, you're trying to sell something before its time. And it was, it was difficult. You know, one of those things. I was going to say, did you see there was a, there's a TikTok going around. And I forget the guy's name too.

I've seen him. I should know his name. Anyway, he was, I want to say the CEO of the company that made the Blackberry. Oh, yeah. I saw that the movie, the Blackberry or Blackberry. So there's a interview where Apple was about to come out with the iPhone and they asked him about it. And he just starts laughing and laughing. He's like, listen, he's like, good luck. You're telling me a $1,000 telephone. He is 100% financing.

he starts naming off all the things that he felt were, you know, detrimental to the success of the iPhone. He's like, I mean, he's like, it doesn't even have a, he is, it doesn't even have a keyboard. He's like, good luck checking anything with that. He's like, I don't know what they think he is. Maybe there's a market, but I don't see it. And he just starts laughing. And of course, it immediately kills the Blackberry. Right.

Oh, yeah. Now, what's so funny is in the comment section, people are like, you know, because the idea, he sounds like a jackass. But of course, they are also like, yeah, he's also like the sixth wealthiest man in the world. Wow. Whoever. And once again, I can't remember his name, but I recognize him. But it's funny, too, you, you, it's always those technologies.

It's, it's, to me what cracks me up. It's the guy that walked into a boardroom in early 1980s and said, hey, I have an idea for bottling water. And people had to go, I'm sorry, what? what kind of water regular water well we'll call it spring water we'll get it from a spring we'll make it some special we're gonna bottle it how much you're gonna sell it for it more than soda what the fuck out of it let this guy in i mean can you imagine like jennison in let him in here could you're losing their job like you got 30 guys at a boardroom going who what are you talking

about i mean that guy had to go to 40 different companies before somebody said i don't know might be a thing maybe right well and now it's air now they're bottling air well that's how that's how ridiculous it sounds what i mean they're oh yeah so it's already available in like sports the sports locker and stuff it's bottled air uh not extra oxygen or anything and it's supposed to give you some kind of lift but it's already out there and i had thought about that too i was like why couldn't they do that with like on the airline. So if you're in first class, you get special air, you know, upper air, if you will. In the back you get whatever. I don't know. But anyways, I think it's happening now. Tap air.

Tap air, exactly. Right. So, so I was at the 97, what we were talking about? We were talking about you. Yeah, that's right. The technology. You just, the tech hadn't caught up with it. You had the concept, the idea. You just technically couldn't quite put it together. So but you've got all this money invested into this concept and you're on the on the brink. What do you do? Right. So during the, you know, the, the buildup stage, you know, there was a couple of funny stories.

You know, when we, a lot of these people had never done this. We've never built a phone. Our development staff was in Israel, in Kafar Saba. So all of our developers, all the real smart guys were in Kafar Saba. And on the U.S. side, we were the implementation or infrastructure team where we would go out, install the equipment, coordinate with all the vendors. And then we would meet with the customers to make sure that everything is going well. So it was a two-team effort. But during the buildup, we'd never done this.

So we got the first telephone, which barely worked, but we used that thing to hell. We wore out the numbers on the dial pad. we had to put those, I don't know, your old like me, a dimo labeler. Yeah. One, two, three, four, five. So those are still on there today, 34 years later. And that phone went around the world trying to sell to all these different telcos. And so then as part of the scaling part of, hey, will multiple phones work if they all go in, you know, dial into the same server?

Nobody knew. Nobody gets done this before. So one night, I was late at the office. had left. And I think some of the guys were working remote or something. And I said, all right, we got to do a scale test. So I went around and installed eight of the phones and eight different phone lines that are able to dial outward. So it's the same kind of phone line that used for a fax machine. You know, it's not like behind a phone system, you can dial out. And so to see how it would react, I install these around the office and then I would put the timer on a clock and then I would

quickly run between all the different phones and press dial dial dial and they were they're all on different offices so I had to go to one office quick and so nobody was there so it was just like a sprint boom boom boom boom see how fast you could do and see what happens to the to the server see if it crashes or or not and so after a couple times of doing it I got down to a nice process and I was able to get all phones dialing in at the same time where we could actually see a hit on the server, and then we could use that as part of our successful scalability test to see that it works.

And so when I said, and we showed those numbers, it was in percentages, so you couldn't tell how many phones were connected in, how long were they connected. So no technical backup data whatsoever. But on that note, I just told them, I said, well, we dialed in eight at a time.

It didn't take the server down. Here's the stats. One of the engineers gave the stats. And then they said, okay, it's a success. Let's keep going. And so we kept building. We got the next what they call the Sidco iPhone being built out, which is the white one right there.

And I'll show you a big picture of that. And what happens is the manufacturer was right down the street from us, well, probably like 20 miles. miles, 10 miles. And I was the interface with them. So I would go down and meet with their hardware engineers, see what the problems were, document them, and then talk to our software guys and see if there was anything we could do to fix them. Well, one time I went down there and we were having a big issue with the screens not working all of a sudden. Just out of the box, you can press the screen. It wouldn't work. And so after talking with the engineers and looking at them and everything,

we figured out that there was a small membrane. I know this is getting in the weeds, but it does become important later. There's a small membrane, a rubber membrane, that seals where the screen meets the heart, the design of the phone, and that membrane keeps the screen separate from the plastic device.

So it's a key piece to the whole operation of the touchscreen. Well, what was happening is when they got jostled, that membrane would slide in towards the screen, and the screen would think that there's a finger pressing on it. So when you got it out of the box and you plugged it in and you pressed on the screen, it didn't react. And we were seeing a lot of this problem. So when I went down to the hardware guys, I said, we got to do something different.

This is not, this is a big issue. And this guy, big bushy beard, big hairy afro. I forgot his name, but he was one of the best engineers that I knew, hardware guy. He looked at it for a couple minutes. And he said, I got the answer. I was like, oh, good. So we don't have to rebuild or anything like that. He goes, no, no.

So he takes out his business card. And he then slides it in between the membrane and the hard on the plastic of the phone, slides a membrane back in. And now the, now the screen works. And I was like, well, that's a fix for this. But what about the others? He goes, we can't, we can't build something new. There's.

And so I had to take that back to our, you know, executive staff, the CEO and everything. And he said, we just got to make sure that the membrane is a little bit bigger and keep a business card handy. I'm like, okay, okay. So that was a small issue. Then we did a trial with them. And the biggest issue that came out of the trial, I think it was like 50 people. The biggest issue was that the screen was too bright. And at night, they could not go to sleep.

So we had to put a dimmer on it and some stuff like that. But for the most part, it was ready to go to the market and to start selling. This is where we were rudely, rudely surprised that nobody was buying. We did a big install in one of the big internet service providers. So they had these what they call points of presence around the country. So if you're in Tuskegee, you can plug in your phone and you can get to a local number and get out to the internet. So that's called a point of presence or pop. So we bought all this network.

We got all the servers in the network and nobody was buying. And so we were hard selling. You know, we had the senior VP flying around the country around the world. And then we were also doing marketing. So we were starting to get people calling into us saying, hey, I would like to be involved in this. How do I take it? And we only wanted the biggest opportunities, big clients.

We didn't want to dig around with, oh, I want 20 units. it's got to be thousands and thousands of units back then it was thousands now it's millions but it just shows the scale difference um and so we i flew to um new zealand and australia uh and i'll show the picture long a big uh big story here is 18t wouldn't buy in fact we did a show and tell with AT&T the phone started smoking so that they said no to that okay yeah that's that's That's definitely a deal killer when the phone is smoking. We went to Telstra in Australia. We went to telephone, Espania, in Spain.

We went to South Africa. I mean, all these different places, no buyers. There was this one little country that kept knocking on our door. And I was the main guy that sent out all the phone. So I checked them, loaded them with software, and I was the interface to all these clients that needed tech support. So I was the lowest man on the totem pole. next to the secretary.

So I was a schleper doing whatever it took to get these units out there. And so there was one country. They kept saying, hey, we're interested. You know, I sent them two phones because I felt so bad for them because we were ignoring them. And they got them set up and they were working. And they said, well, we want to buy 5,000 units. And I was like, wow, 5,000. We're off to the races.

So then I go to my boss and I say, hey, Steve, New Zealand. New Zealand. Believe it or not, yeah, a little little New Zealand. So then I went to my boss. I was like, and this is kind of earlier on, but we were starting to find a hard sell. And I said, you know, Steve, New Zealand's real. They're stepping up for 5,000. Let's go.

He goes, no, we got to do something else, something bigger. You know, we're literally looking at these other big boys. And I keep saying, we need to take, you know, live. Yeah, something. But I'm, again, I'm low man on the total pole. So, you know, who cares what Mike says? Who cares what Mike says? So anyways, you know, I kept kind of New Zealand warm.

And the gentleman down there, his name was Morris Curran and rest in peace, Morris. He was the one really leading the charge down there. And we had a really good relationship. And so when nobody else bought, nobody else was buying. And we had to have some kind of sale to show relevance in the market, Steve went back and said, okay, let's let's let Morris in. And I was like, finally, finally. So Morris flew up from New Zealand, you know, and he's ready to plunk down a check,

flies up from New Zealand and then gets here like, I don't know, 7 p.m. at night. Me, Steve, and Morris are the only ones at the office. It's dark. And they ink the deal right there. No celebratory dinner. No fanfare. Just inked the deal. and I think Morris got right back on a plane and flew back to New Zealand.

And there was only one moment where I just said, hey, let's for the hell of it. Let's just take a picture. And I stepped back and took a picture of Steve and Morris shaking hands in front of the big iPhone poster. And that was the official first sale of the iPhone, international or national. And the little old New Zealand was the first implementation that we had. And it didn't turn out that great because it was such a small country. but still it was they flew me flew us down there to implement it train on it give the you know kind of the big country hey here's how we're doing it we're you know strategy and all that stuff but we knew

that it was it was a real small market so it's really just a placeholder mainly for investors so we can say look we sold 5,000 units we have a network in the u.s blah blah blah and so we're it was constant hype and that's a theme of the startup world is continuous hype. Whether you have it or not, whatever you have, you hype it. If you can't find something and then hype that. And that's the way we got to is a kind of like a version of the fake until you make it these days. You know, you kind of, we're going to be there. Here's where we're going to be. We're going to be there next year. We're almost there. We're almost there. There's tons of demand. We got people,

people ready to go. Exactly. That's right. We got contract signed, stacked up. They're just not signed. You know, so. You just need the money to build them. They're always cold. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so yeah, consider them done. Just, you know, sign here on the dotted line and give us your money. So after that, we got, you know, New Zealand was on the hook. And then they signed a deal with Australia who saw what was going on.

Australia is a bigger market. A similar deal, I think it was five to 10,000 units. And they, I went over to sell to their big telephone company. It was called Telstra. And so New Zealand and Australia in case the audience says, no, they're always. always in competition with each other. A lot of times one doesn't speak highly of the other and vice versa because they're across the Tasman and not sure why, a cultural thing. So they were in competition to see who could do better with the iPhone in terms of sales, services, you know, content,

all that good stuff. And I supported them both equally. So those two popped up quickly. And then soon after we got, I think, a 2,400 unit install in South Africa. So you can see they're all these smaller countries, but nothing's happening in the U.S. No big takers. And so we're, we're starting to, I'm sure the executives are starting to wonder, we got to put some points on the board because our model was really also about recurring revenue and sharing that revenue with the manufacturer and the distributor of the, of the phones. So it was a subsidized model because if we sold the phone just as is back then, it would have been about $500. And $500, for a phone. That was crazy tunes for back then. I mean, right. You could barely get a computer of.

I think back then the computers were still like 2,5003 grand. But people were saying, well, why do I need that? I got a newspaper. I don't need to read my news on the phone. And so it wasn't really a must have device then. Right. But it was it was turning. So we were in the middle of it helping it turn. And so we, you know, once we got some points on the board with Australia, South Africa, I was supporting them. We were trying to get more sales out to them. And let me just see, we were supporting them. I just want to make sure I'm missing. So one of the things that during our buildout, and this was just new guy mistake, do you, do you know a guy named heard of the writer Walt Mossberg? No.

Back in the day, he's retired now, but back in the day, he was the guy, a writer for Wall Street Journal, and he was the guy that everybody would want to get their devices in front of so he could give a review. And most of the time, he was kind of down on him because, you know, we don't need tech. But our marketing team really wanted, you know, a device out in front of him. So some, and he doesn't just take any device. So he waited. And then we sent him one. And then he basically said, my mom won't use it. this is not going to go anywhere.

And I don't know what happened to me. I just got so frustrated because of what he wrote. He didn't even give it a chance. So Hotmail had just come out a couple of years before. Yeah, I'm that old. And so I set up a free account not knowing really how to use it. Set up a free account and sent it to Walt and said, Walt, yeah, because if you don't watch it, some of your name is exposed in the, in the,

email address by default. So if you don't change it to like my pretty birdie at hotmail, it might show your M. Burkhead because that's your account name. So yeah, I didn't know that at that point. Anyways, I sent him an email and it basically said, Walt, your, still remember to this day, while your article was as useful as milk toast, there's no way this device is not going to be useful to your mom or to anybody else, give it a try and sent it. Didn't sign it, no, just sent it. Well, I guess he saw my name and put two together because he contacted our VP of marketing, who I didn't like too much to start with.

He had such a fake laugh. Contacted our VP of marketing, and that's when holy hell broke out. That's when I almost got fired. You know, they wanted me up my, my, they wanted my nuts. And my boss said, we can't let him go. He's doing all the stuff. We, you know, lump it. Lump it, Dennis.

You know, who cares? So I was on pins and needles from that point on. I had to watch out. But from that point on later, if you read Walt Mossbergs, he never reviews Infogear again, but he is a big proponent, obviously, of the Apple iPhone, just because it is night and day. So I don't know if his mom uses it these days,

but I think it's something that back then it could have been used. but he wasn't even giving it a chance so that was another no to the iPhone we're like oh shit what's what was supposed to be our guy to pump up some sales or something so now we're like i'm sure the executive's like what the F is going on here um at this point probably have 15 million into it back then 15 million was a lot nowadays 15 million is jack you know it's so back i'm sure they were wondering like okay we got we're gonna have to go back to to the till as for more funding for the VCs and they're going to want to see some hard numbers sales and recurring revenue and everything and this was 1998-1999 time frame okay so the when we did go to

Spain you know I was like this was probably the fun part I was no kids you know not married got to fly around all the over the place and they took me to Spain to help pitch it and And my boss didn't speak Spanish. And I was like, hey, I used to live in Mexico. I know how to speak Spanish. But like, okay, you get to go. So I go out there. And I don't know if you know, but Spain has a different dialect.

It's, it's Catalan. And it's not real, it's a different kind of Spanish. It's completely different from Spanish from Mexico. They also speak with a lip. Did you know that? There's, yeah. So, how do you know, ortho cacchi so i what i heard of like oh man i don't so i had to start looking at the dictionary and

stuff like that and it was not pretty so i did my best but i didn't feel like i did my my my what i could have done had it been real spanish so anyways i get out there and um you know i think it was our last night there and the we're having a big dinner with the you know the telephone in Spain, reps. And my boss is sitting there, everybody's dressed in suits and stuff. And, you know, the waiter or the server says,

which is like an English menu. I said, oh, no, no, no, no is necessary. So he gave me the Spain menu. And I was looking at it. And of course, the two people we were with, one of them spoke Spain or Spanish. The other one was my boss. So he's pure English.

And I pointed to this one thing. on the on the menu and the guy that kind of looked at me surprised and said stas a good signor you know are you sure it's more like that's the good at the north yes yes i would like yes see so he brings it back and man it's a full baby pig with its head and the apple and the feet the hooves and everything on a platter and i'm not joking That thing and everybody's eyeballs, the whole restaurant was like, what is that? So I looked at my boss. He was like, what the hell is that?

Is that what you ordered Mike? I said, yes, it is. In my side, inside I was thinking, I ordered it, but I didn't know what it was. So needless to say, I ate the potatoes and everything else, but the pig stayed there. And that's what I knew, Spain, you know, knowing Catalong is going to. be out of my out of my reach for a while. And then they didn't buy any iPhones either. So it was really a trip, a trip in vain, if you will, but just a bigger, more of a theme of what we were seeing. Traveling here, hey, here's why you need it. People would say, oh, that's so cool,

but we don't think we need it now. And so that was going on all the way, well, 99. 99 is when we released the second version with two phone lines. And, you know, quickly to go through that, that's where we got investors like Cisco was involved, Labrador Ventures, Intel, some big names. So everybody knew what was going on. You know, a little side note as well, where our office was located, we were three miles from Steve Jobs house. He lived in Woodside, California. We were in Redwood City. He knew where we were.

We had two senior executives on our company executive team that were former Apple guys. So there would, I know data of what we were doing was going back to Apple. They knew what was happening. But at this point, they're just making, they're making desktop computers, right? They're making them. Yep. And at some point, they came out with the Newton. That was a flop.

But they were, if anybody reads any of the books, the lateral books around Steve Jobs, at this time, he was trying to buy companies and piece together, what would later become iTunes. So he tried to buy Rhapsody, which was a music streaming company, and tried to buy Threecom, which was the handheld monochrome thing. And he was trying to piece them together, but the tech still wasn't there. The chips weren't there. I mean, there's just a lot of the bandwidth wasn't there to the internet.

But he was trying. He was trying to buy companies to mash them together while we were building out what was in his vision. And we know that because it's the facts of some of these books. and also what we heard within Silicon Valley, you know, because it's a small world down there. Everybody sits on the board with somebody. And back then it was even smaller because it really hadn't taken off yet in terms of like the way it is today. It's just, it's just crazy. So they knew about us.

They knew what was going on. So in 1999, we released the next generation product, which had two phone lines and all this other stuff. But pretty much it was the same product, just with two phone lines. we at that point we started noticing different things we still hadn't sold much and one of our biggest clients was going to be have you ever heard of the company new skin yeah yeah it's like it's for um like uh injuries and stuff right or something or oh there's that one too yeah there's another new skin that's all about uh makeup and health living products and you know uh stuff to grow your hair.

But their big model, it's multi-level marketing. So you buy into it and you propose to buy $10,000 worth and then you make money off your downline, all that crazy stuff. Well, we were so basically desperate. Desperate. They had a subsidiary called Big Planet. And Big Planet was the tech part of New Skin, I think it's wholly owned subsidiary. And so they pitched us that we would like to buy thousands of your units and we want to do it this way and all this stuff.

And we said, yes, we want to do it. Yes. For six weeks, every week I had to fly out to Provo, Utah to ensure that we were getting ready. The manufacturing was there, that the tech was there, all that good stuff. I was working with their engineers. And then after the six week, there was going to be a big launch. and the third or fourth week there, actually it was the last week before the launch,

we had done all this work, we got all these units there. There was like 1,500 units, not a lot by today's numbers. And I just started randomly opening up boxes and realized that almost all of them, the membranes had slipped and covered the screen. Right.

So now out of the box, they're not working. And so it was going to be, we give this iPhone to the end user and then they walk away at the end of the show. And so that was, it was a disaster. Yeah. Disaster. And so there was only, I was the only guy there feet on the ground from Info Gear.

And I was, you know, reporting back to them what's going on. And I had- How many business cards did you have with you? Right. Not enough. Not enough. You know, they had to take out their own business cards. Well, also every day I had a one-on-one. with their CTO.

I forgot the gentleman's name. Big tall guy. He came from Novell. Anyways. And so I met with him before. I met with our executive team because he was right there. And I said,

I recommend we do 100% QA. And he went like this. What? You know, 100% QA, that's unheard of. That means 1,500 boxes, us opening up each box, plugging it in,

taking the business card, flushing it around, testing it, unplugging it, wrapping the cord back up, putting it back in the box, close the box, wrapping the box, one done. And it was two days before Go Live. And Go Live was this big Coliseum. They were going to have thousands of their reps that are MLM-centric. The iPhone was essentially their marquee product that's hanging all of their other services

off of. Content, online books, all that stuff was supposed to be. looked at on the iPhone. So we had to do 100%. So they got, they hired a whole bunch of part-time staff. And over the course of two days, night, noon and night and noon through the day and night, everybody tested those out and we got through the QA. And then ultimately, when I had to tell the boss, the CEO, our CEO, we're going to do 100% QA. I, there was no video back then, so I couldn't see his eyeballs fall out of his head. All I heard was just a big silence.

And, you know, he's like, well, what are the options? And all I remember saying, I couldn't, I couldn't even sugarcoat it. I said, there are no options. If we want this to be our, our win, we got to open them all up. And he goes, all right, we'll just make it happen. So they made it happen. Luckily, they got enough people going on. And I'm not sure.

we still had a whole bunch of issues once they started plugging them in. And so I had trained up about 300 of their reps on how to do the card if they need to. So I can just imagine. Can you imagine somebody calling in? My phone's not working. And then they say, okay, do you got a business card? Yes. Okay.

Can you go take the card and put it around? Yeah, that was hilarious. Luckily, we were able to use the sale as part of a win for the company to show validity and relevance. But it was a hard win and very, very by the skin of the teeth. Can you imagine? You know, the whole iPhone, that iPhone version was hung on the success of a multi-level marketing company being able to sell it.

Just I think it's funny. I mean, it's just, you know, you wouldn't think about that today, obviously. But back in the day, you know, truth is stranger than fiction. So 2000, in 2000, Disco says, we want to buy you guys. We want to buy you for $3001 million. And everybody was like, wow, why? You know, internally, we're like, why?

There's not $301 million worth of value. There's no sales. There's no, there's no nothing there. And in fact, the people started calling server gear, serverware, because there was nothing, there's nothing there. So we were, everybody was perplexed. like how could this be happening? At the same time, because they had taken so long Infogear to do an IPO or some kind of

exit strategy, we lost a lot of the good engineers because they were going on to bigger and better things. And so they went on to another company called North Point, which was a DSL provider, just coming out. And they said, hey, Mike, we're about to do an IPO. It was the same guy that brought me into that I went to the Philippines with, Shaheen. He said, Mike, come on. over here, we got something going on, check it out. You know, you can do a quick lift on,

on some stocks and, you know, become a probably not a millionaire, but maybe 100,000 error. And I was like, okay, well, like, I'm here at Info Gear. I'm going to do both. And he said, what? I said, okay, I'm going to work half day up with you and then half day down here. And then after three months, I'll come full time up at North Point. And he said, okay. So, that was rough because it was, you know, on Bart and do this for three months, back and forth, back and forth. And I had lied and told the guys at Infogear

that I was going back to college to finish that damn three units of statistics. And so they thought I was in school. I was going to work, you know. So I went in a North Point IPOed. And, you know, on paper, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars. they made millions.

I mean, so we were sitting pretty on the on the paper. And so I was still maintaining the Infogear side while this IPO went. So I got, you know, kind of riding two horses at once right now. And that's just a just a context for the whole area. There was IPOs all the time. It was just going crazy. Everybody was making money on crazy ideas too. But, you know, you get in there and make it.

You might do well. you might not. So in anyways, 2000, then I heard the double that Cisco wanted to buy info gear. And I was like, oh, wow, I get to clean up twice here. That's unheard of. I'm like, okay. So then things started happening. And then they came to us and said, the executive team, my executive boss came to me and said, we have to recapitalize the company. And they're telling me that this is supposed to be good for you. And he slides a piece of paper across. the table to me in one of these beat up old conference rooms and I said, hmm, stock reverse split. I've never heard of that. What is that? And all he said was,

they tell me it's supposed to be good for you. They tell that's not a, they are such a shift of blame. Oh yeah. And I knew what he was saying, but at the same time, he said, if you don't sell, we might not be able to do the deal. And I knew that was kind of a half lie too because we uh you know there's always negotiating so those things i learned later i didn't know then so so i signed it so the stock over split was uh 20 to one so that means for every one 20 options i held i get one so that was ultimately where people made their money was on the number of options that you had so it's kind of in a quandary you know with the deal wouldn't go through if everybody didn't sign.

So I figured, okay, well, we'll go ahead and sign and take what I can, take what I can get. Now, looking backwards on it, you know, I didn't deserve anymore because I had already shown that I'm doing other things than focusing on the company. You know, I was in school doing, I was doing the other IPO, so I wasn't around as much. So looking back, I was like, they probably said, we'll just give him a little bit for his time that he spent here, which was at that point, four years. Yeah, four years. So he passed it over. They had all the company sign, all the older employees. They took it in the shorts because all those stocks now went to new employees and also the new venture capitalists that were coming on board.

I'm sorry. And also the existing VCs because they needed to get their money back out that they had already put in. So there was a lot of, they basically taken money from this side and giving it to the other side. That's what happened. That's what they call recapitalizing the company. I was like, oh, okay, there's a key lesson to learn that they can take it away. So that was 2000. Now, you know, one thing I forgot to mention earlier is that we were also in retail. So we went into a place in New Zealand called Dix, sporting goods or Dix, but also in the U.S., we were in Comp USA. Remember Comp USA? Yeah.

Oh, way back way. Yeah. So we had the, you know, N caps and all the box. You know, similar to the boxes that I have back here. And myself and the other, the other tech was the support for them. So we'd get all the calls. Hey, how do I make it? My screen's not working and all that stuff. So we were doing that. Not a lot of sales, but a lot of returns.

So there were sales and returns, but not a lot of keeper. So again, that's not a good. Yeah. So we're like, hmm, okay. So then, you know, at that point, the word was out. We were doing $6 million worth of marketing. people knew what was going on in early 1999 or maybe mid-1999 we noticed we were alerted by the registrar the holder of all the domains where you register your domains iPhone.com or abc.com

we were notified by them that someone had tried to move the domain to a different owner and I was the one on the account at that time so infalgear owned iPhone.com and so we were told about it. So myself and a couple of other engineers, we're like, well, and back then, you could just call up and say, hey, please move. There was no authentication. There was no verification. So they tried to do it the slippery way, but not social engineering, but email and all that. So that's where it got, we got notified. And so we did a little bit of hunting and trace routing. And it went to the IP address, which is that the single, you know, ID basically, of that internet request, that IP address was tied to a place in Trinidad Tobago to an Apple office.

So who knows who was in charge of that request? But that's when we realized we were under not just observation, but maybe attack. And this was 99. The iPhone didn't come out for the Apple iPhone until 2007. Right. So big gap there. So they were already thinking about it, you know, doing this stuff together, which is, that's how a trillion dollar company today works. Right.

You know, that's the way it works. Right. So they're already looking at trying to acquire the names. They're already thinking about putting that. So they already kind of know the technology that's out there. It's only going to get better. Yep. So.

And they didn't want ours. I mean, because they knew the bill materials was too high. The cost of the phone was too high to manufacture. The content wasn't there yet. The tech in terms of the parts wasn't there yet. It wasn't color. And their goal was, you know, iPod, phone, and video. Was that the three things that Steve Jobs said it is, you know, it's an iPod.

It's a phone. And there was a third one that you kept saying it, a video or internet device. I think that's what it was. Yeah. So they were already into it. And you know that that engineers whole departments cut out of the company dealing with this. And if you read some of the books like ICON about Steve Jobs, it talks about everything that they were doing by engineers that were working within Apple at the time. So it's expected.

It's Silicon Valley. That's the way it works. So in 2000, we were told, hey, we're getting purchased, sign your stock of her split documents. I don't know why, but they gave me, you know, employee of the year award. I don't know if that was a culture thing or a backslap. I don't know. So they gave me 500 bucks and I don't know, add a boy in front of, you know, 50 people or something like that. I'm not sure what I'm not sure what that was about.

And I still haven't figured it out, but they did it. I was the only one too because after that we got bought by Cisco and we were, you know, sucked up into the board. But not without a little bit of drama between there. So when we realized that we're getting bought and we had just given basically all of our shares back, we were told stop supporting all of the international clients. So South Africa, cut them off. South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, zero. And these guys, everybody's calling me.

Like, hey, Mike, this is servers down or whatever, blah, blah, blah. We got this. And at first I tried to help him on the. slide just say hey you know here's what you do uh but as soon as i go outside and do go to engineers now other people are going to hear about so i had to tell them you know we're we're no longer supporting it and and the worst part is that our executive team did not tell them that we were being purchased by cisco we were trying to get through the the acquisition without any turmoil from existing clients or you continue to support them then yeah i would i would i

it was easy for me to say, yes, let's do that. But I don't know, I don't know what the logic was. But they said, cut it off. So I did what I could. And then I just couldn't take their calls anymore. And so all of them failed. I mean, all of them went down the hill without support from us. So they were all pissed off.

They were all pissed off. And so we, you know, and I was, I was a little bit pissed off. You know, like, okay. So let's do something about it. So what I did was I organized. nine of the, well, the employees that wanted to do it that had a stake in the game and essentially tried to get this to be a class action lawsuit. So we had nine people. We even got an attorney and just made it really hard for them to go through the process. You know, they had to do some

things. And what happened was they said, you know, we're getting purchased. I read just the basics on business corporations in California, just so I could understand the law and found that, hey, I could, as a shareholder, because I have options, I can go read all the minutes from all the board meetings. And I said, well, that's what I'm going to do. So I called their attorney. And by this time, all the executives are against me because they know I'm not playing ball. And so when I went to talk to, I went to the attorney's office, you had to read it in their office and I got there and I that the company's already gone luckily but they were like one of the top law firms in Silicon Valley so I went there to you know top of embarkedera one overlooking

the Bay Area gorgeous offices and they said all right here's the books it's probably like I don't know four years of board meeting minutes and so they're stacked up and I was sitting there and I just started opening them and reading and I said all right well and I have the right for copies that costs So I just marked which ones I want to copies. And I'd say probably 90% of those board meeting minutes were redacted. So before I even got there, they were like, this bad. He's not going to read anything about this. So I piece some things together, just see what the, you know, where the numbers came from.

But it was really unusable data. But I thought it was interesting because it scared the hell out of them. Everybody was like, oh, what's he going to find? What's he going to turn over? So by this point, I had created lia. on with the guys in New Zealand and the guys in Australia. And I was putting together a book. I was now a hired gun for them to say,

here's the weaknesses of the current acquisition. And here's potentially where, you know, there could have been some fraudulent, fraudulent work. You know, did we, was it fraud to not tell you that Cisco was purchasing us? You know, so those kind of things they had to, I just gave them the facts. and then they had to go to determine what it was. But I also gave them an attorney,

the same attorney that I was using for the, call them the crazy nine. And so the attorney said, well, Mike, we've decided that we don't want to support your case, but we do want to support Australia's, because theirs is a $5 million case and yours is not. And so we got kicked to the curb just like that.

And the Australian guy that I had held, helped, he at the end, snubbed me for 300 grand. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was bad. And Morin had always told him, he's like, don't trust that guy. He's, he's snaky. I'm like, oh, he's such a nice guy.

You know what do you mean? So I got snubbed out of that. But, and here's the twist, he did end up paying just $30K for all the info that I gave him, even though I was supposed to be getting $300. and it was that 30K that helped me just get into that next house, into that next slot, where I wouldn't have been able to do it without it. So while I'm kind of miffed at him, I could have been set up a lot better. He did come through on some part of being able to, you know, kind of reimburse me for some of my costs

and also all the time that I spent. But what happened was during the acquisition, Cisco normally holds back 10% of the total price. So they held back $30 million that normally was going to go to the VCs, other shareholders, and whatnot. So there was $10 million, no, $30 million that people were clamoring for. And Cisco was not going to let that go until this whole thing with Australia and New Zealand was put to rest. And so I wanted, I was just stirring up shit. I mean, I can't put it any other way.

So I only had seven grand coming to me out of that. that reserve, but I acted like it was a million. So I was, I had a website out there, the fraud, and I had a, I got interviewed by the Mercury News. I didn't like the darn reporters because they made it look like I was just some crazy. They put disgruntled employee. Maybe I was disgruntled, but I wasn't, you know, crazy. That's what I learned. Hey, reporters aren't, aren't your friend. You know, they're, they're there for the story. They don't give a shit about you, the, the source. Right. You felt that too.

I'm sure at a larger level. So long end, I get, we're still going through this court thing. I'm communicating directly with the VC heads. They're saying, Mike, can do that, can do that, all this stuff. And so I wanted the payout, but also I wanted the bigger payout because Australia was supposed to kick me back a few bucks. In 2001, we got brought into Cisco. we were like the 76th acquisition of 75.

Right after we got brought in, the dot bomb happened. Every tech company lost all their shares, all their value. Cisco went from 85 to 15. It was horrendous. And so that's when I was still, I was walking around Cisco

because I was still working for them, even though we had the lawsuit going on. They couldn't touch me because I was kind of like a whistleblower, but not really. So they didn't want anything to do with me. I was dead man walking. Nobody of the existing Infogear team wanted to talk to me

except a couple of old school buddies because they knew I was dead material. If my stank wiped off on them, they had no career at Cisco. So I'd just walk around, you know, do whatever what I wanted. There was nobody giving me work or anything. So that lasts for a couple months before I got bored. And then in April, and it was funny, April 1st,

which is when I started Infogear, I said to Cisco, I think it's time for me to leave. They said, oh, no. Don't go. I don't know if HR knew me or not. They acted like they didn't. But so this is directly to HR. And I said, well, you know, I know you have the seventh program going on. You know, it's a month for every year.

That's the one I'm going to sign up for. And they said, okay, that sounds good with us. And so I signed the paperwork. And then about four days later, I get a call from that same HR lady. and she said, well, you know, we don't have to do it right now on the April 1st. We could put it out a couple weeks if you just want a little bit extra money and want to hang around. And I was like, huh, that sounds interesting. And I said, no thanks.

I already had the pizza party. I'm already good to go. Friday is my last day. And I think it was Wednesday when she sent it to me. And I had no pizza party. Nobody wanted to talk to me. It was, they're like, don't look at me. Mike, I might turn to stone.

So right before that, Ed Cluss, the CEO for Infogear, you know, when they buy you, they bring in the whole company, they have the executives hang around for about a month or so, and then they quietly leave out of the back door with their millions. So Ed and I were constantly passing each other in the hallways. And one day he passed me and he's, I don't know if I had a scowl or whatever. He said, Mike, can we talk? Because all this stuff on the lawsuit was going on. And he knew it.

And he had probably millions of dollars wrapped up in that $30 million holdover. So I said, yeah, let's talk. So we walked into a dark conference room. And he said, listen, Mike, if you promised me not to share what I'm about to tell you, I'll tell you all the numbers. I'll tell you exactly how it happened. I got nothing to hide. And I said, Ed, I can't do that.

I'm sorry. I got, I got relationships that I'm supporting. and I can't promise you that I won't tell, you know. And he said, okay, sorry to hear that. And then we just left. And that was the last time I spoke to him. And so now I look back and thinking I should have taken his call and said, I'll promise not to say it.

And maybe not just so I can understand, again, going back to my core goal was to learn, to learn what happened behind the scene. What was the thought probably? He may have been like, as long as you don't say anything, him he's thinking i'm going to give you a bunch of bullshit numbers to make you just think wow there's just nothing here and i'm leaving that could be it too yep yep exactly so then that was on a wednesday so that friday uh you know packed up my little carton box

banker's box of plant and everything walked out the door and you know nobody there was no must no fuss i was out of there i wasn't looking for any any uh sadness or tears i was just looking to get out of there because, you know, everything was just imploding around us. And so then I heard, you know, I still had a lot of, we'll call them colleagues there. And so on that following Monday, I heard from my colleagues that they let the whole department go. And they said, you got to go find a job in Cisco or you have to leave at the end of this month. And I was like, that bitch, she was trying to get me. Or someone was. I don't. know but I was like whew because I was thinking oh a couple more weeks and just walking around I

can do that he was like no no I just I just wanted to be done you know go on with it so that that happened and so then everybody got wiped out except for one person two people one was a senior executive and he stayed on to manage lynxys which was a huge Cisco infrastructure product and there was one technician my buddy that was held over to support any outstanding iPhones that were in the world. And so he stayed there for 10 years and didn't do one iota of work. In fact, in fact, he said that, you know, when companies get bought, they come in and fill a whole floor of like a building. And then they get moved out or they get taken apart and then the floor goes empty.

And he said that that happened two or three times where his his cubicle was there. And then people would get flooded in for like three months or something. And he would stay. And then they'd leave and his little cubicle would be there. And one day I called him and I said, Hey man, you know, you know, your phone's broken. It doesn't even go through to your voicemail. And he goes, yeah, I know. Okay.

He didn't want any calls. He didn't want any of that stuff. So I was like, he's, he's the one that won. aside from the executives that made millions, he got at least 10 years of paid unwork time for time that he put in. And he didn't have to do any work because nobody was using the iPhones at that point. In fact, the one meeting that he did was probably critical. It worked against Cisco.

And it was regarding how Apple stole the iPhone trademark from them. And that was in 2000, I believe. believe it was. I know there's some documents and some articles I'll share with with you and Colby. And what happened was is iPhone just started or Apple started using iPhone name. Cisco sued them and said, hey, we own that. We bought Infogear. Mark Michaels, excuse me, their lead attorney was huffing and puffing and saying you got, you got to do that, blah, blah, blah. And essentially what happened was is Steve Jobs and Apple, they basically kicked John Chambers in the nuts, the CEO of Cisco, and said, we're taking it.

And they just launched the iPhone without even recognizing Cisco's offer for licensing. And that's where the deal ended. And Cisco said to the market, oh, yeah, we agreed to allow co-sharing of the iPhone trademark, which was a bunch of bullshit. And so Steve Jobs and their team got exactly what they wanted. they just they just hijacked the trademark right out of Cisco's hands and how they did it was this Cisco they got hundreds of attorneys they called in my buddy and said probably the senior executive as well that was managing it called him my buddy and said what's a story on this iPhone trademark

what's story on iPhone and he he said and he's kind of a smaller meek guy really soft spoken and I can just imagine and he said there's probably like 10 attorneys on one side of the table and he's loan on the other side. And they said, what's this thing about the trademark? And he said, you got to give it to him. We abandoned it. We don't own it. And I was like, wow, you told him that? And he goes, yeah, it was the truth. And he's a very honest guy. So he, he doesn't mince words when it comes to the truth, even if his job might be on the line. And so he told them that. And then they had another meeting with him with different attorneys and then another one. And so and then then the Apple just took it. So they were going to give it up anyway.

They were going to have to give it up anyways. But it was just interesting how it happened that, you know, Apple. They didn't wait at legal legal battle. They just started using it thinking eventually we think we'll win this. I know. And Apple was right. They got it. They got the iPhone name. And then I think it was, I don't know, 10 years later or something like that, maybe longer. They actually bought iPhone.com from the owner for a million dollars. So that that was that's a true story as well. And so it all came together for Apple at the end, putting it together waiting. You know, they got all the tech going, all that stuff.

And essentially the success of the current iPhone just overshadows anything that happened before it. And really info gear is just a little blip on the map just to say, hey, an asterisk. Hey, really the concept started here. but Apple blew it out and made it really what we would want it to have been, that we knew it could never be. And so I believe, and this is the cap, I believe that we were in a position that we were to look like we were going IPO.

And that was just a misdirection for acquisition. And why do I say that? I say that on the Cisco side, there was a gentleman's name, his name is Charlie Giancarlo, one of the top guys at Cisco. He was the second that was supposed to replace John Chambers, the CEO, big guy. He was involved on the Cisco side to invest and also for the acquisition. Well, after the acquisition was done and we had the obligatory shrimp and all that stuff, there was a Hawaiian luau party to celebrate.

And on the stage, you know, people were getting pretty drinked up and everything. And on the stage, you know, was Ed Klus. And this is the way it works. So after I went to business school, I'd learned this is the way it works. Is it a crime? No, it's legal, but this is the way it works. Ed got up on the stage and he said, I'm just happy this all happened. Everybody got to do, you know, got the win out of it.

And I really, something to the effect of, I owe it all to my business school buddy, Charlie G and Carlo, Carlo, you know, without our time together at Harvard or blah, blah, blah, something like that. And that's where I realized that's how it happened. They weren't buying server gear. They weren't buying the iPhone. Charlie and Ed were putting it together because that's what they do. That's what, that's what business guys do.

He was just bailing out. He was bailing out his. No, I think there was, maybe it was not a bailout, but just, hey, let's do business together. I'm in a position. This is the way you got to do it, Ed. You got to look like you go an IPO. You got to let us invest at least 8%. And so the roadmap was there.

And so I just thought, wow, that can't be it. So I just did a little homework. And yeah, they did go to business school together. They live literally right around the corner from each other in Atherton, one of the most, one of the most affluent areas in all of the United States in Silicon Valley. It's called Atherton, look it up. And they hung out together. I mean, that's what they do.

And so when I realized, you know, I later graduated university. I went back to Cal, finished my three units because I had to in order to go to business school, went to business school, graduated there. And that's where I realized there was, they did. That's what they do. That's what they teach you in business school, how to do. it. And usually it's the employees that take it in the shorts. But probably the truest crime is something that is not even considered a crime, but you know something happened and,

but it's legal. I mean, so, you know, so true crime is, you know, obviously something that took place nonfiction. Kind of like, like, like, like, like, being able to, um, being able to get insider information and then make trades against it. And nobody knows, you know. Or it's, or they do know, is you can't prosecute them for it. They're like, it's unethical, but it's legal, but that doesn't make it right. You hit it on the head.

It's legal. So it's almost like a crime that is legalized, so it's not a crime. Right. And, you know, the, the whole venture capital community, how startups work, a lot of that is legit. but at the end, if something doesn't go well, you can tell something happened, but it's legal. So it's not really a crime. And I think that happens all the time in Silicon Valley, especially, but also in New York and

all over the world where some things don't happen correctly. And now value is transferred from one group of folks to another or the company's recapitalized and you're not sure how that happened. So I think that that fits this category. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Please consider joining my Patreon.

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