Early Employees: Bob Poniatowski & TiVo

A series of conversations with early employees of iconic tech companies. If you have recommendations for future interviews, tweet them to me via@hunterwalk.

Bob Poniatowski, TiVo (@TiVoPony)

Q: How many people were at TiVo when you started and how did you get connected with the early team?

A: There were three people on the payroll when I started - Mike, Jim, and Sally Ann Reiss (who started getting us set up as our office manager). I was a part of a group of ten employees that TiVo picked up from LSI Logic.

At LSI we were working on system on a chip devices for network computers. Remember the Sun slogan 'The network is the computer'? It was the mid-nineties and we were working on that - really slick tablets that would get data and apps from the network, not that dissimilar to today’s iPads and app stores. The market was nascent and moving very slowly though, LSI had a couple of rough quarters financially and the decision was made to shelve our project. There were nine design engineers and myself (I was the product management guy), and the plan within LSI was to split up the team and move us onto five or six different projects. That didn't sit well with the team - we were all friends in past companies/projects, and the team had been hired specifically to work together. Our families had dinner together and went camping together. There was little interest in being split up.

Around this time Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton left SGI and began discussing pulling together a startup. Half of our LSI team had been hired from SGI, and word got back to Mike and Jim about our situation. They came in and hired all ten of us, and we were the first employees at TiVo. I think it was quite a surprise at LSI when all ten of us tendered our resignations.

The nine engineers had a couple of weeks of work to finish up before they could leave, but I started at TiVo right away. On my first morning we got the keys to our office space, I remember walking up with Mike to unlock the door. We got inside and he turned to me and said 'So, you're sure the other guys are coming, right?'. I said yes, and of course they did.

Q: What was your initial role at TiVo and how'd this change over time?

A: I always wore a product management/product marketing hat at TiVo, although I worked on many different products and areas of the service.

Our initial goal was to figure out what we were going to build. When Mike and Jim first pitched us the plan was to focus on distributed computing and an 'information furnace' - a heavy computing server in your garage or data closet that would aggregate everything coming into the home and distribute it to intelligent nodes sprinkled around the house. Phone calls, cable TV, internet traffic - everything would go through and be stored on the information furnace gateway. Jim was a big proponent of Mark Weiser's vision at PARC of ubiquitous computing, and the plan was to have the furnace push just the right information around the house to various smart devices. One of those devices would sit next to your television and hold one or two programs for you to watch (the rest were stored back on the furnace). It could pause and rewind live TV too.

This was in '97, and the entire business plan depended on targeting new home construction (for wired ethernet backbones) in high-end neighborhoods (this was all going to be very expensive). After that first pitch I recall one of us (Bob Fishman who had jumped over to LSI from Apple) say out loud what we were all thinking. Why don't we set aside all the big server stuff and focus on that little box that pauses and rewinds television? It was obvious that that was where the bang was in the pitch, and that's what we did.

There were a few things I focused on in those early days. One was working on the business plan with Mike - descriptions of the product and how it would work, market and cost projections, evaluating potential partners. I learned a lot from working with Mike on that, every word and every phrase was important. I remember the first use-case I wrote was horribly negative, along the lines of 'Thousands of program choices on hundreds of channels are crushing your will' type of thing. Lol. Mike got all that spun back around pretty quickly.

We also had brainstorming sessions about what would be in the product. This was before we'd picked up any furniture, phones, or computers - we all sat on pillows on the floor with a whiteboard propped against one wall, outlining what might work. Keeping it simple and accessible for the entire family was a key market requirement from the research I'd done. This wasn't a workstation - the person buying the product wasn't the one who would always be using it. Everyone in the family had to be comfortable picking up the remote and finding something to watch. Keeping it 'as simple as a toaster' became our mantra.

Personalizing TV was another market trend we tackled. I recall one of our comparisons at the time was automatic teller machines. It seems quaint to think of now, but the pitch was 'ATMs personalized the banking industry, giving people freedom to get money whenever they want. TiVo will allow you to watch your favorite shows whenever you want'. Personal shoppers was another comparison we latched onto. The whole idea of a suggestions engine, a personal assistant to help select shows for you, came from that idea. Matching people to TV programs or movies was all very new in the late '90s.

Validating the product was another key area I tackled. We had to quickly come up with data that confirmed our product decisions and would convince potential investors that this was something people would buy. I'd never been to a focus group in my life, let alone organized one. But I became a quick study. A few books from Amazon and a hired moderator to help consult and we soon had a convincing product plan backed up with data. When we eventually partnered with Philips on manufacturing they insisted on running their own studies. Multiple studies, at great expense. And the results were exactly the same as ours. I was pretty proud of how much we were able to get right on such a scrappy budget.

Over the years I worked on many different products with an array of partners at TiVo - satellite products, DVD products, network applications and third party development. But the bulk of my time there was spent leading the Core DVR Service. That's everything you see onscreen that has to do with finding and recording your favorite shows. TiVo Central and Now Playing. Wishlists. Search (now integrated with broadband content). The redesign into a high definition UI. Years spent working on getting people to the right content at the right time in the simplest way possible. I think that's one thing that TiVo has always excelled at, and I'm intensely proud of that.

Q: What did you want the TiVo brand to stand for? Did consumers understand the product right away?

A: I led the effort to name and brand the company, that was something we tackled in early '98. As a startup we went by the name 'Teleworld', which had people guessing we were involved in the customer support/call center business in some way. It definitely was not a name we wanted to carry with us for long (although you'll still find it if you search your TV guide data - TiVo provides some data down to the DVR via broadcasts of 'Teleworld Paid Programming').

We worked with an outside design firm on the branding. It was led by Michael Cronan, a friend of Mike's (almost everyone we partnered with early on was either a Friend of Mike's or a Friend of Jim's - an important lesson, as a lot of work was done with little upfront cash. FoM and FoJ can be very powerful and productive for a startup). We'd gone through hundreds of names. Literally. TiVo was in the first batch of names that Michael brought to us. We'd initially liked it, but had set it aside, it came in too early and we hadn't explored the space enough yet. We knew that we wanted a name that ended with an 'o' sound. You can't make a frown when saying a word that ends with 'o', you're usually smiling. We tried out different names internally, for a few days we called the company 'Bongo'. There was 'Lasso'. 'JetSet'. 'Libre'. As I said, hundreds of names. But we came back to TiVo.

TiVo fulfilled another of our requirements - it had to be a word that we could substitute in everyday conversation for 'TV'. We wanted people to talk about watching 'TiVo', not watching 'TV'. The word TiVo actually never stood for anything. And that was intentional. We had people suggest that it was 'like TV but with input and output', or the marketing folk would try to assign all sorts of meaning to it as an acronym. But that was resisted, it was important to have a word that carried no preconceived meaning, something that we could craft the meaning for ourselves.

Once we had the word agreed upon we had to develop the logo. That was actually more challenging, and ended in a split decision. Michael's team sketched many logo treatments for us, but the little guy that became the TiVo mascot really sprung from the mind of one of my first employees, Lisa Dunlevie. We were sitting in Michael's studio going over designs and Lisa began telling us about the Darwin fish logo she'd noticed on the back of a car that morning. She started doodling an old-fashioned television with feet and wrote the word TiVo on its' screen, asking whether the logo should be about the 'evolution of television'. Michael grabbed that and ran with it. And the TiVo guy was born.

When it came time to test the name and logo, we found that people had a very strong positive association with 'TiVo'. It reminded them of Italian sports cars (good) and television (even better). The little TiVo guy was reminiscent of Mickey Mouse, it was playful and inviting. And it worked well as a 'bug' on TV, something that could sit in the corner of the screen. Many of our other possible logos just didn't work that well on television.

Still, the business development team didn't like the playful logo. They wanted something more serious (one person told me that they'd never put that logo on an S-1 filing). So we actually had two logo treatments for TiVo for the first year of the company - the colorful, playful TiVo guy and a much more formal, text-only 'TiVo' logo that was used for official correspondence with investors and some partners. Eventually everyone saw the value of the TiVo guy and the text logo was retired.

One other tip - never adopt a six-color logo. You'll make your marketing department miserable for years to come. It costs a lot to print anything six color!

Regarding understanding the product, yes, people 'got' the product right away. Focus groups were amazed that they could have shows at their fingertips, and couldn't believe that they could pause and rewind live TV. They thought we were joking or tricking them somehow. Everyone wanted the product immediately - until they heard the price. Those early TiVo DVRs were very expensive, and people in the tests became visibly angry when they heard the price. They wanted everything the product did, but couldn't justify $1000. We had to find a way to shift the value equation, which we did by offering more recording hours at lower prices. It was a matter of adopting what VCRs had done for years - allowing consumers to trade off quality for quantity. As well as riding down the cost curve of multi-gigabyte disk drives.

Q: What was your most meaningful contribution(s) to TiVo's success?

A: I've already covered a number of the areas where I helped move the company forward, and as stressful as it may have been at the time it really was a joy. Mike and Jim were great to work with, and the focus on pushing forward every day, always learning something new, or doing something no one had ever done before was exciting. TiVo had a very rare combination of extremely talented and kind people, it was a fun place to work.

Like most jobs though, it's a job. There are years of meetings and reviews, the basic block and tackle product management tasks that make up the day. One of the key ways I was able to help the company and leverage this knowledge was in sharing it with the outside world. I became the online evangelist for TiVo on our community forums, with bloggers and the press, and with our customers.

That was really a rare opportunity to pull back the curtain a bit and let people see what was going on at TiVo. For a while I even had a webcam at my desk where TiVo fans could watch everything going on in real time (we had to be really careful about what was written on the whiteboards). But mostly it was visiting with TiVo fans, helping them understand why we were making the decisions we were making and often calming a lot of the unnecessary worry that naturally springs up online if left to a vacuum. It was a great deal of fun, but extremely challenging. As I moved up in the organization there was less of my time afforded for that role, and I did miss it.

More recently the shift from a standard definition user interface to new high definition screens became all consuming - that was the focus for my last few years at TiVo. I think we largely succeeded, although the transition was slower than anyone would have liked. We introduced many new and innovative ideas into the HD interface, and the fun now is in seeing bits of my product roadmap implemented every time my DVR receives a new software update. Keep going guys, it's looking good!

Q: Did you have any traditions or rituals that helped define TiVo's culture?

A: Yes! Culture was very important at TiVo, incredibly so in the early days. We were doing something different, something fun, and we wanted to have fun doing it.

One of the things I realized in doing the initial research was that everyone has a favorite TV show. Or several. And those shows are touch points - they allow us to immediately connect with other people quickly and easily. Find someone else who shares a favorite show and you've got an easy conversation right out of the gate. So I decided that we'd spend the money to print each employee's favorite programs on the back of their business cards. It was a terrific icebreaker, and told everyone that we really were all about TV. If you see someone from TiVo today ask them for their card and flip it over. You'll learn what they watched as a kid, when they were just getting started, and what they watch today. It's one of those small things that defined who we were.

At TiVo all of the conference rooms are named after television shows. The buildings on campus were named after different product features. We had fun with naming.

But probably the biggest culture-defining item at TiVo is Blue Moon Day. It's a national holiday for TiVo employees, and commemorates the day we shipped the first TiVo DVRs to customers. It's always the last Friday in the month of March. You see, back in 1999 we had the goal to ship our product by the end of the first quarter. One of our engineers had noticed that that March coincided with a 'blue moon', a second full moon in a month. So we code-named our first DVR 'Blue Moon'. The name had the delivery date baked right into it. We shipped our first production products at the end of the March, and all of us donned blue lab coats to tour the production line here in San Jose (we were working with a local contract manufacturer at the time). We drank champagne. Everyone signed the first box down the line. And the next day Mike told everyone to stay home, he was chaining the doors shut. We'd all worked so hard we deserved the day off, and TiVo still observes that day as a holiday today. That first TiVo DVR, the one with all of the signatures on the box, to the best of my knowledge is still in a display case just off the main lobby at TiVo headquarters. I used to stop and look it over whenever I was feeling nostalgic for the old days. A lot of great people worked on that box.

Q: What's on your TiVo?

A: You mean TiVos of course. They're all networked and we can watch any show in any room we want. As well as broadband content. Jim's original 'networked home' idea finally caught up with us.

We watch The Walking Dead. Downton Abbey. Face Off from Syfy. Cook's Country and America's Test Kitchen. House Hunters. And New Girl, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, Community. And lots of Netflix and Hulu. There are so many choices now, it's hard to remember the world before TiVo!

[Note, after a successful tenure at TiVo, Bob Poniatowski is now looking at new projects where he can play a product marketing/product management leadership role. You can contact him via LinkedIn]

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News

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