Updated Nov 4 – 1:15 PM
Stefan, Freddie, and I sat outside the Starbucks at De Anza and Stevens Creek sipping our coffees and trying to convince ourselves that this wasn’t a dream. In about 30 minutes we’d drive the few blocks to Infinite Loop for our first meeting with Steve Jobs; the topic of the meeting: Apple acquiring Astarte.
Freddie, Me, and Stefan
Our lives were about to change in a big way.
We reviewed our ‘talking points’ for the hundreth time…why our technology was so valuable, how innovative our applications were, how brilliant our engineeering team was, the great skill of our marketing guy (that would be me), and so on. All the points looked so good when I wrote up the proposals, and all sounded completely lame when we thought about them in the context of the upcoming meeting.
At this moment, I was very unhappy that I had seen the movie ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’. I had no idea if the movie was accurate or not, but it kept coming into my head. I couldn’t help wondering if Steve was really like that, and if we were about to be devoured by sharks.
We gathered our notes and our courage and headed to Apple. We were met in the lobby by Tim S., who ran the QuickTime engineering group. He had been my primary point of contact during the ‘mating dance’ which led up to this meeting. He took us to the elevator and up to the fourth floor of building 1 to the board room.
Was it just me? or was the air different up here? I looked around the room. Windows along the far wall looked out over the entry area in front of the building. There was a conference table large enough for about 15 comfortable chairs. In the table top in front of each chair were power and network connections concealed under a trap door. At one end of the room was the usual podium, projection screen and television that you’d see in any nice conference room. But at the opposite end was something you would definitely see only here: five fruit colored iMacs displayed on a long built-in credenza. Each one fairly glowed in the light of a recessed spotlight directly above. It was exciting to be there, but I had only a second to take it in.
Phil and Avie were already in the room waiting. We had a bit of nervous chit chat while we waited for Steve to arrive. It didn’t take long. He introduced himself, we all shook hands and sat down ( I had heard somewhere that he didn’t like to shake hands, but that turned out to be bunk, like some many of the things you hear about him.)
A minute later a women came in to the room with a cup of tea and set it in front of Steve. She left, and we got down to business…
stuff to add: the discussions, Germany and Minnesota, the aftermath, zipping our lips, questions about our financial involvement, timing, relocation questions.
Tibor – You’re right; it’s Weberstraße 1 in Karlsruhe.
[...] La piccola software house tedesca Astarte è responsabile sia di Toast, finito alla Adaptec (poi Roxio) che di DVDDirector finito ad Apple con tutta l’azienda e trasformatosi in DVD Studio Pro e iDVD [...]