Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
General Magic went public with just an idea in the early 1990s and collapsed within years, but its scarred alumni went on to co-found LinkedIn, eBay, and Nest, and to create Android, the iPod, iPhone, Google Maps, and Safari.
Where this was said
At 25:40 · chapter starts 22:07
Epstein introduces what he calls the most important company nobody's heard of, offering it as the starkest possible case study in the danger of too few constraints. General Magic was founded in the early 1990s by three Apple veterans, two of whom designed the original Mac. CEO Marc Porat had coined the term 'information economy' in his 1976 Stanford PhD and, by 1989, had sketched a thin glass touchscreen rectangle with app icons — a smartphone — in a red leather notebook [1] — David Epstein "General Magic had Marc Peratt's visionary 1989 sketch of a smartphone, unlimited funding, and a 17-company global alliance — then imploded …" 22:10 . Goldman Sachs took the company public in Silicon Valley's first 'concept IPO' — no product, just an idea — and money and talent poured in. A 17-company international telecom alliance formed around them, their meetings had to open with an antitrust lawyer listing prohibited topics. They could do anything, so they did. An engineer named Steve Perlman spent months expanding a calendar function from 1904-to-2096 all the way to Big Bang-to-future because nobody could say no to any request. Three-quarters of the dozens of former employees Epstein interviewed volunteered some version of the same phrase: 'I couldn't figure out what not to do.' The stock doubled on its first day of trading and was worthless two years later. But the alumni — especially the young ones scarred by the chaos — took the lesson of constraint to heart. Tony Fadell co-founded Nest and led the iPod design. Others co-founded LinkedIn and eBay, created Android, built Google Maps and Safari. General Magic's legacy is not what it built but what its survivors built in reaction to it [2] — David Epstein "General Magic: founders of LinkedIn, eBay, Android: General Magic went public with just an idea in the early 1990s and collapsed within yea…" 25:40 .
General Magic had Marc Peratt's visionary 1989 sketch of a smartphone, unlimited funding, and a 17-company global alliance — then imploded because nobody could figure out what NOT to do. The alumni, traumatised by unconstrained chaos, went on to build LinkedIn, eBay, Android, the iPod, iPhone, and Google Maps.
Traumatised by General Magic, Tony Fadell forced the Nest team to prototype the packaging before building the product. If the key message didn't fit in the box, it wasn't a priority. Constraints clarify priorities in ways that open-ended brainstorming never can.
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