Jim Barton: We wanted to deploy technology within the home so consumers could stream music or video to their TV from a server in their garages. We formed the company as Teleworld — the name was a placeholder — and began to architect the hardware and software.

Howard Look (TiVo’s vice president of application software/user experience, 1998–2005): I was still at SGI, which started to implode. A bunch of our friends had left to form [the early web browser company] Netscape. The web was taking off. Money was growing on trees. Everyone wanted to work at a startup.

Jim Barton: We talked to quite a few venture capitalists, and a lot of them said, “Pass. No one will buy this.” [Eventually] we got funded on our initial slide deck—a bunch of transparencies on an overhead projector. We raised $3 million from New Enterprise Associates and Institutional Venture Partners. We pitched an aggressive vision of what we could do in the home.

Mike Ramsay: But it became clear that the whole-home thing was just too complicated to build and too complicated to describe to the average person. And from a hardware standpoint, the DVR was the most compelling component of what we wanted to do.

Jim Barton: We collapsed the concept into a single box on your TV to capture content off your television feeds and present that back to you. We came to the idea of pausing live TV, being able to record things, and all the pieces you need to manage all that.

Photo: Howard Look

Howard Look: I came on in early 1998… I was a video junkie. My wife and I, we watched a lot of TV. My job was to program the VCR in the morning every day before work. We had seven VHS tapes for Saturday through Sunday, which I would program.

Richard Bullwinkle (TiVo’s chief evangelist, 1998–2002): People didn’t realize the need — that you should never have to stay home to watch Friends. But NBC had us brainwashed.

Howard Look: To me, it was really obvious how disruptive it could be.

Mike Ramsay: We did get questions from some of the VCs, like, “Well, why won’t the big companies just do it themselves and just crush you? You are talking about a product that may violate copyright if it is recording television programs and manipulating them.” They said, “You are stepping into a world of large companies whose vested interest is that you not succeed.”

Mike Ramsay: We went about trying to build a team. We needed a few engineers. First place we were was in Santa Clara.

Howard Look: We took turns picking up the pizza orders. Instead of a receptionist, we had a motion-sensor frog that would make noise so we knew someone had walked in. I was employee number 16. [Within] months, we outgrew the space and moved to a new office building in Sunnyvale. We were bouncing around a space that had 200 or 300 seating capacity.

Mike Ramsay: [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen gave us $3 million.

Howard Look: We flew up to Seattle to demo the product for Allen at his Mercer Island home. While we talked, koi fish were splashing in a pond. He kept pulling out bags of potato chips. He asked a lot of good questions. And then he asked, “Would you like to see my home media environment?” He took us to an underground bunker with a 200-seat movie theater. And he had robotic arms programmed to put VHS tapes into VCRs.

Mike Ramsay: He also invested in ReplayTV, which had seen him earlier that morning. [ReplayTV, launched by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Anthony Wood, began developing its own DVR around the same time as Teleworld.] Replay was vested by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the premium VC firm. That made us nervous.

Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay

Richard Bullwinkle: We were really trying hard to find a name. We had it down to Bongo, Lasso, TiVo. A lot of names that ended with “o.”

Michael Cronan: Once I began to understand that [the DVR] could change behavior on an essential level, I began to pose questions like, “What would ‘the next TV’ be like? Are we naming the ‘next’ TV?”… Of all the names we developed, TiVo was the ninth name we presented. [Cronan passed away in 2013. His quote comes from an interview conducted by Matt Haughey for PVRblog in 2005.]

Mike Ramsay: The logo character was originally kind of a two-dimensional cave painting. We wanted to animate it, so we contracted (TV marketing company) Pittard Sullivan, which did most of the TV show openings. What was a clincher for me about the name and logo was that it was a character we could animate.

Richard Bullwinkle: The remote was the first thing I saw that I felt, “This matches my effort. Everything I am doing to get this out the door, this feels right.”

Paul Newby took on the idea that the thing in your hand was the most important interface—more than the box or even the screen. Paul knew it before maybe anyone.

Stephen Mack (TiVo’s director of operations, 1999 to present): Paul not only has a physical resemblance to Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, he is also, like Flanders, a sweet, can-do guy.

Paul Newby (TiVo’s senior director of consumer design, 1998–2008): I hired [design and consulting company] IDEO in Palo Alto. It was an excellent team effort. The idea was to build [the remote] early and rough and then iterate like mad.

Howard Look: I put it in my wife’s hand. We called it “waf,” or “wife acceptance factor.” We wanted this to be a different consumer product, not just for the typical nerdy guy bringing something new home from Best Buy so the wife would say, “We don’t need another remote.”

Mike Ramsay: I think Howard had the idea of using the remote to vote on something you like or don’t like. We wanted to get TiVo biased to knowing your preferences. We used a thumb up and thumb down.

Howard Look: I remember watching Siskel and Ebert and thinking, “That’s how people think about TV shows, too.”

Paul Newby: We agonized to minimize button count and maximize Braille-ability [the ability to feel your way around the remote]. And we knew that the blank space between keys was of equal importance as the buttons. We had a really good two-dimensional map for a minimal 30 buttons when other remotes had 40 or 50. By the fall of 1998, we had functional iterations. We did hundreds of foam shapes until we settled on the friendly, narrow-waisted peanut shape.

Jim Barton: I was very focused on the remote and the UI [user interface] and making sure everyone had a TV experience with their TiVo.

Richard Bullwinkle: We knew we needed a sound like NBC’s “dun dun dun.” We really worked on it.

Howard Look: We contracted with Ed Allard, who had worked for me at Silicon Graphics and went on to do lots of other cool things. The TiVo sounds are original and Ed composed them. I managed that project and the relationship. We previewed lots of different sound genres including synthetic, metallic and natural (which is what we ended up with). He deserves a ton of credit for the incredible sounds he composed. They’ve stood the test of time.

Jim Barton: Broadcast TV never stopped. You want that smooth experience. It was suggested that we could use Windows, and I said, “Are you crazy? Windows crashes all the time.” Your TV doesn’t crash. A hardware manager came to me with a chassis and asked, “Where should we put the reset button?” I said, “There’s no reset button.” The software in the system had to be robust.

Mike Ramsay: Your refrigerator doesn’t have a reset button.

Richard Bullwinkle: The first program we recorded was Jerry Springer. Hey, that’s what was on. We all gathered around and watched the little red light go on. This was late 1998.

Howard Look: On Christmas Day, my family opened presents, and then I had to go to work. My son said, “Daddy, don’t leave.” But we were working every day to have a successful launch at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas] in January.