Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…But they did grab SoundJam and as best as we can tell, all the SoundJam guys are still 15, 17 years later all at Apple. And Jeff Robbin is actually, he’s VP of consumer applications. He remains the lead software designer for iTunes. He works with Tony Fadell on the iPod. Supposedly, he actually lead the TV project that kind of never came into being that Steve was... it was his pet project right before he died but ended up... the Apple TV and the new Apple TV did come out but I don’t think that’s the sort of full vision of what they were working on. And another fun little Steve Jobs side. Robbin was so important that in 2005, Time Magazine wrote an article I think probably about iTunes and the iPod and referred to Robbin but Steve wouldn’t let them refer to him by name, only describe him because he was worried about competitors “poaching” his talent. Became one of the many famous Steve-isms. That couldn’t be a more perfect segue into what I believe the acquisition category is. And for me, I was debating between whether this is a people or a technology acquisition. I think when you hear comments like that and you sort of take a step back and look at what was going on here, yes, they forked the SoundJam codebase to ship iTunes, it’s based on a lot of SoundJam code. But this was a people acquisition. Apple was going to do this regardless.…

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