David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, and one thing, just for our storytelling narrative there we skipped over, was there’s another thing that happened in the early 2000s that reads a little bit as an alternate history for what could have happened at Epic. Imagine you’re a small company. A big company comes to you and says, can we co-develop a new product together? You can distribute it to your customers, we’ll distribute it to our customers under our brand name and everything, but you get some of that revenue. We’ll build this with you and it really will charge your business up. If you don’t know any better and you’ve never done it, it sounds appealing. Maybe we should do that. There are many instances of it working, so that’s extra tempting. My favorite weird example of this in history of it not really working is the HP iPod. Do you remember this? Oh yeah, that’s right. I do remember this. I think I might have had one. No, I have one of the U2 iPods, the red and black one. Listeners, Google it. It’s this really odd thing. It’s an HP brand on the back of an iPod that tells you all you need to know about what a weak position Apple was in at the time, that they were willing to let HP put their brand on something entirely created by Apple, to get HP’s distribution, and get some cut of that revenue. Of course, it would’ve bootstrapped their ecosystem since it used iTunes and all that. That’s basically what happened here. Philips, the Dutch company, comes to Epic and says, we want to do something focused on the radiology segment. You do a lot of the development work. We have the customer relationships and distribution.…

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