David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…We talked with the NCS guys about this, but the invention of transistors, semiconductors, this stuff is so divergent. Once we get to the integrated circuit. It's so wildly different than the path that technology was already on that it was unlikely that anybody else toiling in a lab was going to independently find their way to it at the same time. Once this thing gets invented and all these brand-new use cases emerge, the opportunity to license that technology and use it to commercially make products in your country is huge. Keep in mind what we were saying for the last few minutes here about the size of these various technology "products" that were being used to build the radios that were the size of console tables and tape recorders the size of nightstands. The transistor is available for license and Ibuka is like, this is it. Just like when he saw the tape recorder and just like when he got obsessed with radios before, he's like, we got to do this. Morita is like, okay. Morita goes off to New York—this is, I believe, in 1953—and negotiates a deal. It ends up taking about a year to finalize this, but he negotiates a license from Western Electric, Bell Labs, to use the transistor. The Bell Labs guys are like, well, what are you going to do with it? Ibuka and Morita are like, we're going to make miniature radios with the transistor. They're like, guys, you can't do that. This stuff is still done with germanium at this point. You can't get enough power in this to really power a radio that would actually work. We think the market application that makes sense here is hearing aids. Hearing aids, that's right. Ibuka and Morita are like, no, the hearing aid market in Japan will not be a viable one for us. In fact, I think there's a cultural issue where it's perceived as a weakness to be hard of hearing.…

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