Bill Warner: As I began to crystallize how I would make this, at the same time Apollo Computer was being; was having all kinds of problems. Management problems. And it was really clear that things were not going well.And I was pretty low in the organization, because I was 31 years old or so, and; but I knew all the high-ups because I had done this deal, the GM deal. You know?

And I went to them and said, “Here’s this idea.” And the president of the company said, “We’ll fund it.”

Larry Jordan: “Wow.”

Bill Warner: And he said, “I’ll give you space, give you some money, do it here, this would be great.” And I said OK.

Larry Jordan: Fantastic.

Bill Warner: Or I said maybe that’s a good idea. I went to my boss. This guy’s name is Mike Gallup. A big, tall guy, deep voice. And, you know, he said, “Bill. How hard is it to get the money we need to make the work stations we need to compete with Sun?” And I said, “Well, pretty hard.” He said, “How likely is it; do you think you’ll really get the money for doing this?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” He said, “If you really want to do this, you get out of here right now.”

Larry Jordan: Wow. Wow.

Bill Warner: “Go do it.” And two weeks later I quit.

Larry Jordan: “Wow.”

Bill Warner: Two weeks after that, the president who gave me the funding, or proposed the funding, was fired.

Larry Jordan: Wow! So, where did you get the funding? I mean, did you show a prototype to an investor, or at the MIT startup conference?

Bill Warner: So, I made these little demos and I started showing people and getting people excited. And there was a lot of people pushing me not to try to go so far. I would show them the video, you know, and you could tell it was going to be; I mean, we didn’t even have video. We had these little things with lines going around. But they were still pretty small on the screen.

And people said, “Why don’t you use tape decks to give you the quality, and then you could . . .” And I was like, “No. Digital video. Digital audio. It’s gotta be digital. It’s gotta be fast.”

And we just kept sticking to our guns and making demos a little better, a little better. And then eventually figured out how to get that video in, just for a little bit of it, how to get the video to play back. How to get sound with the video. We didn’t have sound for the longest time.

And then I hired this guy, Jeff Bedell, who was my first engineer. He’s still at Avid today. And he started actually building the Avid system. And we started building a prototype and we started showing it to customers. So we built a first prototype that was very film-oriented and it had film strips and it was going to be all about cutting film, just film interface: film, film, film.

Larry Jordan: Virtually.

Bill Warner: Right. Which, by the way, I wasn’t a film guy, but I understood putting pictures out.

Larry Jordan: Right. Timeline.

Bill Warner: Yeah. There was a timeline and there was a film view. And, funny thing, that original Avid thing is very similar to iMovie today. The new iMovie.

Larry Jordan: The newest version? Oh, interesting!

Bill Warner: Yeah. Just totally film-oriented.

We showed that to some people and they were like, “Where’s the play and record thing? I want the play and record monitor.” So we actually took two paths. We made two prototypes. One is a film visual and we made a second one which was a source-record visual editing system.

And we decided to rent a suite at the NAB show and invite people to see this. So, I picked up one of those guidebooks to video post-production. And I opened the book and basically, if they had any fancy equipment, we invited them. So, if they had a Quantel Harry or if they had anything kinda, you know, beefy,

Larry Jordan: Upscale.

Bill Warner: Yeah. We invited them to come to our suite at the NAB show.

Larry Jordan: ’86 or ’87?

Bill Warner: ’87.

So I had a venture capitalist friend of mine, Bill Kaiser, who was interested. In February he had the first demo. February 1988. So Bill looked at the system. He was excited, but puzzled. You know, never seen anything like this.

And so early on I made a decision, one, that we’re gonna go to NAB. So that set a stake in the ground. And then we decided we’re going to take these two prototypes to NAB and we’re going to invite all these people. And we got a suite with two rooms. And I also decided I’m gonna invite Bill, and I’m gonna have him be there. If people like it, great. If they hate it, then he’ll hear what they hated and we’ll figure out how to fix what they didn’t like.

Larry Jordan: Great. Great. You didn’t have the mindset of, “If they hate it, that’s it. It’s over.”

Bill Warner: Oh, no way. No. We were too into it at that point. I mean, I could taste it. I wanted that machine. You know, I wanted the thing. It’s just; I had to have it.

Larry Jordan: Yeah.

Bill Warner: So we went to the NAB show. We shipped by Federal Express. Our machines were lost.

Larry Jordan: In shipping?

Bill Warner: Yeah. They found them in time.

Larry Jordan: Oh, good.

Bill Warner: And we were sweating bullets, but just to show you how much money meant to us at that time, we were thrilled because now the shipping was free. And it was like a thousand dollars to send these big machines.

Larry Jordan: But because they lost them. . .

Bill Warner: Because they lost it, for a few hours or something, it was. . .

Larry Jordan: . . .a savings.

Bill Warner: Right, right. So we get our machines and we set it up in the suite. We had a real process. We called people up at their hotels, are they gonna com? We had two rooms we pre-screened them in the one room. And we surveyed them before seeing it. We surveyed them after seeing it. We asked them what price points they were willing to play at, what features they wanted. We asked them graphically. We asked them with numbers. We asked them; we had all these. . .

Larry Jordan: . . .measurements.

Bill Warner: Yeah. Measurements. We wanted; this was our moment to figure out whether we had something or not. And we asked, “Do you want black and white for $14,000 or do you want the medium system for $50,000, or all the bells and whistles for $85,000?” They all said, “Look, we want $85,000. We’ll spend $85,000. And we want the features. We want color. We want this.”

Larry Jordan: Load it up.

Bill Warner: Load it up. Eighty-five grand. That’s our price point. And so we came back and Eric Peters was there, and my plan as an engineer was that we were gonna do fifteen frames per second. Because if you look at it, the speed of the disk was here, all right? To do thirty frames per second from that disk meant you would have to use it at, like, up to here. Which, in engineering, you can’t do. You just don’t do that.

Larry Jordan: You need more headroom.

Bill Warner: You need more headroom. So, I said, “We’re gonna to go to fifteen frames a second. We can do that.” And so that’s what I said. Actually, we asked them: “How’s fifteen and how’s thirty?” We did ask them this. And they all said, “We have to have thirty. It has to have thirty. We have to have thirty.” In my mind, I said, “You’re getting fifteen.” I didn’t tell them that, but I said, “You’re getting fifteen.”