Less than a month after the initial meeting, I was back at the ranch for a second meeting with the team that I had begun to assemble to develop what would become the Pono music player.
Neil, Elliot, and Craig had accepted my proposal to manage the entire effort. One of the benefits of working in Silicon Valley is that it’s home to some of the best experts in almost any technology field you can imagine. Because so many of us have worked at numerous companies, networking is amazingly effective; the more jobs you have, the more experts you encounter, and if you don’t know the expert you need, one of your other contacts usually does. I had in mind several people based on prior experience and reputation. As a result, I was able to assemble a small team in about ten days. Never had I gotten such a positive response from those I called; they all welcomed the opportunity to work with Neil on his important pursuit. No one needed any persuasion.
THE TEAM
Mike Nuttall, a cofounder of the product design company IDEO and now out on his own, was responsible for the industrial design. I had worked with him when I first moved to Silicon Valley nearly three decades earlier; coincidentally, he had already been working with Neil and his first team. I had high regard for his capabilities and design talents. His role would be to further define the product’s appearance: the controls and the interface, essentially everything that affected user interaction. He had already come up with the general shape of the player, but there was much more work to do to design all the details, including its construction, display, color, finish, materials, user interface, and controls.
I brought in Dave Gallatin, who I knew would be one of the most important members of the team. Gallatin had worked for me at Apple when we developed the second generation of the Newton Message Pad. Gallatin was one of the best product architects that I had ever encountered in Silicon Valley, and he had been a superstar at Apple. He was easy to work with, creative, hardworking, calm, and methodical, and always delivered on whatever he committed to. We had also worked together a few years earlier as part of the team that created the first Nook eBook reader for Barnes & Noble. Gallatin’s expertise covered a wide area, including defining and designing the electronic hardware architecture and developing the product’s firmware. Gallatin also had experience in designing some of the first non-phone products to use the Android operating system.
Also joining the team a few months later would be his business partner, Dave Paulsen, a veteran electronics engineer who had worked for many of the iconic hardware companies in Silicon Valley including Apple, Grid Computer, and NeXT. Paulsen had once run his own sixty-man electronic design company. He was the same engineer described in Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs who had told the Apple chief what he could do with his job after Jobs insulted him and his team for only working eighty-hour weeks.
Last, we brought in a mechanical engineer, Simon Gatrall, who had once worked for IDEO but was then working independently. In addition, Jason Rubenstein, who had previously been working with Mark Goldstein on the Pono music store and the user interface for the player, continued in that role. Our audio expert would be Bob Stuart of Meridian.
PRODUCT GOAL
The goal was to build a small, affordable music player that could play back high-resolution audio files better than anything available on the market. It was to be simple to use and targeted to all those who loved to listen to music, but without the complexity found on existing products designed for audiophiles. Neil’s goal was to expose a new generation of listeners, those who grew up listening to MP3 files, to something much better. He mentioned how his daughter, Amber, felt cheated when he explained to her that she was actually listening to a dumbed-down version of the original music, and he believed many others who had only been exposed to MP3 would feel the same way once they began using Pono.
We realized that this undertaking had a lot of risk. Not the risk of designing and building a player; that we knew we could do. The concern was with the current market trends and the market acceptance of a player. More and more music was being consumed, not as physical media, not as files on stand-alone music players or even phones, but as music streamed over the internet, delivered directly from the cloud. Apple’s sales of iPods had begun to plateau and were expected to soon decline. And numerous companies were offering streaming music for just a few dollars per month or even free with ads. Streaming was the enemy of quality music, but it didn’t seem to matter to the millions who listened to it in greater and greater numbers because of its convenience and low cost. We knew we were fighting an uphill battle but one that we believed would show how much better music could be.
Inspired by Neil’s passion for what we were doing, we were all focused on our jobs and not worrying about what we couldn’t control. It’s easy to dwell on “what ifs,” but our job was to design and build the superlative player that Neil had asked for.
THE MARKET
The market for music consisted mostly of low-end streaming that was very convenient but had mediocre quality; music players that played downloaded, compressed files such as the iPod; and music player apps built into smartphones that worked much the same way. The high-end audio industry was entirely different. It had been associated with hobbyists and the privileged few who were willing to search for their high-quality music and hardware, then assemble the best audio system that they could afford. Just the process of buying music from the existing high-res stores required knowledge of a half-dozen file types with cryptic names. It was sometimes hard to know which albums really were high res or if they had been modified to make them seem like they were higher quality than they really were. In other words, listening to high-quality audio took work.
MUSIC STORE
By contrast, in building the Pono player and our own accompanying high-resolution music store, we would provide a complete and affordable way to enjoy quality music. To make it as seamless as possible, the music store would sell content for download to a computer and transfer to the player. It would be much easier to use than existing stores and would focus on high res.
Neil wanted the store to be simple and easy to access for both finding and listening to quality music. It was a gift he wanted to give to all those who love listening to music, a segment he believed was much larger than the audiophile market.
While Neil was excited to move forward with the player and store, it was still not exactly his ideal solution. He ultimately envisioned that the music player would be synced to a tablet that would bring up details about the album as it was playing. The tablet would display lyrics, the history of the performance, contributors, and detailed liner notes about the performers. It would have been complicated to do and not something feasible at the time. But it would not be forgotten, because Neil had the vision and would somehow find a way to do it—if not now, then perhaps later.