Voting Age

Voting Age

A Couple of days ago I took my granddaughter Dahlia to the Exploratirium… AS I parked the car Dahlia asked me… “Who are you going to vote for Nonno”… “Obama” was my reply…
“Good “ she said… “Me too, I am voting for Obama”…
I smiled thinking… boy they start early… Dahlia is barely five… or as she says four and three quarters…
Good luck my Princess…

Friends 5

Friends 5


Masa M was one of the most successful hires I made…I had hired him as liaison to our Japanese partner, Matsushita…
True to the Japanese tradition Masa was very loyal… he had worked for a large computer chip manufacturer for three years… he had stayed that amount of time because the company sponsored his green card… and started looking for a job on the third anniversary of employment… This dependability and loyalty made Masa the most successful intermediary in building joint partnerships in the computer peripheral field… We still keep in touch with an occasional lunch at Fontana’s in Cupertino… Good luck my dear friend…


Uli and Doris B have all the positive traits one can see in Swiss citizens… and they know what deep friendship means… I remember one urgent European Distributor meeting I had in Paris… The company was in trouble and I was sent to Europe to drum up some orders… Uli refused to call it a meeting… he called it a Blackmail Meeting… I also remember when I needed Parkinson medication available in Switzerland… Uli was there to supply it…
But the most striking memory I have is… one day Doris visited us to complain on the extremely long period for our broken drives to be repaired… She told our Credit Manager that if we refuse to repair the drives promptly she will put us on “Credit Hold”. Useless to say… the drives were repaired promptly… Au revoir mon ami


Leda B I met Leda in a restaurant in Palo Alto during the World Cup in 1994… She is Brazilian but is fluent in French and Italian… of course we spoke Football between us… It turns out Leda was a journalist on a Fulbright scholarship at Stanford… Over the years we stayed in touch on and off… she moved back to Brazil recently… she says visa problems… but I believe she was homesick… missing the mess one can find in a large Latin country… the largest I presume… In her last email she said November would be when she comes… I hope it is November 2008… Ciao Leda

Friends 4

Friends 4

Kolestin O When I moved to the USA I split Europe in two and hired and appointed Jean Pierre in Paris… Unfortunately after six months Jean Pierre had an operation… he died on the operating table… leaving me to find a replacement… I asked around and through Yves R I met Kolestin… and after three hours he was hired… I remember calling Orit and informing her that I found Kolestin…Where is he from, she asked… he is Basque I said… good, minorities make good salesmen… she answered… and she was right…

Jacques O He was my distributor in France… he is obsessed in always finding a woman… even if only for a smile… he is all show… but with substance too… even though he needs to be the center of attention… always….

Yves R Is maybe the opposite of Jacques O… In every way a gentleman… and a shrewd businessman… when he started his company he mentioned that in six months to a year he would like to add computer peripherals to his portfolio, and if by then I am still interested he would hire me… A couple of weeks later I finalized a deal with Ferrell S… and was looking for distributors throughout the continent… I called Yves and met for lunch… he then started to tell me that he needed some time before hiring me… I then said “Yves I have been hired by Shugart and want to appoint you as distributor… because I have a few orders for you to fill out…”and handed a couple of purchase orders… I am still in contact with Yves… and we get together whenever we are in the same continent…

Dick W Dick was retained as a consultant to help and support me… in Paris… whenever I needed help… a lot involved paperwork, get the right one so as to ensure the legality of a shipment… we were in the middle of the cold war… I remember meeting Dick on July 13th in Paris… it was Bastille Eve with people dancing and making noise in the street all night… I kept in touch with Dick throughout the years…
By chance Dick called me as I was leaving the Detox center… and found a room in a “very undesirable” neighborhood… we must be able to find something better than this… It is thanks to Dick and his support that I found the studio I am in now… Thank you Dick my friend…all the best…

Gunther W was hired by Wolfgang to replace him at Synelec… I remember when he was hired his English was extremely primitive… He will learn it said Wolfgang… which he did… we had lunch last year in Munich… and all seems well… Good Luck Gunther… all the best…

Dimitre V is a Bulgarian living in Campbell… we worked together in the brief period I was with BMI… we meet from time to time for lunch… always enjoyable… see you soon, I hope

Bill C My neighbor… Bill is a poet and he has been guiding me through the writing of this Blog/Book… time only will tell what and how will it end… au revoir…

Friends 3

Friend 3

Leon M One day when I was at Shugart I received a call from Bob T… Bob and I used to work together… he was now with a competitor… he told me that he wanted me to meet someone… so we met for lunch… He brought with him Leon… and said “Ivo this is Leon and I just hired him to run International Sales… Since you know the business can you give him some pointers…” What was curious about his request was that he was introducing me my to new competitor… and he asked for my help… Leon and I became good friends… I later worked for Leon… with great success…. We are still keeping in touch…

Ferrell S Ferrell once described his job as that of a zoo keeper… who hired a bunch of wild animals to take care of the IT jungle… When Ferrell hired me I was living in Paris… knowing of my desire to move to California… he said “Ivo you get us half the market and we will move you”… with that incentive I worked my butt off… and three years later I gave Ferrell a complete analysis of the European market…showing that we had between sixty to sixty five percent of the market… seven months later I moved to Palo Alto…

Jan P Jan is a Swede and like all Swedes he is convinced that they are superior to any other Nordic person… Jan knew Ferrell so he believed that with his connection he could play up his role… so when I visited him in Sweden he accompanied me to see some Swedish customers… The next day I was scheduled to go to Norway with him… he found some excuse to skip this country… the market is very small…and my man Hogne will take you… Visiting two customers in Oslo the next day appeared to be perfect timing… they were both on the point of choosing a disk drive… after three more visits our sales to Norway were amongst the highest in Europe… even Jan admitted that… he still lives in Stockholm… and I still remember his home phone number…

Dieter S is a typical Bavarian… who believes that beer is liquid food…rather that alcohol… He is also very European who cares for his wine and his Armagnac… One of my successes I can boast was his convertion to the appreciation of Champagne… and since then we have some Champagne whenever we get together… here is to you Dieter my good friend…

Friends 2

Friends 2

Alan K I met Alan in the Bowling Alley in Haifa… He was an engineering student at the Technion…. When I joined SDSI in 1971… Alan was there working in engineering…. I later found out he was in Toronto and spent a few days during a vacation trip in Canada in 1982… He has two daughters, Imbar and Ortal, about the same age than Gal and Sharon… Alan moved to Chicago and I tracked him down a few months ago… Ortal lives in Oakland… and he promised to call the next time he is in town…

Irene and Romain C lived in our same complex in Paris… their daughter Delphine was Gal’s age… they were inseparable growing up… the year after our move to the US… Delphine came for a month in Palo Alto… and Gal went to Paris the following year… Romain and Irene moved to Montreal a couple of years later… we keep in touch, sporadicly…

Jair L Jair died about a year ago… he lived in LA and committed suicide in his desperate fight against Vodka… we were communicating by phone quite often… but I was deep in my addiction and I failed to assess the gravity of his condition… Rest In Peace my dear friend…

Michael B An Israeli IT distributor… Some years ago in an interview with an Israeli IT magazine I predicted that IT stores will be like Supermarkets… Michael still remembers that interview…

Pietro B When I started with Shugart Europe… I asked around for an Italian Distributor… and two different people told me that Pietro had just left the Swedish company he was with and was starting his own distributorship… Some ten days later I was in our booth at IT show… the Systems 75 in Munich… and I see Pietro come by asking if I had appointed any Italian distributor… and I said…”Yes you”… That was the beginning of a lasting friendship….

Angelo D When I was with SDSI selling into Europe… we had an Italian prospective customer named DEA… I was working closely with the Engineering VP on evaluating our product… everything was proceeding according to plan… but at the last minute the boss refused to sign the purchase order… I met him briefly and he told me that his equipment cost was one million dollars… and with my disk drive he would save five thousand dollars… with the risk of lacking full compatibility with DEC.. That Boss was Angelo… he had forgotten about that incident… Years later Pietro hired him as Managing Director… So when he introduced him I reminded him of the DEA affair… Angelo is retired and lives in Torino…. I spent a wonderful few days with him last year…

Friends 1

Friends

I thought it would be a good idea if I listed the friends I made throughout the years… I presume that I will forget a few… and I apologise if I forgot you…

To start from the beginning… my oldest friend is Steve S… previously known as Stelio (in school) and Lucky before that… we were going to the same park, called Oscar Finley Park, when we were two or three years old. The park was in the Mazarita district in Alexandria… I still vividly remember the statue/fountain depicting a boy riding on a dolphin… what it meant… I ignore it… another common point between us was Labiba… Labiba was a cook who was working three days in my grandma Wanda’s house… and three days at Lucky’s mother’s house… It is strange how our families stayed friends… my nonna with his mother in Egypt… my mother with his sister Marina in Greece… and Steve and myself in the USA… quite a few generations… except that Steve lives in Alexandria, Virginia and me in Santa Clara, California…

Bouli K. or Dimitry K… was in school with me in Alexandria, we were also Boy Scouts together… Bouli lives in Athens and the last time I saw him was in the late eighties… thanks to the internet we communicate from time to time…

Alec A was also in school together…he lives in New Jersy…. The last time I saw him was in 1964 when he was vacationing in Greece….

Aram M was another friend from BBS… I tracked him down around 1997 and stopped by his house in New Jersey during one of my trips to Poughkeepsee…

Robi O is next in list, we were in school together in Milano, at the ORT… I saw him again in 1967 when he came to volunteer in Israel… he took a job in Elbit, the same company I was with… he also was instrumental in my taking Orit with me from the beaches of Eilat in 1968… Again through his intervention, I received a call from him where he was offering me a job when I finished college at the Hebrew University in 1971… Robi still lives in Haifa in the same house and his wife Helen is a darling, as usual…

Sallie and Avi T Sallie and I worked together in Elbit… I lost touch with Sallie until last year… when, with Robi, we went for lunch at their house… Avi is into making wine… excellent wine I should say…

Marcello H is the only other ORT alumnus I am sometimes in contact with… he lives in Rome and I had dinner with him some four or five years ago… we email each other sporadically…

Daniel O was a classmate at the Hebrew U… being both Italian and studying Economics we became good friends, doing our exercises together… I had lost touch with Daniel… I was surprised to receive an invite for his wedding, to Silvia, some three months too late… what was surprising was that he got my address in Paris… he was in Cambridge, England working on a PhD…
It so happened that one of my neighbors was heading the Latin Desk at the OECD, and he wanted to convince me to join him… and work at the Italian desk…So I thought of Daniel and told him about my friend…
He said OK so I tracked his phone number in England and called him… “Daniel, how about a real job… interested…” He got to Paris a few days later… got the job at the OECD and moved to France… A few years later he moved to Luxembourg where he is working for La Banque Europeenne des Investissement… as chief economist… I saw him about a year ago during my Eurotour…

Yaacov and Daniela N They were our neighbors in Jerusalem… in all these years we stayed in touch with each other… They moved from Jerusalem to Ranana… when I was in Israel last year we spent a week-end with them, Gal and Dahlia, accompanied me… and of course their children Lior and Ramy with families came over on Sabbath… one of my fondest memories… I wish I will be able to see them again… one day…

Ilan and Ziva B… Ilan is my pillar of strength… Whenever I am distressed, or depressed… I think of Ilan… and I feel better… When asked How do you do… he always answers… Every Day Better… and he means it… He lives in Givataim and if I happen to be in Israel… look him up… because that is my home base in Israel….

Alain (Ilan) P He joined the kibbutz about the sam time I did… he is the type of friend with whom I would sit with for hours… discussing our latest problem… or politics… or share any joy we may think of… he is the friend whom I last saw in the seventies… but he was available when I tracked him down in Israel last year…

Tid Bits

Tid Bits

A bunch of observations from my past which I still remember…

CPU… This was a British distributor whom I appointed in mid 1975… the company was run by Tom and David… their salesman Rob was aggressive but very impersonal with customers… and whenever I had a complaint Rob declared that it was because Tom’s support was insufficient… I could have tolerated these minor incidents if the sales were good… but alas… sales were very low... I called Tom and asked him to meet me at the Heathrow Airport Hotel three days later… which was Xmas Eve… Tom and Dave were there waiting for me… They looked somber… They were both convinced that I would terminate our relation…
Instead, I ordered Champagne and told them that I was fully committed in our relation… but I wanted them to go after every customer… for 100% of the market… This relation turned around and CPU was a fruitful customer for everyone…


A few months after I joined SDSI in Haifa , we bought a car… a Fiat 124… it was the first car either of us had… Since I was carpooling to work I seldom used it to commute… One day my boss Moshe said to me… “Ivo, in all the years I worked I made it a point of being in the office before my boss…” now that you have a car you can be here by by half past seven… I answered “…Moshe, I have a better solution… you can come in at eight o’clock… then you will surely find me in the office…” which he did to everybody’s satisfaction…


Wolfgang was an aggressive German salesman… he was working for my distributor Synelec… but for all intensive purposes he was running the show… One day we were driving to Paderborn to visit a customer… We drove through the town which put us about a couple of blocks from our destination… with the building on the first turn on the left… But there was a No Left Turn sign in front of us… Wolfgang, who was more a salesman than a German said
“That Sign is for Other People we can go left…” and we got to our meeting on time… This convinced me to hire him… and have him find his replacement at Synelec…
Of all the people I encountered in Europe… Wolfgang is the only one who is still in disk drives… He figured out, correctly, that with the Information Technology (IT) expanding with meteoric proportions… there will always be a need to expand the storage in the IT Networks…
Good luck Wolfgang, my dear friend… all the best…

Betty

Betty

A few months after Orit left “to find herself” I went to Hawaii with the girls for Passover… After a week in Maui Gal and Sharon flew back home… while I took the plane to Tokyo… the funny thing about that flight… it was a honeymoon flight…. i.e. all the passengers were newly wed young couples on their way back from their Honeymoon in Hawaii…

In Tokyo I did my business as usual… and was dropped at the Imperial hotel around six… As I was going to my room I noticed a European woman talking to a Japanese hotel employee… When she finished with the employee I approached her and invited her to have a drink at the bar… It turned out she was a travel journalist living in Miami… she was going on this trip to Japan, China and Hong Kong… we spent the evening talking and talking and talking… we agreed to meet in Hong Kong some ten days later…

That was the beginning of some of the most romantic periods of my life… After a super romantic evening in Hong Kong…. Betty managed to change her return flight and stopped in SFO for an extended weekend in the Bay Area… After that, for the following year or so I stopped in Miami on every trip I made to Europe… and on a couple of occasions I took Betty with me… I remember Paris, Milan, Rome, Geneva, Lausanne, Stresa, and Puerto Rico… where I joined Betty for a Jewish Cuban Wedding of her cousins’ daughter… this event lasted three days…

Plenty of very pleasant memories which I shall cherish forever… or at least to the end of my lifetime…

DAWN

DAWN

I started getting into politics in the early nineties while watching C-SPAN on television… there was a sub-committee examining a train derailment on the Russian river… Chairing this sub-committee was a congresswoman from Marin County… she appeared totally in control… and was chewing the Pacific Railroad executive alive… She was so tough and so much in control… that it was a pleasure looking…
I told myself… Ivo, if this woman runs for an office closer to here… I’ll campaign for her… About a year later this woman ran for the Senate… her name is Barbara Boxer…
I called the Democratic Party and got to join a group of her supporters… There was an Arts & Wine festival in Palo Alto a month later and a volunteer was unable to get a table for Boxer… because tables were only for political parties and organizations… we could put fliers on the Dem table…
Wanting to do more I decided to build a mock oil well and put it on wheels, an oil well because Barbara’s opponent was campaigning for off shore oil drilling… On the oil well I put some signs “Barbara Boxer Boxer Shorts donations $10”… I sold out on the first of two days…

The year was 1992… and there was an euphoria on electing women… that started the époque of “My Dad the Feminist…” as my daughter Gal called it…After the election I joined a group which came out of Boxer campaigners… This group called itself DAWN… for Democratic Activist for Women Now… DAWN’s grass root charter was to get women elected in office and bring up women’s issues whenever needed…
After some time I got myself elected in the DAWN Board… I used to joke with them and called myself the “Token Male” in the Board…
After a few years in DAWN I received the GEM Award… GEM meaning Greatly Enlightened Male… but that was the period where I had started with crack… and lost my sense of direction… by direction I mean direction through life…

Feelings

Feelings


When I think back about my feelings a few years ago when the only thing that I cared for was my apathy… It was a way for me to escape… escape from my shame… from the bum I was becoming…
I remember one November calling Gal and telling her I was unable to come for Thanksgiving because I was intoxicated… and going to the Public Shelter for the holiday… I was seeing myself totally becoming a street based homeless… from picking cigarette butts and smoking them… to panhandling… and sleeping by the railroad tracks… and I totally lacked the willpower to get out of this vortex I was getting into…

How did I get out of this… I draw a total blank… I remember instances… and I could write a few more pages on how I felt… but I totally lack the desire of doing so…
Thanks to the Neuro Surgical team at Stanford… and my determination to go back to an earlier commitment…
A commitment to be a father to my daughters… a grandfather to my grandchildren… and a loving friend to all of you…

Hooked On Credit

Hooked On Credit

Are we hooked on credit… We find credit so convenient that we tend to forget that one day we have to pay it back… We even ignore that we have to pay interest… all this because we use the credit “which we earned”
Earned… give me a break… we are so bright that we agree to pay exorbitant fees to allow someone to charge us these fees because “we have good credit”… sounds complicated….
Try cash… it is simple… and cheaper than credit…

Credit comes from the Latin “credere”… which means to believe… So when you get credit you are believable… probably that is where “As Good As Your Word” and… “Cash is King”… comes from…well, I believe that deep inside me… I am a royalist…

Cash Only Please

Cash Only Please...

CASH ONLY, PLEASE!

(an idea proposed by Ivo Adam and Bill Costley on 16 OCT 08)

Here we all are, passively awaiting the media-reported financial tsunami that will engulf the world, told a recession is almost upon us, but definitely not a Great Depression. No, they say (so far) that it’s just a credit crunch, so credit is hard to get: banks won’t lend to each other, so people & companies can’t get necessary credit from any bank. Credit is just drying up.

What can we personally do about it? Get a little saner, quickly. Stop using credit just one day a week. The amount of credit available will increase that one day's worth while the bank consortia that are behind American Express, MasterCard, and VISA, etc. will suffer the loss of that one day’s carrying charges. If you roll that one-day-per-week between Monday to Sunday & back, it will strike rolling terror into the consortias' fiscal hearts as their constant cash-flow income becomes less & less predictable.

What does this do for you? If you are living too much on credit, you now have taken one credit-day off a week to try to come to your fiscal senses & spend cash or spend nothing at all. One day when you say to the spending world “(I) Pay in Cash Only, Please!” (as some Chinese restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown say every day.) Just after WW2 cash (or a valid personal check) was really the only acceptable medium of exchange. People were very selective, super-cautious about what they bought, making things last longer. They darned their sox, rather than discarded them, etc. Ask your mom or grandmom, who will remember.

Celebrate this truly liberating Credit-Off, Cash-Only Day totally alone, or with your friends, or in small Cash-Only clubs. You reward is: saving all carrying charges. Result: Your savings should instantly begin to increase. Your sense of being out of fiscal control should begin to end. You will shed excess-debt weight. You will soon begin to feel you're in fighting fiscal trim.

To respond to this idea, please e-mail: cashonly099@gmail.com or to see the blog go to: http://cashonly0099.blogspot.com/

My Father

My Father

A few days ago was my father’s ninetieth birthday… or to be more precise… would have been… he died a few years ago… We were far from being close… but he was my father…

When my father, Ennio Attias, was eighteen he told his father, Raoul Attias, that he wanted to be a car mechanic… instead of working in his father’s Import Export business… Being the only son that passed very badly with the family…
My father went to the Ford dealer in Alexandria, Egypt looking for a job… he was assigned an engine and told to clean it thoroughly… being alone in that section he was unable to find someone to help him pick up the engine from the floor… so he picked the engine on his own…

He fainted and woke up in the hospital after having gone through emergency surgery… Unfortunately the surgeon had left a scalpel in Ennio’s kidney… It was discovered a while later after intensive bleeding and a messed up kidney for the rest of his life…

After that he went to work with his father…

When my father divorced my mother… I was angry… and stayed angry for a number of years… but I was polite with him and with his wife… even though I hated her… for stealing my father away… but I was always courteous…

Years later when I was in Milano I used to see them on Saturday afternoons, unless it rained, at a café in the Parco Sempione… It was very relaxing, surrounded by green… with a medieval castle in the background… It’s the closest to nature that we can find in Milano… my father used to say…

Years later after I moved to the US… I usually scheduled my weekends in Milano for a variety of reasons… one of them was go for a haircut… go shopping…and have lunch at my father’s… On one of these trips my father told me that his business had gone sour… due to market loss to the Japanese…
His business was the export of rubber sole presses to shoe manufacturers… Apparently there were some five or six Italian manufacturers who held a quasi monopoly of these presses… One day they got an order from Japan… and a year after delivery the Japanese offered the same press for half the price…
My father had to close the business and look for a job…


Trying to help I spoke to my Italian distributor, Pietro Bonoldi, and asked him to see if he could find my father a job… whether in his company or with one of his associates…
In doing this I knew that I was leaning very heavily on Pietro… but I had to do my best… Ennio was my father after all… even though he was in his mid sixties…

He was hired as account receivable manager and stayed with the company for fifteen years until it was sold and went out of business…

It Felt Like S...

It Felt Like S…

That’s the feeling I had when the judge gave me sixty days in County Jail… like s…

Some months before I was arrested for possession of crack cocaine… they gave me two year probation… i.e. stay clean for two years… In that period I had to go for urine test every two weeks… and to court every two to three months…

The last time my urine test was positive and the judge gave me sixty days in County Jail…
In view of my (Parkinson) condition… and my age… they put me in protective custody…or PC… which meant being locked in a cell with another inmate for twenty three hours… and then let out for an hour a day…

The main thing about jail is the total loss of control… the guards or C O as they liked to be called made it a point of controlling your life… Purposely they wake you up in the middle of the night and change your cell… or anything else to make you lose control… like put everyone in chains when transported to Court…very humiliating…

On the other hand… if one thinks it through… these COs are going to stay there much more than sixty days… probably the rest of their lives… and this is far from being with the best of companies…

This feeling of impotence… of total loss of ones dignity is a memory that will be very hard for me to forget…

What Am I...

What am I…

As I was sitting on a public square in Palo Alto… kind of listening a man speaking loudly… to anyone who wished to listen… about the state of affairs of the world… I started wondering whether I was part of this man’s world…
How did I get out of that… and to what did I leave it for…
Being a bum is sad to the extreme… because when you wake up to nothing… there is nothing to do about it… except to find money to buy alcohol, or drugs, so you can return to that world of oblivion… sad…

And what do I do now… well, first I have motivation… motivation to be the Ivo I used to be… to be the Ivo that is there for the family… and to draw satisfaction in seeing Sharon and Gal smiling… and to be there for them when in need… whether it is to take Dahlia to the Exploratorium… or read Goodnight Moon on Tikva’s grave…

All these things are only possible with a “real” Ivo… who stays real and refuses any excuse for returning into oblivion… like my dear friend Jair… who’s final step was to end his life because he was unable to see anything but oblivion in his future…

Normalcy

Normalcy

What is normal… I ask myself… is it the state I am now, after my Deep Brain Stimulation surgery… after my compulsive behavior… end of my addiction…
Now that I have a chance of looking at life and say to myself… Yes Ivo you can be… Cogito Ergo Sum… I think therefore I am… I remember when I was in rehab I told this sentence to a friend and he liked the fact that he could think… and therefore be… unfortunately he left the rehab and went off drinking… I was sorry that he left… and hope he took his being along… and one day return to normalcy…

A Crack Smoking Bum...

A Crack Smoking Bum…

That is what I was reduced to two and a half years ago… without any future in sight… I was spending my social security check within a week of reception… and associated myself with other addicts living on the fringe… I was living in various rented beds in halfway centers… and saying to myself “Ivo, you must stop this crack…” it was a sentence I was repeating to myself constantly… and I continued smoking… and I tried other drugs…which luckily I disliked…

The other thing which I had was my Parkinson tremors… I was shaking all over and the only way to stop it was take more medicine… Requip to be precise… I was taking five to seven pills a day…(the limit was four a day)…
Little did I know of any effects Requip created… all I knew was that it was stopping my tremor… even though I was sleepy and acted in a totally lethargic manner… I just was void of any liking or caring about myself… and I wanted more drugs…

But I still had something left in me… I decided to try going to a rehab and hope it to be the last time… So I packed all my stuff, books, clothes and furniture and spent the next two months putting it in storage… with that done I went to Horizon South to detoxicate my body and my soul… I had finished being a crack smoking bum…

By sheer coincidence I received a letter from Stanford Hospital inviting me to go for some tests and explore my aptitude for Deep Brain Surgery… That procedure was recommended by my doctor some six to eight months back…

While performing these tests… I informed the neurologist on my taking Requip… she immediately asked me if I had developed any compulsive behavior, like gambling… having learned about compulsive behavior the day before in my rehab class I immediately told her YES and it is called crack cocaine…

Having heard that she immediately took me off Requip… and the rest is history…

Bad Timing

Bad Timing

After six years at Shugart you would imagine that I accumulated a decent amount of stock options… to be truthful a few months after I joined the company... I received a packet from Sunnyvale… I was living in Paris at that time… indicating that I was granted stock options to the tune of five hundred shares… I was elated because thinking European five hundred shares is a lot… I delayed any discussion on stock options until I talk to my boss in person…
Then a few months later I was informed that we were being acquired by the giant Xerox… and that my 500 shares would be converted to three hundred and forty Xerox shares… That was the time I realized that five hundred shares was very little… and it was too late to change it…

A few years later when I was at Maxtor I made sure I was granted sufficient stock options…. several tens of thousands… and I held on to them quite q while… the company was doing well and I loved my work… then when the stock tripled I decided to sell most of my stock… The shares were valued at $14.5 and rising… so before going on a trip I was about to take… I gave a sell order at fifteen dollars… and signed all the papers necessary… the date was August 1 1991… two days later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait… and Maxtor shares traded at three dollars… and never reached the teens…

Bad timing…

Oops... Wrong Turn

Oops… Wrong Turn

As I was driving home, I took the University Avenue exit off 101… the traffic was intense so I decided to try turning left and find a shortcut…
I saw a supermarket and… since I needed some stuff I parked my car and went in this Supermercado…
What I saw shocked me… there was less choices than at Safeway… only three miles away… and… the prices were higher… the only thing they had more choices than in my local market was tortillas…
I started asking myself… Why… why are there less choices and higher prices than a few miles away… where there is a choice of three supermarkets… do the poor have more money than the rich… I asked myself…

This was my first encounter with East Palo Alto… the city on the wrong side of the freeway…

Intermezzo

A Time for Reflection

A little over a year ago I was having lunch with some old friends and David Johns said “Ivo you should write a book”… and that is when and where it all began… thanks to the “blog” invention I managed to write a few chapters… and I shall continue… promised…

Adambyte

Adambyte… Why it Failed


In early nineties I got afflicted with start-up fever and decided to start a company… so I went to Comdex and methodically went through every aisle of all three huge halls to see what was the next revolution going to be…
One product line which was promising was Laptops… and there you had one dominant computer… the Apple Powerbook… The Powerbook was a real computer… while all other had limited capabilities…
The other development was with video presentation software… although quite a large amount of storage was needed…
By adding these two developments I decided to explore the possibility of selling a storage box for the Powerbook… and Adambyte was born…

After preparing a business plan… and checking the technical feasibility
Off I went to Boston at an Apple show to do some market research… The show was split in two sites… and there was a shuttle bus… which took fifteen to twenty minutes… I spent most of the day in the shuttle bus… doing about eight round trips… and every time I was sitting next to someone else… all of them Apple users… and I had their devoted attention for twenty minutes… the reaction was enthusiastic… insufficient storage was the main drawback of the Powerbook…

With that positive reaction I was convinced to start the company… I raised some money from private investors… and a larger amount from my savings… and we built a product… the Adambyte Powerbox…

The big problem I had was under capitalization and consignment… I succeeded in securing an order from a large distributor for two hundred Powerboxes (at $2,000 each)… but the payment terms was 30 to 45 days after they sell the Powerboxes… and they would return the unsold Powerboxes…

With such terms it was impossible for me to secure a bank loan… but I had one more card to play… Corporate Account…

Tandem Computers were interested in my Powerbox to give to their sales force for them to use when making a video presentation… they needed over one hundred Powerboxes…

On the day I was scheduled to finalise the order… I received a phone call from the purchasing manager… where he informed me that the company put a freeze on capital equipment… by orders of the Chairman…

When I heard that I decided to pull the plug on Adambyte…

Survival or Success

Survival or Success

What’s in a word… if you are in advertising it has to be the right one…

As I settled in Shugart as Director of Sales… I got more involved in our ads… and the message they conveyed…
At that time we were launching a new product and had a warehouse full of this new product waiting for our customers to finish their development…
Since the product needed an extra card… (sometimes hard to get) I had the bright idea to sell the product in a kit form… The disk drive (8”) the card and cable set… We agreed to go on an ad campaign and asked our P&R and ad people to come out with an ad…

After a week they came up with “SURVIVAL KIT”… and a sub text saying “Let us help you with our survival kit”…
That ad appalled me… there was a negative connotation in that ad… so I changed it to “SUCCESS KIT”… and sold out the product…

Some time later I joined the French company Bull and opened a US subsidiary called Cynthia Peripherals… The name came from the French tradition of naming a project by looking at the date on the Saint Calendar… and naming the project by the closest woman’s name… thus Cynthia…
The product was a ten and a half inch disk drive… which was a unique dimension… but since I had a very large advertising budget… I blocked the back page of every Computer System News (the most popular publication at that time) for my dramatic ad…

The ad consisted of a huge bright yellow lightning bolt and the text saying… “The Ten and a half Commandments”… followed by some gibberish on the product…

Dahlia

Dahlia

Dahlia is a princess…
She dresses as one on every occasion…
Or maybe it is her attitude that makes her a princess…
She is a curious princess… asking questions all the time…
Nonno, she asked… how did you stop the shaking of your arm…
I went to the hospital and they put some wires in my head…
And that stopped my shaking…
Will it stop it for ever and ever… she asked…
I hope so, I said…
Nonno, I love you… said Dahlia

What an angel is this grand daughter of mine… :)