General Magic was probably the single-most important project of the 20th century. Originally spun out of an internal Apple project. The at-the-time CEO, John Sculley later joined the board of General Magic and despite Apple’s minority stake in General Magic, attempted to cannibalize their research and neuter their products:
Even though the company folded shortly after the dot-com bust in 2004, the spoils of their research and development gave us Palm’s Pilot, RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, and countless other products that we now collectively call: the smartphones. Veterans of General Magic are, to say the least, numerous:
But wait, there’s more:
- Andy Hertzfeld, one of the members of the original Apple Macintosh Design Team. Also had a brief stint at Google engineering.
- Pierre Omidyar, one of the many founders of eBay. Now a philanthropist.
- Kevin Surace, CEO of AppVance.ai
- Kevin Lynch, previously the CTO at Adobe, now he’s VP, Technology at Apple.
- Phil Goldman and Steve Perlman, both founders of WebTV (Side-note: WebTV was briefly classified as a weapon for overseas sales due to the nature of its strong encryption. Later is rebranded as MSN TV) which Microsoft acquired in 1997 for $425 million.
- Peter Nieh, currently is a partner at LightSpeed Venture Partners.
- Marco DeMiroz, currently is a partner and co-founder at The VR Fund, a venture capital firm dedicated to all things VR.