Oh, So, Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host Brian McCullough. I originally

wanted to talk to Mike Slade about Starwave, that innovative company that

launched some of the major names onto the web including E-SPN.com, ABC News.com, Mr. Showbiz and others, and after an eventual sale to Disney put together the pieces

that would become the Go.com portal play. But Mike is one of those guys who has had such a varied

and interesting career I couldn't help but go into other areas. I mean the dude worked at Microsoft in the early 1980s. He worked at

Next in the early 90s and from 1998 through 2004 he was special assistant to Steve Jobs as Jobs came in and

first saved Apple as a company but then launched the iPod and kicked into motion the

modern gadget era as we know it.

So we'll get into all of that in this excellent wide-ranging conversation with Mike Slade, CEO of Starwave.

Mike Slade, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast.

My pleasure.

So I usually on the show ask questions like, what was it like to go to work at Google in 2000 or Facebook in 2005

But let's start with you by asking what was it like to go to work from Microsoft and what was it 1983?

Yeah it's funny that you say that because I was going to Stanford Business School and I didn't

I and when I went up there to interview I didn't really know what they did. At the time they were private and

Lotus and Ashton Tate were public and all they mostly made were languages and

operating systems and compilers and flight simulator and

multi plan was a also rant spreadsheet and word hadn't shipped yet and

the mac hadn't shipped yet and no one really knew what they were so I went up there for an interview. I was from the

northwest and I really wanted to live in the northwest and so I interviewed at Nike and I wasn't a world

class runner so I didn't hire me and even though Phil Knight was a Stanford MBA and then I went to interview a Microsoft and lo and behold

it made me a job offer and I took it and I didn't really, I have to say I'm not being stitches, I didn't really know what they did when I got there. I mean I'm not kidding, I'm not kidding, I don't really know what they did when I got there.

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