Listen to May Interview, Part 2
Mike May: So I had an LED-120 terminal, braille terminal, about the size of a small washing machine that was spewing out about a thousand sheets or so a week, and I was reading everything in hard-copy braille.
But I could also then give feedback to the system and say, "Store that in a particular file or folder." So I was one of the first people in the CIA that was doing computer-based storing and filing and processing of information because these programmers built the program for me.
Tony Candela: If the information was coming over the computer, I imagine this was prior to having let's say a talking terminal, or anything of that nature. So it would dump into the LED-120, which essentially is a braille printer.
Mike May: That's right.
Tony Candela: So all the stuff would go basically to braille.
Mike May: A box of paper a week.
And what I would actually get in the morning is I would get a printout with an abstract of all of the different messages that were relative to my countries. I would look through those abstracts and say, "Give me more information on this one," or "File that one."
It was a matter of reading and storing and filing. Because my job was, if something critical happened in one of my countries, then I would be called upon to write an article that would go into the presidential daily briefing, which is what the top figures in the government get in order to know on a day to day basis, just what are the hot spots in the world and what people think about it.
Tony Candela: When you were in college, this would be the early 1970s to the mid 1970s, what types of technology were available to you to help you through, first your engineering and your political science and then of course on to your Master's degree?
Mike May: I primarily relied upon tape recorders and of course in engineering there was a lot of transcription. Braille transcribers were amazing. There was a woman named Betty Osborn who had been my braille transcriber when I was in first grade. She stayed with me, offering to have her group braille things for me, through my time in college and the San Mateo Braille Transcribers Group did a lot. So I had quite a few people supporting me with braille transcription.
Then, of course, as I got more into Political Science, the load was on reading more. I had lots of tapes and I remember the compressed, the first compressed tape recorders that were indispensable. Lexicon, I think is the name, Lexicon Something. That was a way to crank through high volumes of material.
When I was in graduate school I had 11 readers. One was in charge of the other 10 readers. [They would] get everything to me, properly on time. Some of these readers I never met so I had a Reader Manager, in order to get through the incredible amounts of material I had to read, on a weekly basis, in graduate school.
Tony Candela: That's more readers than I ever heard anybody ever had before. How did you get them and how did you set that system up?
Mike May: Well, I realize that if you lose a critical reader and you only have two or three of them, then you've lost 30% of your reading ability. So I wanted to reduce that load to 10% and it worked effectively for the two years I was in graduate school.
I did have an Optacon. I used it somewhat but I never was good enough and I always found that going at 20-30 words a minute was just so inefficient.
It was a useful tool for checking private mail but not for reading any kind of large volumes of material.
Tony Candela: When did you get your Optacon?
Mike May: I think I got the Optacon in say '73.
Tony Candela: Not too long after they first came out on the market.
Mike May: No. And I loved it. I spent a lot of time, I remember sitting in a restaurant just reading the menu and taking forever to order just because I wanted to do it myself.
Tony Candela: How did you get the Optacon?
Mike May: I think it was funded by rehab. Seems like they were $3,500.
Tony Candela: There was a fund set up to pay for Optacons. Sensory Aids Foundation was I think the name of the organization.
So you were one of the early recipients of it.
Mike May: I was and I went down to Palo Alto and got my training and used it for a number of years. But I never felt like it really was something that helped me when it came to high volume reading.
Tony Candela: Did you meet a lady named Margie Linvill? She's the wife of John Linvill.
Mike May: I met them both. I don't think I ever met their daughter.
Tony Candela: Candy.
Mike May: I heard a lot about her.
Tony Candela: She would have at that point been a student at Stanford.
Mike May: Exactly.
Tony Candela: So you met the Linvills?
Mike May: Yeah. I was on the board of Sensory Access Foundation that Marjorie Linvill was also on.
Tony Candela: Any other types of tech? Did you have a talking calculator?
Mike May: I had a talking calculator, Speech Plus, $400 from Telesensory.
I had a giant slide rule that was about three feet long, a tactile slide rule. I hope that's in a museum somewhere because it was quite a piece of work.
Tony Candela: And this was way before any kind of higher-order calculation device was available, for non-visual users, that's for sure.
Mike May: Yeah.
Tony Candela: So how long did you stay at the CIA?
Mike May: I was with the CIA not much more than a year. I finished up graduate school in Washington, D.C. and I decided I wanted to go back to California. It's one of those classic, "It's a great place to visit but not necessarily want to live here." In the humidity all the time.
So I moved back to California and that was to see what sort of job I could really get with a degree, a master's degree in international affairs.
Tony Candela: You quit the CIA, without another job lined up?
Mike May: Yes.
Tony Candela: And you came back to California.
Mike May: Mm-hmm.
Tony Candela: This experience of managing the readers and having a reader manager, prompts a question. Did you know early on that you had good management skills? This sounds like a management task.
Mike May: In retrospect, you're probably right. I hadn't thought about it that way but it certainly taught one the power of finding good people and keeping them and the challenging process of sorting that out when you're often making those decisions based on knowing somebody for a half an hour.
And then what to do, when do you move on and when do you keep somebody. All of those different things. To be figuring that out at age 25 or 24 or something probably was pretty useful.
Tony Candela: And before we get too far away from your schooling, back in high school you were on the wrestling team and then for a couple of years of college, you were also on the wrestling team? You told me this off tape.
Did you do any other extracurricular activities when you were in high school?
Mike May: I'd participate in any sport that I could. In elementary school I did flag football. Less so in high school because people got a lot bigger than me.
I loved music a lot. I got involved in that at the beginning of high school and particularly in college. It was such a great way to meet people and playing in youth groups and in church groups and then eventually in bands.
Music was a big part and sports, wrestling, and soccer was something that was starting to get popular. When I came here to Davis, I was on an intramural soccer team. I had a beeping soccer ball. It was heavier than a regular soccer ball so some of the other teams didn't like it because you couldn't head it without hurting your head.
So they would agree to use the beeping ball for half of the game and a regular ball for the other half. And I found that I could even get by with a regular ball. One of the great advantages of being blind is that when you're running straight at somebody and they realize that you don't see them, there's an intimidation factor that you have, as long as you keep going for the ball and don't worry about what's in between. And sometimes people would step off and I could actually get an advantage over them.
Tony Candela: And how do you describe your body build?
Mike May: I'm 6'2", 170 lbs. So I'm long and lanky, always have been.
And with any of these things, wrestling or playing soccer, I always found that there was a niche for me, in terms of my body type and being blind. In soccer, it was being a fullback, being a defensive position. Cause a lot of times all you have to do is kick the ball out of bounds, get it away from the goal.
Being the person scoring goals would not have been a great thing for a blind guy. And that was true of any other kind of sport. And I was always finding a niche and when I think about getting involved in business, a lot of times it was the same. Find the niche, let's figure out what works for me.
Tony Candela: There is a story that the blindness community knows about in northern California, about Mike May that has to do with adventures at a camp up in the wine country territory, north of San Francisco. The camp is called Enchanted Hills.
And you were a frequenter of the camp and I think your mother had something to do with the camp, didn't she? In your younger days.
Mike May: I started to go to Enchanted Hills camp when I was about 8 years old, in the early 60s and I went there many years. Missed a few years.
In 1975, they were looking for a new Camp Director and asked my mother to recommend somebody and one thing led to another and she was hired as the Camp Director, from 1975-85.
So a place that had really become special to me during the summer, I also worked at. I was actually working there as a counselor before she was hired in 1974 and then I stayed on and this became my second home, if not my first home, where I spent a lot of my summers and a lot of time off season. A beautiful place.
Tony Candela: Well, the story that people tell is the story of you running through the woods, without any aid or device, headlong, downhill, scraping and scratching yourself.
And the end goal was what? To get to a bar?
Mike May: Oh, that story, yes.
There was an event to hike to Napa and I had some reason I couldn't go on this hike. It was an 11, 12-mile hike through the fire trails and on to the small country roads and down to Napa itself. And I couldn't go on this hike and I really wanted to.
So, I took care of what I needed to do and then it occurred to me that if I ran, I could probably catch up with everybody. All the vehicles had left. They were taking staff down there to meet people. I had a Seeing Eye dog at the time, Toady. And I knew these trails because I had been on them for so many years as a kid.
I went with my dog through the trails and these are fire trails, overgrown and pretty steep in certain places. And I went three or four miles through those roads till I got to the paved road and then ran along that for awhile.
My dog's pads got sore and so she could no longer keep walking. She wasn't used to running quite this far. So somebody came along in a van, one of the staff going downtown and they offered to pick us up and I thought, "Gosh, I've gone six and a half miles already. I want to make it the rest of the way myself."
So I very foolishly had my dog get in the car and I knew this road and there wasn't much traffic on it and I just ran, without a cane, and continued down this road the rest of the way. And this worked until I got to Napa, at which point I got to a signal light and I'm thinking, "How do I negotiate this signal light? And I just waited and crossed, with no cane, got to the other side and was running again.
At that point I ran into a pole, with something sticking out of it and it cut me pretty deeply under an eye. So now I'm not only sweaty after running ten miles, but I'm bleeding.
And I got to the next light and I think, "I'm not going to cross this by myself." I waited till somebody came. People would come along and I'd say, "Excuse me," and they'd rush off cause they'd see this hideous-looking person, sweaty and bloody, asking them for help.
So it was quite an accomplishment when I finally got to the pizza parlor where everybody was meeting and had made this run, half with a dog and half without, half dead by the time I got there.
Tony Candela: This story is told still, by people who were around back then who occasionally still go to Enchanted Hills for adult retreats, things like that that are still available.
As a side question, a philosophical question, what do you think about camps for the blind like the one at Enchanted Hills? There's often arguments these days about whether they should have them or whether everything should be in the mainstream. It's an argument that has been going on for quite a long time.
Mike May: I think there's a place for camp. I learned a lot. I can use my own experience and think that that's where I first really started dating. Because when you're 13, 14 years old and you're not self-confident, you're worried about will she go out with me because I'm blind or not, when you're in a little safer environment and the girls are blind and the guys are blind, it was easier to practice there to develop some confidence that then helped me out when I was in the mainstream.
I think of the same kind of thing, in terms of schooling education. When I was in elementary school, up until high school, all the kids were bussed to one school in the county. So there's fifteen blind people and 600 sighted kids in a school. And I think that was really beneficial in terms of learning braille, learning skills, getting the fundamentals down because I had a resource teacher at my disposal six hours a day.
Whereas in today's environment that's philosophically more integrated, the student doesn't have a teacher six hours a day. They end up with an aide or somebody that shows up once a week. And I think learning the fundamentals is very important and I did so in that kind of a school system and at summer camp there was something where we could also be free and develop skills and enjoy the benefits and things to be learned from other blind people.
Tony Candela: The prevailing argument these days is that immersion training, really where you spend a lot of time learning the fundamentals, you have lots of blind people around you to use as role models is ultimately the best way to get your skills and your sense of self, really prepare yourself for the mainstream world, as it were.
Mike May: Yeah. And I think, you asked about, "Where would I want to be? Would I be in the way-finding business, and if I go in any other direction, I think I'd still be in the getting around business but I'd love to have a day when I could just focus my time on mentoring and teaching and not having to worry about income and a family to raise. I'd like to be able to give back, because I get so much out of people who learn from me and they get excited about getting around better, whether it's with GPS technology or it's skiing down a mountain. If I can share that with somebody, I get a real kick out of it.
Tony Candela: Let's go to California. You left the CIA, you left D.C. We're in the late 1970s, 1980. Around '80. And you decided to go west, young man. Go back west.
So you went back to California. Where did you live when you returned?
Mike May: I moved back home, my parents' worst nightmare. Kids go away and then they come back.
It was probably one of the most difficult periods I'd experienced. Of course I don't remember probably when I was in high school and things were a struggle too, but when I think back over college and career, that transition from graduate school to a job was really hard, I'd interviewed more than probably all of my other classmates. I never got a rejection but I never got a job.
It was because, when it really came down to it, I had a fairly high level of education, I would be taking on a lot of responsibility in a job, and a lot of managers were not willing to have somebody work for them in that position, put their job on the line, put their neck on the line. And they just wouldn't hire me.
And I interviewed after interview. I had this great resume, traveled to Africa, and had a Master's, worked at the CIA, and I could not get a job.
Tony Candela: You traveled to Africa? During your Master's degree program?
Mike May: No, it was at the end of my time at UC, Davis and I needed some units and I wanted to travel. I had intended to go to the University of Beirut in 1975 and then in September, when we were supposed to take off for Beirut, the University President was shot and killed and all hell broke loose and they canceled the trip.
So I found another trip to Ghana in West Africa and went over there for several months.
Tony Candela: So that landed you in I guess a partly modern, partly not so modern environment, I'm going to guess.
Mike May: Very primitive environment. I lived in a village where there was no running water, no cement buildings. In fact we were building, I joined the village in a project of building the first cement structure, which was a school.
Tony Candela: Now what was it like, before we leave Ghana now, what was it like dealing with, I'm going to guess, the belief systems of the people who were natives over there, to what blind persons could do?
Mike May: It was absolutely, without exception, the second-most profound experience in my life. The first being having children.
But that process of being out in this jungle village, where we didn't speak the same language, and I have a Seeing Eye dog and I had long hair at the time. So here is this white guy, blind with a Seeing Eye dog in this completely different culture, which happened to be Muslim and they accepted me because their fundamental belief system was, "You have to participate in this community to survive. If you don't, you die." It's pretty black and white.
So if you lost a leg, it didn't matter. You couldn't go sit in a corner and do nothing. You had to haul water or cook or sew or do something. My personality was such that I would say, "I'll do anything. Give me a hand or point me in the right direction. I don't want to be completely on my own." And this worked great. As soon as they saw I demonstrated an interest in participating in the building of the school, I had a job of carrying the dirt from one place to another. It was a very straight path and somebody would give me a load of dirt and I'd go to the next place and dump it. We were building a foundation.
And I would do this menial labor that a tractor could have done in a week. It took us months to do it, three hundred people working on this project. But it was so amazing that they were enabling in their thinking. As primitive as they are, and picture this jungle out there with mud huts, as primitive as they are, they were more advanced in their thinking about enabling other people in the community than I find most communities in our so-called developed countries.
Tony Candela: The language they spoke, was it English?
Mike May: Enzema.
Tony Candela: Enzema.
Mike May: Hello.
Tony Candela: My transcriber is going to have a fit.
So how did you communicate with these people?
Mike May: I had studied another language that a few of them knew called Chwee. That helped. And some of the kids knew some English, but there was very rudimentary communication.
Psychologically, it was very difficult because when you can communicate only in short phrases for several months, there's a certain kind of claustrophobia that sets in. You just want to say a complicated sentence and have somebody respond, and that wasn't an option.
Tony Candela: Did you pick up language skills as you went along?
Mike May: Some. Much as I could in a few months.
Tony Candela: Is that how long you were there for, a few months?
Mike May: I was there about three months and then I got malaria, very badly, and was running 106 fever and delirious for several days and the guy I called "Mr. Natural," the medicine man took care of me and eventually they had a vehicle that would come in once a week to bring in supplies and they took me out when they could, to a hospital run by German Catholic nuns and I recovered there before they took me back to the capital, Accra, and I went home.
The funny thing with that story is it's a good example of my mother. She got a telegram saying that Mike was coming home and this was earlier than I was supposed to. So she figured they were sending me back because they couldn't accommodate me because I was blind.
So she got up in arms. She found out the Ambassador at that time was Shirley Temple Black. So she called Shirley Temple Black, but the time difference, she gets a call back from Shirley Temple Black at 3:00 in the morning, in Walnut Creek, California, and she said, "Mrs. May, no, your son is coming back because he has malaria. He's very sick, and not because he's being sent out of the country because he's blind."
That's my mother for you. You have that kind of support, you can go anywhere.
Tony Candela: This was a very, very interesting adventure. Were you happy to leave at that point or were you sad to leave.
Mike May: It was both. I felt there was unfinished business. I don't know what happened in that village. I'm sure the school got finished and there's a four-lane road out there now.
When you're that sick, you don't think about anything other than just feeling better, for quite some time.
Tony Candela: So now, back to California.
Mike May: Applying for a job and having this great resume and struggling was really tough. Evaluating the issues of being blind and being turned down because I'm blind, and I think that played a big part in it. Certainly the fact that I was looking for a high level job, an entry-level management position, if you will, was difficult.
But with perseverance things happened. One of the biggest turning points was I went to work for Time-Life Libraries, the people who call you up and try to sell you trials of books, and over the course of four hours each morning in a building in San Francisco, I would probably talk to a hundred people and 96 of them would tell me to get lost.
That hardened me to the issue of being rejected, like nothing else could possibly do. So somehow in a backward way, developed my confidence and when I'd go in for a job interview, I wouldn't be put off by them turning me down. I don't know if it was timing or that, but shortly after that I got a job with the Bank of California, and never really had to pursue another job from that point on. It was always one job that evolved into another job.
Tony Candela: So when you got to Time-Life Libraries and you were doing your cold-calling, as it were, were you using any kinds of technologies at that point? Was there anything new that was helping you to do that job?
Mike May: No. Not at that point. I was using tapes and braille. I'd braille up the call lists.
No technology at that point. This was 1980.
Tony Candela: And the PC was almost ready to come out, but not yet.
Mike May: Yes. There were a few. The Bank of California. This is when the technology really started happening for me.
Tony Candela: What was the job at the Bank of California?
Mike May: I was to have an overview management training and a number of different departments. I worked in the Electronic Funds Transfer department and I also worked on the Automated Teller machines, when they were first coming out.
And in order to communicate in the inner office environment, there was the precursor of e-mail called Tymenet. The way the sales person had pitched this on the bank on using Tymenet and then right around that, this is 1981, someone introduced me to VersaBraille.
And so I got a loaner VersaBraille from Sensory Access Foundation, which was a lifesaver, because I could try it out and see if it worked. This is all pioneering things. A new system for the bank and the Tymenet person, who's a good friend to this day, worked with me a lot to interface the VersaBraille and we got this whole system going.
She actually gave me a free account on Tymenet that I kept for many years. That's how we stayed in touch. That turned the corner where I purchased a VersaBraille, Rehab purchased it for me, and that was my fundamental tool in day to day work at the bank.
Tony Candela: So signals would come from the computer system over the telephone, right into the VersaBraille. What would it be, a Braille display that you'd read from.
Mike May: A 20-character braille display and the VersaBraille tape-based system. And then I also had a direct interface to some other computers.
Tony Candela: And the direct interface was through the VersaBraille?
Mike May: Through the VersaBraille, exactly.
Tony Candela: So you could type into the computer itself and receive input from the computer.
And those VersaBrailles were tape-based, which made them so much slower and clumsy but they were wonderful for the time.
Mike May: Incredible at the time. I couldn't live without it and many times the display needed cleaning and I had to send it back to Telesensory and I might as well go on vacation because I couldn't do my job without it.
Tony Candela: How did the job go?
Mike May: It was fascinating. I had an incredible boss who taught me some of the personnel skills that I have now, in terms of managing other people. I'll never forget that I asked him about the secretary, how long had she been there? And he said, "I never keep a secretary for longer than six months." I said, "Are you that hard to work with?" He said, "I make sure I hire smart people and I move them on. Everybody wants to work for me because they know that it's a stepping stone to a higher position."
So here's another enabler. And where other people would look at it just the opposite. And that's the reason he hired me. And his boss, who is one of the people involved in hiring me, as well as the Executive Vice President of the bank, they are still people whom I'm in communication with to this day, 22 years later.
Tony Candela: Did you move up in the system at the bank?
Mike May: I moved up in terms of getting out of that intern kind of role into an official management position, but I was only at the bank about a year and a half and then a friend of mine from high school who I started out in ham radio with, he had been involved with ESL, which is a defense contractor in Sunnyvale, and had presented the idea that there could be a way to do automated political risk assessment, the kind of stuff I was doing at the CIA he felt could be done in an automated fashion, using satellites and signal processing and so forth.
And so we presented a project to ESL for a new business area that they'd never been involved in to do just that. And it was finally accepted. We actually started this before I got the bank job and it took about three years before they finally came around and said they wanted to start this new business here.
So I left the bank and went to work for ESL in the first really of my ventures. I was by myself and had a lot of engineering support but it was my baby to try and create this product in a large corporation.
Tony Candela: Did your friend stay with you, the one that helped you conceptualize this?
Mike May: He was still there. He was an engineer, working on some other projects. And then he left, with three other engineers to start a company to develop a laser turntable.
We used to do quadraphonic sound in high school. We listened to Linda Ronstadt, who was on an FM radio station and we had a 4-track recorder and do all this stuff we love with audio. He had a dream and having worked in signal processing, this defense company came up with some technology to make a laser turntable.
So he left with these three engineers and a couple months later, I went to join them to handle the marketing and sales side of the business. And we started a little company, which eventually developed the world's first laser turntable.
Tony Candela: A laser turntable does what?
Mike May: It's essentially a giant CD player. You put a vinyl record into it and it plays the record without touching it. There's no needle. The grooves are being tracked by laser diodes and the groove walls are being read by lasers.
Tony Candela: A needleless turntable.
Mike May: Non-destructive reading of the record.
Tony Candela: Are those type of turntable still in existence?
Mike May: The same company is now owned by a guy in Japan, I saw him last year and it was very nostalgic because he was doing a demo at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas and I was looking through his stack of records to pick something to demonstrate and the very same Doobie Brothers album that I used to demonstrate and a couple of the others, Minute by Minute, was in his stack.
Because when he got the company he got it lock, stock and barrel. So it was really strange to put that album on and hear how beautiful it sounded, twenty years after we'd left the company.
Tony Candela: Was there a period where you were working for two companies at the same time?
Mike May: No.
Tony Candela: You went from ESL to this other company?
Mike May: To Finial Technology.
Tony Candela: Finial Technology.
Mike May: The other thing I was involved in that was brand new for me was raising money. We raised about $7,000,000 bringing in your traditional venture capitalists.
And then I also added to my bailiwick at that time, the Apple IIe.
Tony Candela: Now we are in the early '80s? 1982 or '83?
Mike May: Actually, I was at ESL in '82. That's when I first got the Apple IIe, or probably an Apple II+ and I was customer #12 for Raised Dot Computing and David Holladay.
I should say Holladay. I get the Hallidays and the Holladays mixed up.
Tony Candela: Holladay.
Mike May: So I started with the Apple IIE and the VersaBraille and that went with me to Finial Technology. I milked every ounce out of the Apple IIe that one can possibly get out.
Tony Candela: So with the Raised Dot product, Braille edit, at that time I think it was called that, you got braille translation and you also got some kind of speech, did you not?
Mike May: There was speech on the Apple speech card, that's what I used and that was my system for reading, writing, database storage. A product from Bill Grimm, precursor to GW Micro. He had a database product, Screen-Talk, something like that.
Tony Candela: I remember the Talk series, Word-Talk, File-Talk...
Mike May: File-Talk must have been the database...
Tony Candela: Elegant. They were custom designed so that if you were a Speech user you could use it very easily.
Mike May: And the thing I loved about David Holladay was that I could send in a list of ten things I wanted improved, and eight of them would get implemented. He really developed a cult that I've never seen emulated.
Maybe with Braille 'n Speak to a certain extent is the closest example. I really felt a part of a cult because Duxbury came out and might have been a better product but boy we loved our Braille Edit.
Tony Candela: David described the fact that he was functioning by reacting to consumer input. That was of tremendous help to him. So you were one of the people giving him feedback.
Mike May: Yeah. Some people complained David's testy but he was an engineer, he was a programmer and they don't always have the best communications skills but boy, he was dedicated to what he was doing and I think made a huge impact on the early days of the technology.
Certainly he personally impacted my own productivity a lot by implementing these eight things, at least once a month. He was incredibly productive himself.
Tony Candela: He eventually came out with his own newsletter to keep people abreast of what was going on.
Mike May: And that newsletter was critical. And to this day when people say, "What do I do to learn about this technology?" I think back on the Raised Dot Computing newsletter. You need something like that. Because he didn't only cover his own product, he covered other products.
Tony Candela: A very busy man. You are also a busy man. You were with Finial Technologies. What did you do there?
Mike May: Finial blew up in our faces. It was very difficult emotionally. This was our baby. We were shooting for a home run to make our millions.
Fortunately, we came out not with millions but with enough money where we could sort of contemplate for a year. This is about the time I met Jennifer so I had a new relationship evolving. I was a great guy to hang out with. I took her to Europe. We went to Chile skiing. Doing all this stuff. Between Finial and whatever I was going to do next.
I finally decided that start up companies and pioneering new products was where it was at for me. Cause that was really the fundamental decision. Do I do another startup? Do I go to the security of a big company? Where do I go?
And my friend Rob was going through the same thought process.
Tony Candela: What's Rob's last name?
Mike May: Reis.
Tony Candela: How do you spell that?
Mike May: Reis, R-E-I-S.
And Rob decided to work on one particular product. We were always brainstorming. We were camping out on Mount Shasta with a bunch of us ex-Finial people. Boy we came up with some hair-brained products. One was a dishwasher for camping.
So Rob went off to do one company and I started up with what we called Maytech sports. It actually started out Maytech Products and then we added to focus more on sports.
The product was called The Bunwarmer and The Bunwarmer was to be a portable heating cushion, primarily to be used in sports environments, at Green Bay or Buffalo and this is something you could either sit on, hence The Bunwarmer or was really more effective if you tucked it inside your jacket. It would heat up for two or three hours, during a football game.
And these kind of products are now found in hand warmers, where they have this powder that oxidizes quickly and that's what causes the heat.
So we developed this and I had an anaerobic chamber where we did all the testing of these things. And we moved, I was in San Francisco, living in a flat with Jennifer and we got married and went to Ashland, Oregon and took all of this paraphernalia with us and that's really where Maytech Products got under way, literally in the basement of our ten acre home up there in the foothills in Oregon.
Tony Candela: What made you move from San Francisco to Ashland?
Mike May: I was tired of the rat race. I think there was still an emotional part of me from Finial where I just felt like this is a huge break in the stream of life and I need to do something different.
And there was a lot of evaluation of what is quality of life? Is it making $5 million in Silicon Valley and having to spend $5 million for a house, or is it making $100,000 in Ashland, Oregon and spending $100,000 for a house. Either way, your resources are sort of sucked out by the community that you live in, but the quality of life, the air, the people, the availability of sports in Oregon was so enticing and one could make a lot less money and still have a lot more happiness and quality of life.
And that was true. I still, even though I'm back in Davis now, I miss that environment and I think of that equation. We didn't have kids at the time so once the kids were in the picture, all of a sudden we had another complexity to deal with.
Tony Candela: And Ashland is also famous for its Shakespearean Theater.
Mike May: It's one of the few places I've ever run into where you have a beautiful combination of country and culture. Usually when you have a beautiful place, there's not a lot of culture around. When you have a lot of culture, there's not a lot of country. Here we had both.
Don't tell anybody.
Tony Candela: They'll go there and ruin it.
So you're in Ashland. You've brought your paraphernalia with you. It's in the basement.
Did The Bunwarmer sell well?
Mike May: It didn't sell well. It was really difficult building the market and the wrong turn that we took was focusing on the professional sports industry as the primary market for this. And the reason why is that the NFL player's association or the NFL licensing system is very Old Boy network and you don't just come in if you have a new product and get in the door. The only professional stadium at that time that wasn't locked in by the NFL was Buffalo. All the others were 100% controlled by the NFL system.
And we didn't crack that system. We sold some product to Buffalo and to Green Bay and ran out of money, essentially.
Towards the end of that product cycle, we realized that the better market for it was the Emergency Medical and the Survival market, if you will. And we made some inroads in there but there was a point where I expended all my savings and money from Finial and I can't go into debt any more. I've got to do something that makes a living.
In the end, Maytech Sports was a dead end but an interesting avenue to go down.
Tony Candela: So you essentially ended up being a one-product company for the life of the company?
Mike May: Yup.
What we took on was a very low-tech product that paid the bills. It kind of pulled us out of the doldrums and it was called a Flexible X-ray Film Cassette. So when somebody X-rays a pipeline to make sure there aren't fractures in it, they need to be able to wrap a film cassette around it. Like the film cartridges that you would traditionally be familiar with in the hospital for a broken arm or something.
And we bought this business from this guy in Grant's Pass and in the same basement next to the anaerobic chamber we had all these cutting and slicing machines and we would build these vinyl film cassettes. Some of them had lead backing. We had all kinds of crazy applications for them.
People would want to film an explosion to see what the blast would look like an X-ray so we'd build these film cassette, they were in unique design and people would pay thousands of dollars for these things.
And little did they know that it was Jennifer and I in the basement of our house in Oregon making these things and we're shipping them off to companies like 3M or Defense Contractors who thought they were dealing with a big company.
Tony Candela: So what did you do next?
Mike May: We sold the film cassette business to another person in Ashland and at that point, I'm trying to think how the timing worked, but a good friend that I'd known from skiing and other places lived in Ashland named Bill Belew. And Bill and I were talking about computers.
I'd always thought of computers and adaptive technology as a tool for getting my job done. I'd never thought of it as a business. As a matter of fact, I'd avoided being involved in any blindness business. I thought that that was too easy.
When I finished graduate school, there were a lot of people urging me to go to law school and get a law degree. I almost didn't want to do it because blind people were lawyers. I didn't want to go down any traditional path. That was not necessarily a good thing but that was my thinking at that young age.
So I stayed away from adaptive technology but I'd always used it a lot and read the Raised Dot newsletters. I needed all these things for my other businesses to be productive.
But Bill and I got together and here I'd started up a couple of companies now and we had a person who wanted a computer put together. So we got the stuff and got the wholesale pricing and sold this guy a computer and made some money and hung up our shingle, "Custom Eyes Computer Systems." That's Custom Eyes.
And that really began my involvement in the adaptive technology business. September, 1991 and Bill and I developed that business and it doubled or more, each year.
(End of Part 2 of 4)
