Listen to May Interview, Part 3
Mike May: He was the technical guy, I was the marketing guy but we both did a lot of customer service work and people would call us, 10:00 at night and we'd take care of them. We'd be talking to each other at midnight about the day's problems.
It was a great collaboration because Bill was so good technically yet he wouldn't have had the vision or really the chutzpah to really start up a business. But that's what I do and that's what I'd been doing. So it was a nice marriage of our abilities and we felt married after doing this for three years together. Our wives would say we spend more time together than we did with our families.
Tony Candela: Did your wives stay in the business at all?
Mike May: No. Jennifer was still doing the film cassettes I think at that time. There was some overlap and Bill and I did the company and we hired a few other people that worked for us, support staff.
We did a lot of business in northern California and by 1994, we were doing more business in northern California we found out than any of the resident dealers who were in northern California, which of course made some of them annoyed with us because we being in Oregon, people didn't have to pay sales tax buying from us.
Tony Candela: Eventually, did you sell that business off to one of those companies in northern California?
Mike May: Well, here's the serendipity that came about.
In, let me remember the sequence, in July of '94, I was flying back from the ACB convention and I was on a plane from San Francisco to I think Chicago and Jim Fruchterman happened to sit next to me. It's the first time I'd ever met him.
So we got to talking and we're both into startup stuff, intensively. And we were talking about the companies he'd started and his rocket science and all this. And by the time we landed in Chicago we really felt a connection, an entrepreneurial connection.
He said, "We're thinking of growing Arkenstone and adding a Vice President of Sales. If you ever consider moving from Oregon. I made it very clear I didn't intend to do that. I loved it up there. He said, "You make sure and call me."
And not long after that I get a call from my friend, Kathy Mack, who worked with Telesensory Systems. And Kathy said, "We've lost our General Manager," and they went through a lot of them there. "We're interviewing for General Managers and I want to put your name forth as somebody to interview. Is that okay?
I said, "I don't know." Telesensory, the big behemoth. "I don't know." But she did and I got a call and I flew down for interviews with Larry Israel and company.
My thinking was Telesensory of course at the time was the biggest company by far and yet they didn't have such a great reputation for service. Could I go to work there and provide the kind of customer service that Custom Eyes provided. Could we have that kind of impact nationally?
That was seductive to me, thinking along those lines.
After I interviewed and I saw that the behemoth really is pretty well established in the direction it was going and, as you know, they were very bottom line driven. I realized that Mike May was not going to have an impact on that.
And so when I got home...oh, I thought, while I was down there, I called up Jim Fruchterman and I said, "By the way, I'm interviewing for this General Manager position at Telesensory. How are you guys coming? He said, "Come on over."
So I went over and interviewed for a Vice President of Sales job. I went back to Oregon, called up Larry Israel and said, "I don't think I'm your man." And shortly thereafter, Jim Fruchterman made an offer to me to be Vice President of Sales of Arkenstone.
Now I had a difficult time, from the standpoint of moving, but also in discussing with Bill Belew, the fact that we were in southern Oregon, in a small town. Custom Eyes didn't really have the wherewithal to support two senior people. We needed to move to either Portland or San Francisco and Bill wasn't willing to move.
So that combination of events, Custom Eyes needing to grow to the next level and me being wooed down to work with this unique person I'd met on an airplane who was doing innovative things, and having children just being born and realizing that we can't live up in the woods, on ten acres, and raise kids very easily. It was going to be a lot of logistical work.
That combination of events brought us back to southern, to the Valley, Silicon Valley, and I went to work for Arkenstone, starting the end of '94.
Tony Candela: This gave you entree to discover the way-finding technologies, being with Arkenstone?
Mike May: One of the things Jim Fruchterman told me about on that plane flight, and I never got out of my head, was the fact that they were thinking about this combination of GPS and way-finding. And this is something that Charles La Pierre had brought to VisuAide, up in Canada, and VisuAide had connected with Arkenstone and Charles came down and was part of a project to introduce that at Arkenstone.
Tony Candela: So the connection actually came through VisuAide, the way-finding technology. So there was no way-finding technology project at Arkenstone until the connection with VisuAide happened?
Mike May: It's one of those things where more than one person has the same idea at the same time. And I think the meeting of the minds kind of happened at that point.
Actually, the earliest, there was GPS technology that the VA was working on in the late '70s. A number of people told me stories about this and I don't know the details but I know that they were working on it, specifically for applications for the blind.
And then a guy named Jack Loomis, Dr... Jack Loomis at University of California, Santa Barbara, he had a GPS system designed and built and prototyped at UCSB in '93, prior to when Arkenstone was working on it.
So in terms of actual development of GPS, the earliest records I've seen of it was the work that Jack Loomis did at Santa Barbara.
Tony Candela: Meanwhile, the military had been using GPS technology all along. The signals were restricted in certain ways so that the civilian population didn't have accurate data.
Mike May: That's right. There was no access for civilians till, I think, 1984, Ronald Reagan made it available for civilian use, primarily when that airliner was shot down accidentally over Korea when they strayed off course. And the point came up, if we had had GPS, we would have known where we were.
So that was released for general use and it wasn't really viable for consumers till the mid '90s when some of the receivers became a little bit smaller, and not just high end military units.
Tony Candela: So VisuAide came down and I'm going to imagine, a big meeting happened and you and Fruchterman and La Pierre and others were there at this meeting.
Mike May: I wasn't involved in the first discussions with VisuAide. I don't know exactly how they coalesced their plan to launch this thing but the general idea was that Charles had the technical skills and interest to work on this and so he came to Arkenstone, on loan from VisuAide and a couple of engineers at Arkenstone started working on what was then called The Strider Project, right about the time that I started.
So they'd been working on this a couple of months before I got there.
Tony Candela: So then how did you join the fray, with regard to the Strider Project?
Mike May: Well as Vice President of Sales, it wasn't really in my job description to get involved in product design. But certainly from my innovation standpoint, it made sense and they needed a marketing person and a high-end user to test this stuff out and I became the guinea pig.
The other thing that I think probably made a lot of sense, at that time we needed publicity. Arkenstone was certainly happy to be the beneficiary of the press that came out of having an innovative product. I had had a lot of experience with the product, so between being a guinea pig, the poster child, if you will, I got very involved in this product.
Tony Candela: You became, once again, the consumer providing input. That's what you had done for David Holladay.
Mike May: More directly. The engineers are the guys who are programming this and I'm wearing the backpack in a lot of the pictures. [When] people think of the beginning of the GPS technology, it's those pictures of Mike May wearing the backpack with the antennas sticking out of the top and the thing weighing ten to fifteen pounds.
Tony Candela: Did this for you have the feel of an athletic endeavor? While you were playing with the technology, testing it, thinking about it?
Mike May: In some ways, yeah. An athletic endeavor is when you start at the top of a ski run with this pressure, you have a certain amount of skill but there's a pressure, "Will I make all the gates or will I slam into one."
And so there's this discovery process that's going on and you try to make your skills better so that you're successful and you get through the finish line intact. In taking on a new product development, there's a lot of risk and unknown involved and you try to mitigate that with skill and information and resources. But in the end, there's still this risk that drives me to be involved in that situation.
And certainly with the GPS, we didn't know. Is there a market? There was always a belief that we could make it smaller and more effective. Little did I know how long it would take. I really thought that we would have turned the corner much sooner. As did Jim Fruchterman.
Tony Candela: If you were to give us a then and now snapshot of the technology, could you say what was the Strider like in the mid '90s and what is the current technology like right now?
Mike May: The unit that we had at Arkenstone was always laptop-based. So the size depended on how small a laptop could we get.
And some of the laptops got down as low as four pounds. So picture a backpack, a custom made backpack that would hold a laptop, a speaker, and a GPS receiver that was quite large, bigger than the tape recorder you're using. Shoebox sized tape recorder. That was the GPS receiver.
Then there was a differential receiver, a second receiver that was like the size of a grapefruit and then all the wires and connections and batteries for this stuff going together.
And because this was cobbled together and wasn't really commercially available, the real challenge of that particular system was the whole interface and the external keypad. It had all of these connectors and batteries. You had high potential for a temperamental system that would break down, and it did.
I could run it, because I was the maestro, but anybody else try to run it and they might have trouble. As compared with the system today, where there's one connection to a serial port and soon there'll be Bluetooth and there's no connections and the system is much smaller and you don't have to boot it up and with all the PDAs you just turn them on and they work.
The battery life is 18 hours vs. 3 hours, so the simplicity is much greater. It's no longer cobbled together and of course the software has gotten better. That's something you'd expect to evolve over time but it's mostly the hardware that evolved into a much more convenient, user-friendly package.
One of the philosophies that I certainly acquired and we talked about it a little bit earlier is the infrastructure development, applies also to the idea of using as much commercial technology as we can. Because when we were trying to build our own receivers and these weren't coming off of the mass assembly line, they weren't as bulletproof as something needs to be when it's being carried around and depended upon day by day.
So I really developed through that experience this avid intent to use as much commercially available technology as possible and minimize what we're doing in terms of customization.
Tony Candela: Were Striders ever sold?
Mike May: No.
Tony Candela: They were all just developmental?
Mike May: It was all just developmental.
What happened was in 1998, Arkenstone was losing money and the Board of Directors said, "We can't keep losing money, even though you're a non-profit, this is really sucking away from other developments and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere." And there were huge insurance worries. A blind person has this and they get run over by a car and they sue the company. The liability stuff was a major concern.
And so they made a decision, much to my horror, to terminate the project, and that was it. It was done. And it was at that time that I started thinking, "All right, if they're done with it and Jim's willing to let go of the technology, I'll go off and do it myself."
And I found a few other people who were interested, Charles was and Jim Meisner from Colorado, who had 'Beyond Sight,' and Mike Busboom, who worked for Arkenstone over in Vienna. Jerry Kuns was very supportive.
So all the blind guys who were consumers of different technology thought it was a cool thing. They would invest the money or their time or whatever it would take to make it happen. It took a good year or more before I worked out the logistics of getting the technology, working out an arrangement with Arkenstone and leaving, moving to Davis and setting up shop to start development.
Tony Candela: What made you move to Davis?
Mike May: Well we left Ashland, Oregon and moved back to Silicon Valley. Working with Arkenstone was great but it still was the rat race that we had left and even worse. So we were no sooner in Mountainview and San Jose when we decided, "We've got to get out of here."
When our kids hit school age and we started looking at the quality of schools in different areas, Davis all of a sudden popped up as having some of the best schools in California, in terms of ratings and that's why we came here.
It had to work in terms of transportation and other reasons, but that came together. We moved to Davis and then I incorporated Sendero Group in January of 2000 and we released the first version of what was Strider. Charles improved the software. We put together a full laptop-based package and in January of 2000, we started shipping products.
And that's the first time that accessible GPS was ever available.
Tony Candela: How much were you selling them for back then?
Mike May: $995 was the first...That's not including the laptop. That was just the software and GPS receiver.
Tony Candela: So you and your small group had to be convinced that the things that were holding Strider back, when you were with Arkenstone, could be overcome, so that you'd actually have a viable product to sell?
Mike May: Well, I realized that the hardware issue that we dealt with at Arkenstone was being addressed by the commercial industry. And that's what made it really possible for us to have a viable product.
The software was always pretty decent but the package wasn't decent and the convenience factor.
And it was more convenient with the laptop and it did work better but it still had connections, it still needed to be booted up, and those were things that we had to think about and when we heard about the BrailleNote, it was all of a sudden, instantly I saw that four or five issues that we were dealing with, could go away, if we developed around that platform.
Tony Candela: Now before we forget to ask, why did you name your company Sendero?
Mike May: When I started looking for web names, even in 2000, it was amazing how many names were taken. Anything having to do with way-finding, path-finding, all the logical things were gone and the Spanish word for pathway is sendero and sendero luminosa, that's the shining path, a Maoist guerrilla movement in Peru and I figured most people don't know about that.
And I liked the multicultural aspect of a word like sendero. And it worked in other languages. I checked with Mike Busboom about German and French and Sendero worked with them. So that's what we chose.
Unfortunately, Sendero.com was taken so we had to be Sendero Group to get a web name.
Tony Candela: Do you know how to say the word in other languages?
Mike May: We just say Sendero.
Tony Candela: It just comes out with a different accent in different languages.
So you were moving along in the decision to use a platform that seemed ideal, namely the BrailleNote came about. Was this as joyful and ah-ha experience as it sounds like it was?
Mike May: It was. It was very exciting. As it was the case with my meeting with Jim Fruchterman, when I hooked up with Russell Smith and he agreed with the concept immediately, we just sort of shook hands and said, "Let's go do it."
This was much to the chagrin of some of the people in his company, the financial people and other folks, who said, "We've got to have a plan." Russell and I just, there was a plan but we didn't dither a lot about contracts and should we do it, we just went for it.
Which made things happen and really from the time we shook hands at another July conference until we had the product out, I think we had it out the following March, March-April. I guess it would have been 2002.
Tony Candela: I remember reading about this at the time and part of the explanation for going to that platform, not only was it an ideal platform but this would also give Sendero Group the freedom to continue to develop the product, the basic way-finding technology.
So was that part of the benefit of going to the BrailleNote platform?
Mike May: Well the main purpose was all the things I described, as far as a simpler, more attractive piece of hardware for users. And the BrailleNote was really taking off at the time and clearly was taking over from other note takers.
There was the by-product of this new development was that we could adopt a new map engine that was brand new and would add a lot of functionality and we were free from some of the license restrictions we had when we worked directly with Arkenstone.
But Arkenstone which of course evolved into Benetech was still very involved and supportive of what we were doing and they owned the patent on the basic concept of the GPS still. And Charles LaPierre went to work for them, full-time, and even though he is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sendero Group, his day to day office is in Benetech and they rent him out to us.
Tony Candela: This is a very interesting arrangement.
Mike May: It's really a collaborative effort and part of Jim Fruchterman's belief that he likes to start things and spin them off. So he really thinks that Sendero was a spin off from Arkenstone and certainly the GPS technology is that.
Tony Candela: And somewhere right around this time, or maybe slightly earlier, you had a life changing experience having to do with your eyesight. And I'm hoping that you'll take us through the story. I know you've told the story many times and it's recorded everywhere, where you had some of your vision restored. If it's not too painful for you...
Mike May: No, sure.
Tony Candela: How did you lose your vision to begin with?
Mike May: And it's interesting that you'll see at the end of this explanation, that the new vision and the technology business development come together, in a curious way.
I lost my sight at age 3 from a chemical explosion and I spent my life totally blind, learning braille, never thinking about having vision.
Tony Candela: A chemical explosion. Do you know the circumstances of that?
Mike May: Oh, yes. We lived in a mining town in Silver City, New Mexico and calcium carbide is used in the miner's lantern, because it doesn't need much oxygen to burn underground. And somebody left a bottle of this in our garage. I wanted the bottle for another purpose. I climbed up in the rafters, got this bottle down. There was no lid on it because the top of the jar was cracked and the lid wouldn't stay on, so I was able to easily go put it in a trough of water and water when mixed with calcium carbide powder turns into a gas, which in and of itself wouldn't be bad. Normally it would just be gas burning in the lantern, but it happened that right next to where I was doing this, there was some garbage burning.
So a plume of gas goes up in the air from this powder-water combination. A spark hits it and blows me sky high.
I was lucky to live through the experience. I was in the hospital for six months and sustained a lot of blood loss and other damage and my eyes were burned.
And so I went through life, with a few operations, but generally certainly once I was an adult, I never even thought about getting any vision back. That wasn't going to happen.
Tony Candela: And some of the tissue in the front of your eyes was very damaged.
Mike May: All the tissue was burned. They tried to put in new corneas and it didn't work.
So in February of '99, I went to an AFB event where I believe I was awarding Mike Cole a Kay Gallagher award. I happened to be there and because we were across the street from a friend who's an optometrist, Jennifer called up and said, "Hey, we're over here at the hotel. Can I come over and you can tweak my contacts."
So after the meeting that morning we went in, she got her contacts tweaked and he said, "Hey Mike, since you're here, why don't you talk to my colleague, who's the ophthalmologist Dan Goodman."
Dan Goodman looked at my eyes, looked at my history. He knew my former doctor who I hadn't seen since he passed away ten years previously. Dan Goodman introduced the idea of this potential stem cell cornea transplant, and that's when I started thinking about it, on that fateful February day in '99.
Tony Candela: Had it been done very much?
Mike May: No, he'd done two. And it's very unusual circumstances where the inside of the eye needs to be intact and only the surface is damaged.
And normally, certainly anybody who has retinal problems, that's not the case.
And I didn't do anything about this for many months. I finally started looking into it. Decided, like other ventures, adventures, this is something that I couldn't turn away from. I had to explore it. However it turned out, I had to check it out. And that's what really was pivotal in deciding to go ahead and do this.
Tony Candela: Many people would say there's an argument to be had about this decision, to try for sight when you haven't had it for so long versus not try for sight.
What made you feel compelled to try for sight?
Mike May: The curiosity factor. Cause I easily convinced myself I didn't want to deal with it, the likelihood of something successful, the doctor said 50% but it meant I'd have to go into a hospital, deal with anesthesia, drugs, all sorts of things. It just didn't suit me. I didn't feel that I had time to cope with it.
I'd make all those arguments, make the columns of pros and cons and every time I'd do it I'd say, "But what if it does work?"
When you start up a business, what's the likelihood that it's successful? Ten percent? It's pretty low. So this just kind of went along with my personality and I thought, "I'm always going to wonder about this. I've got to get this out of my system, check it out, and if it doesn't work, I'm no worse off than I was, other than I've spent a whole bunch of time and money on the doctors."
Tony Candela: Do you remember where you were when you made the decision, "Yes, I'm going to do it?"
Mike May: It was gradual. At some point late in the summer and I'd done a little bit of research and found out if my health insurance would cover it and some other practical things and I decided to go ahead and I scheduled the appointment.
Tony Candela: Would or did the health insurance cover it?
Mike May: Yes.
Tony Candela: They actually had this procedure categorized?
Mike May: Not necessarily. They just didn't have it, it wasn't something they wouldn't cover. It was sort of backwards. It fell into a general category of eye surgery and so they were willing to cover it.
Tony Candela: So what did you have to go through?
Mike May: I went through two operations. One in November, around Thanksgiving of '99, where I had stem cell tissue implanted. They essentially took a cookie cutter and got rid of the bad tissue and they put in the new tissues, let that grow in for about four months. Once that was healthy, nothing had happened in terms of my vision during this time. I was still where I was which was no vision in one eye and light perception in the good eye.
Then on March 6 of 2000, and this is right after Sendero opened its doors and released the GPS and all kinds of other things were happening, I went in and had the operation and it worked.
Tony Candela: Were you immobilized at any point? You weren't restricted?
Mike May: I didn't spend the night in the hospital. They sent me home. The next day I went into the doctor to have him check the bandages to see if everything was healthy. They didn't expect that anything useful would happen for two or three weeks and they took the bandages off and boom, in came the light and I could see things and I'd been curious about all the images coming in there since.
Tony Candela: We've read in the logs that you've kept and articles, about the whole issue of the great experiment that philosophers have been talking about for centuries and what happens when someone who has not had sight for very, very long suddenly gets sight. The whole wrestling match, I use that term on purpose, the whole wrestling match between seeing and perceiving and understanding what you're seeing, and the problems that come from it.
So it's been an adventure for you to figure out what you're seeing and what you're perceiving. Can you tell us the problems that you've had?
Mike May: Well, the best part of the whole thing is I went into this because I wanted to see what would happen and now that I had some success, it's still the process, it's the adventure that intrigues me. I've had a front-row seat learning about new vision development, visual cortex and all of these different philosophical and practical issues that one has to deal with and I have been able to observe first hand what happens.
In my case, it turns out that I don't see details very well but I see general objects pretty well, pretty far away. I see colors wonderfully, nearly as good as a fully sighted person. And if something is moving, I see it easier than if it's not moving.
So somebody can toss me a ball and I can run and catch it in the air. Which to me is like magic.
Because 43 years of my life was totally blind. One didn't run and catch a ball in the air, cause you couldn't hear it. If it wasn't beeping or something, it had to be pretty close or bounce off your chest. So I still feel it's magic. It's like getting in an airplane that weighs 200,000 pounds, how does it stay 35,000 feet up in the air? It's magic.
Tony Candela: Seeing things in motion as opposed to discerning and understanding what you're seeing sitting still does probably intrigue the doctors. Is there an explanation for that?
Mike May: They have concluded from this, and there's an article in Nature and Neuroscience that came out in September 2003 where they document their findings and one conclusion is that babies have their motion detection hard wired. It's there from day one and it's built in.
Other things have to be developed.
They were less certain about something like face recognition which falls into the category of how the visual cortex deals with detail. One would think that face recognition is pretty fundamental, knowing one's mother, knowing one's enemies is very basic but in fact, in my case, I don't have any ability to discern facial details at all. They're not sure why that is. At a certain point they just say, "Well, every person's different." People lose sight at different ages and how far the sight is developed by that point varies from person to person.
Tony Candela: When you lost your sight you were 3 years old? Three and a half?
Mike May: Yes.
Tony Candela: You obviously had a lot of visual experience already, enough to see a jar up in the rafters and go for it and purposefully have a plan in mind for what you were going to do next.
Does any of that vision come back? Did any of it stay with you through the years? Could you evoke visual memory during the time when you still didn't have your sight back?
Mike May: The odd thing was when I remembered that experience and others that happened when I had sight...For example, I remember going deer hunting with my father and the whole mystery of being up at 5:00 in the morning and going out and walking through the trees, I did that as a sighted person. But when I think back on it, to this day, I think about it as a blind person because my cognitive training eventually put everything into tactile, smell, other sensory categories. Even the things that I'd experienced previously.
Tony Candela: You converted your cognitive system to a non-visual one.
Mike May: And that probably wasn't the case when I was ten years old but certainly when I was older and could actually think about it and analyze it, that was the case.
Tony Candela: Can you image the jar in the rafters now?
Mike May: Tactilely.
Tony Candela: But not visually.
Mike May: Not the same jar.
Tony Candela: It's not the same jar.
Whereas I think other people who had their sight through all those years and then lost it later and didn't get it back, would be in reverse. They would image the vision that they had at the time and probably have a devil of a time converting to a tactile or a non-visual...
Mike May: And the visual scientists say that typically one's visual development is concluded by about age six. So you might picture that mine was cut off in mid-stream. I had 50% of my development complete.
Tony Candela: I know that you said this publicly, but I'd like to ask you anyway. The inability to perceive facial features: Was it disappointing? Were you looking forward to seeing Jennifer's face and do you have a sense of her face that's different now than before your vision restoration?
Mike May: I wasn't disappointed. I was curious why it didn't work. It just seemed odd that I could see a ball coming from thirty feet away and why couldn't I recognize a face. I was very curious about that and still am.
I wasn't disappointed. I felt like I knew my wife and my kids better than anybody on the planet and I wasn't missing anything.
And that hasn't changed, my perception of her face hasn't changed. I suppose the only thing that's slightly different is the fact that I can now picture her hair color, whereas in my mind's eye, previously, she was blond, and to me blond was one color. Now I see it and I realize the different shades of her hair color.
Tony Candela: Has the time since the eye surgery been emotionally trying for you?
Mike May: It's been more challenging in terms of time management, because my life is carrying on with my business and yet there's a lot of media attention and at certain times that media took up entire days and weeks.
Tony Candela: Really. That's a lot of involvement.
Mike May: A huge amount of time. And I questioned many times, should I be taking, should I be doing this radio interview at 6:00 in the morning, for five minutes on Drive Time in St. Louis?
And every time I contemplated turning those guys down I thought, "This is such a unique opportunity to influence how the public feels about blind people." I'm like the politician that no matter what you ask them they have the same message.
This was how I took on the whole media blitz. No matter what they asked me, my message was: blind people are individuals. They have a lot of potential and here I'm an example of how some things can be done. I was hoping to influence those people in Podunk places as well as big cities as to the opinions about blind people. So I did it.
Tony Candela: What was for you the most enjoyable media experience that you've had?
Mike May: By far, the BBC documentary, where they had seemingly unlimited resources, wonderful people, sensitive individuals that spent a lot of time with me and my family and my friends and the result was a really very accurate product.
Dateline did a story and I'm still in touch with the producer from that show. He did a show on Strider in 1997 and then the story on me in 2000 and I like those people a lot. But it's a different format. It's an evening magazine and can't in the end be as accurate or as sensitive as the BBC documentary.
Tony Candela: And BBC sent all their people over here?
Mike May: Yeah. Two producers, cameramen, sound crew and multiple times.
Tony Candela: Multiple times. This really did take a whole lot of your time.
Mike May: It was a full-time job for these two women for six months. They easily spent over $100,000 on this documentary.
Tony Candela: What was the least enjoyable media experience that you had?
Mike May: Well some of these Drive Time people were just obnoxious. Their role is to be controversial and stupid and they were successful.
They would say insane things just to get me riled up, which they couldn't. But it was rude. It wasn't borderline rude. It was rude, some of them.
Tony Candela: Where do you think that comes from?
Mike May: That's their format. That's their demographic.
I learned to ask, so I would be prepared, "What is your demographic?" And if they said, "Eighteen to thirty year old males," I knew to beware.
Tony Candela: Stupidity would reign.
Mike May: Saying things like, "So, don't you feel now you have some vision you want to sit on the sidewalk and sell pencils and see what people's reactions are like?"
And I said, "There but for the grace of God go me or ex-radio announcers."
And they had one of these buzzer systems that would go off in the background. It was so ridiculous.
Tony Candela: Are you involved with the media as much these days?
Mike May: Less so. They keep coming. The Germans seem to have this strange obsession with my story and I think I've been on every German network, about every six months I hear from one of them.
And I hear from other people who are considering having the surgery and they want to discuss, in detail, the families do. But it has dropped off but it still percolates on.
Tony Candela: That's got to be hard to counsel others about surgery, since it seems so unique to each individual, what their eye help is like. So what do you tell them when they call you for counsel?
Mike May: I tell them it is just that. Medically, it's very difficult to be in the small percentage of possibilities for some vision restoration, number one. And if you are, number two, look at how you deal with change. How well do you adapt to a lot of variety.
Cause you're not going to go from zero vision to 100%. It's going to be somewhere in between. It's going to be a struggle.
How does your family feel about supporting you? Are they happy? Are they pushing you into it, because if they are, this is a bad sign because it leaves one with the underlying feeling that, "Well, they want me to have my vision fixed, therefore they must not have liked me as a blind person."
And it's unavoidable not to draw that conclusion.
Tony Candela: I saw you give a presentation in San Francisco, gosh, it seems like it was three years ago at least. And I remember saying to you, "You can always close your eyes if this gets to be too much," because I think at that point it was rather new.
Have you wanted many times to just close your eyes and just not deal with the visual input?
Mike May: What I've learned to do was not necessarily close my eyes but like any person who has vision, tune it in and out.
You think of all the situations where you're with a sighted person and they miss something and it turns out to be incredibly obvious. And it's because they tune out, for one reason or another. And I've learned to do that.
When I ski, I tune out the environment because it's so distracting. When I'm moving at high speed and I see a dark object, I don't know if that's a shadow or a person or a tree. I need to focus on trusting my guide and not thinking about what that is. Because I can't tell until it's too late. So I tune out.
Tony Candela: So under that high-performance, that high-stress situation, you have elected to go back to the old ways?
Mike May: Absolutely.
The beauty of all of this is that I can use a hybrid of vision and non-vision.
Skiing is one example. Finding the bathroom is a very day to day kind of, in an airport let's say. I'm walking along, I'm looking for kind of a blue plaque, about chest level, next to a doorway. And I see one and I walk over to it and I read it with my fingers.
Now I could stick my nose up there and see does it say women or men or is there a figure of one or the other. But it's so much quicker to use my blindness skills. And that's a perfect example of how this all works.
I was fine finding bathrooms before I had vision. Now that I do, fine, I use the vision to help me. It's a little bit more convenient maybe. It's different. It's just the way I do it.
Tony Candela: I'd like to draw toward closure here by getting your thoughts on your own future and, you've talked about it a little, your impressions of the industry that you work in.
Mike May: Tony, if we could, before we address that, I want to make one segue into the, through the new vision...One other fundamental part of Sendero is...the challenge in running the business is getting the funding and wherewithal to make it happen. And there was a big transitional event in getting the Department of Education grant that was a make or break it transition in the Sendero Group. If I could I'll explain that.
Tony Candela: Absolutely.
Mike May: After I had this new vision experience and the GPS laptop version was out and then I eventually evolved into working with Pulse Data on the development for the BrailleNote, we were coming to the end of our financial coffers and this was in September of 2001.
The BrailleNote isn't out yet and we're trying to do this development on a shoestring and as I've had to evaluate with previous companies, it's when do you throw in the towel? I didn't want to go into huge financial debt. I'd applied for probably ten grants and been turned down because a lot of time I didn't have a Ph.D. nor the academic credibility to get the kind of grants that were typically funded.
(End of part 3 of 4)
