Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you? Uh So, this is
Speaker 1: probably gonna be a little long for a tech Stuff
Speaker 1: tidbits episode, but it's also I think it's gonna be
Speaker 1: somewhere between the tidbits in a full episode. We'll see
Speaker 1: when we get done, won't we. But I thought I
Speaker 1: would do a spotlight on a particular startup story during
Speaker 1: the heyday of the dot com bubble, as in when
Speaker 1: dot com companies were considered the new you know, gold rush.
Speaker 1: And it's a story about greed, deception, and a spectacular collapse.
Speaker 1: So let's set the scene. And by the way, this
Speaker 1: is a story that has been told before, and I'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about a particular depiction of this
Speaker 1: later on. Now, in the early nineties, very few people
Speaker 1: outside of academia and maybe some research facilities, some military facilities,
Speaker 1: very few people were aware of the Internet. In general.
Speaker 1: The mainstream was blissfully ignorant of the Internet. People might
Speaker 1: have made use of an online service provider or OSP
Speaker 1: or maybe if you were a nerd like me, a
Speaker 1: bulletin board system or BBS. But these were kind of
Speaker 1: windows into tiny walled gardens for the most part, and
Speaker 1: they only offered a hint of what would be possible
Speaker 1: with the proliferation of the Internet and the Worldwide Web.
Speaker 1: As such, no one was really thinking ahead about, you know,
Speaker 1: monetizing the Internet in a meaningful way, because again, most
Speaker 1: folks didn't even know the Internet existed, but then came
Speaker 1: the Worldwide Web in the early nineties. If you listen
Speaker 1: to my interview with barrittun Day Thurston, then you know
Speaker 1: I was skeptical of the Web when I first countered
Speaker 1: it in college, and I could hardly be blamed because
Speaker 1: at that point the Web was essentially a bunch of
Speaker 1: text based pages. Uh these were static pages, so nothing
Speaker 1: would change on them, and everything kind of looked like
Speaker 1: it was torn out of a statistics text book. It
Speaker 1: was not exciting. It didn't resemble today's web at all, really,
Speaker 1: But with netscapes, introduction of the Secure Sockets Layer or SSL,
Speaker 1: and the foundation of companies like eBay and Amazon, the
Speaker 1: mid nineties saw a glimmer of what the Web could
Speaker 1: be from a commercial standpoint, if you had to pick
Speaker 1: a year where things really began to take a turn
Speaker 1: towards the commercial would be a pretty decent choice. Shortly
Speaker 1: after that, folks began to really dream big about the
Speaker 1: sort of businesses that could be enabled by the Internet
Speaker 1: and the Web in particular. And behind those companies was
Speaker 1: the financial sector, And in this case we're talking mostly
Speaker 1: about venture capitalists and other types of investors who saw
Speaker 1: this as an opportunity to turn a lot of money
Speaker 1: into let's see a metric buttload of money. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: these are rich people looking to get way more rich.
Speaker 1: For the most part, there are probably some people who
Speaker 1: probably couldn't afford to invest, and we're doing it anyway.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this was these were the money people, right.
Speaker 1: The potential of the Internet in general and the Web
Speaker 1: in particular looked like it was gonna be uh the
Speaker 1: possibility of a huge payout, and for some cases it was.
Speaker 1: So we started seeing these various money people for ludicrous
Speaker 1: amounts of capital into various startups. Now, some of these
Speaker 1: startups didn't really have any business plan to speak of,
Speaker 1: So while they were flush with investment capital and they
Speaker 1: had a whole lot of money to spend. They didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily have a way to generate significant revenue, and so
Speaker 1: these were companies that were just kind of coasting on
Speaker 1: investment cash and not able to support themselves. So they
Speaker 1: were living on borrowed time. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: them would end up seeking multiple rounds of funding, and
Speaker 1: they would stay afloat constantly in the in the effort
Speaker 1: to try to either find a way to generate enough
Speaker 1: revenue to sustain itself or and this was the preferred
Speaker 1: thing it still is to this day, get acquired by
Speaker 1: somebody else and and accept an enormous payout and get
Speaker 1: like bonkers wealthy. And some of these companies actually did
Speaker 1: have ways to generate revenue. They weren't like just completely directionless. However,
Speaker 1: most of the time we're talking about some relatively modest revenue,
Speaker 1: and maybe if they were allowed to grow organically, they
Speaker 1: could have stuck around. But a lot of investors were
Speaker 1: encouraging these companies to scale rapidly, to expand their services
Speaker 1: in their presence well beyond what they could support, and
Speaker 1: so these companies ran into serious trouble because, you know,
Speaker 1: scaling increased costs, but not necessarily an equivalent increase in
Speaker 1: the ability to generate revenue. So really it just meant
Speaker 1: that it was getting more expensive to run these companies
Speaker 1: as they were growing larger and larger. But we don't
Speaker 1: need to talk about all of that. We all know
Speaker 1: that the dot com bubble ultimately burst, and it was
Speaker 1: due to a lot of different factors. But our story
Speaker 1: focuses on one tech startup in this dot com bubble era,
Speaker 1: a startup that got a lot of attention and money
Speaker 1: before things went totally pear shaped, and that startup was
Speaker 1: called Pixelon. Now, a man calling himself Michael Finna founded
Speaker 1: Pixelon in n in San Juan Capistrano, California, and the
Speaker 1: whole purpose of pixelon was to bring streaming video to
Speaker 1: the web. In nine Now, let's get some perspective on this.
Speaker 1: In much of the world that was online was still
Speaker 1: relying on dial up internet. That meant that people who
Speaker 1: were using a modem connected to an ordinary telephone line
Speaker 1: and dialed into an I s P server. Now, the
Speaker 1: fastest modems on the market in were capable of download
Speaker 1: speeds of up to fifty six kill a bits per second,
Speaker 1: not gigabits, not megabits, kill a bits and that was
Speaker 1: the fastest. Not everyone had the fastest modems. Some of
Speaker 1: us were rocking significantly slower ones. And sure there were
Speaker 1: a few folks who had DSL connections in the late
Speaker 1: nineties which were significantly faster than dial up modems, and fewer. Still,
Speaker 1: we're starting to get cable internet connections that was really
Speaker 1: on the verge of becoming a thing more in the
Speaker 1: two thousand's era. By the late nineties, it was pretty
Speaker 1: darn rare, So it would take time for folks to
Speaker 1: migrate away from dial up, even as these services were
Speaker 1: starting to come online, because I mean, obviously rolling out
Speaker 1: these services across different regions took a lot of time. Now,
Speaker 1: to look at it another way, YouTube, arguably the best
Speaker 1: known online video platform, wouldn't debut until two thousand five.
Speaker 1: So a web based video platform capable of sending streaming
Speaker 1: video with a thousand different channels to a user's computer
Speaker 1: way back in was a pretty darn ambitious goal, not
Speaker 1: necessarily impossible, but very challenging to pull off. Now, Finny
Speaker 1: didn't just come into this idea out of the blue.
Speaker 1: He had founded a quote unquote computer business, which is
Speaker 1: about as specific as I can get. Because I couldn't
Speaker 1: find any real details about it, but he called it
Speaker 1: a re steck r E S T E C. Find
Speaker 1: out what it means to me. He leased off a
Speaker 1: space from this guy named Chuck Halsworth and Finney's clients,
Speaker 1: we're asking about the possibility of, you know, replaying horse
Speaker 1: races over a computer, like televised horse races, and that
Speaker 1: got him into thinking about computer video, and he and
Speaker 1: Houseworth put a couple of other folks together and they
Speaker 1: founded a company called Digital Motion Video. Over the course
Speaker 1: of about a year, their team made some progress, and
Speaker 1: that led Finney to think of the next big thing,
Speaker 1: a one thousand channel internet video platform capable of streaming
Speaker 1: digital video to users no matter where they were, as
Speaker 1: long as you know, they had a computer and an
Speaker 1: Internet connection. So Michael Finney seemed determined and he established
Speaker 1: himself as the head of pixel on. Uh, it depends
Speaker 1: what the title like. The title depends on what source
Speaker 1: you're looking at. It sounds to me like he was
Speaker 1: pretty loosey goosey with titles. In some accounts he's referred
Speaker 1: to as the chairman, and some the CEO and others
Speaker 1: the chief technology officer, and he worked really hard to
Speaker 1: get various investors to pour money into this endeavor, and
Speaker 1: one person whom he tapped to invest in his vision
Speaker 1: was the owner of an insurance company in southern California,
Speaker 1: a guy by the name Paul Ward. Now Ward was
Speaker 1: fascinated by Finney's pitch, but he didn't feel so great
Speaker 1: about Michael Finney himself. I mean, he seemed a bit unstable,
Speaker 1: to put it lightly. This was in the very early
Speaker 1: days of pixel On, when it was just a small
Speaker 1: office with a few employees, plus Finney himself and Finny
Speaker 1: had hired some engineers, but the whole enterprise seemed a
Speaker 1: little uncertain. Finny definitely seemed like a an eccentric leader.
Speaker 1: So Ward was guiding the company toward a round of fundraising,
Speaker 1: which was aiming for around thirty million dollars. Actually, the
Speaker 1: accounts on this very too. Some it says as low
Speaker 1: as twenty eight million, and some it's as high as
Speaker 1: thirty five million, But at any rate, Ward was getting
Speaker 1: a bit nervous about seeking this funding. Meanwhile, Michael Finney
Speaker 1: was publishing press releases announcing that Pixelon had signed a
Speaker 1: deal with Paramount Pictures and Paramount would lean on Pixelon
Speaker 1: to promote Star Trek Insurrection, the next generation film using
Speaker 1: online video. Star Trek Insurrection wasn't that great of a movie,
Speaker 1: so I guess that's was kind of a match made
Speaker 1: in heaven. Okay, the plot will thicken, but before we
Speaker 1: thicken the plot, let's take a quick break. Michael Finney
Speaker 1: didn't come across as someone who could build out the
Speaker 1: technical infrastructure to make something like an online streaming video
Speaker 1: network work. So Ward reached out to someone that he
Speaker 1: had met when a New York insurance company had purchased
Speaker 1: his California based insurance company. This was a guy named
Speaker 1: Robert Feldman. Ward asked Feldman to come on board with
Speaker 1: Pixelon to help make it work from a technical level.
Speaker 1: And uh, Feldman had been working in I T and
Speaker 1: telecommunications for years, So by this time we're into early
Speaker 1: Pixelon was working on components for streaming video. They would
Speaker 1: later turn out that a lot of the stuff being
Speaker 1: worked on wasn't actually Pixelon's own, stuff like the player
Speaker 1: wasn't Pixelon's. Instead, what they had done was they had
Speaker 1: re skinned. Essentially, they had disguised a version of other
Speaker 1: companies products, namely Microsoft's Windows Media Player. So it had
Speaker 1: a pixel Pixelon overlay, but it was in fact Windows
Speaker 1: Media Player underneath, so Pixelon wasn't even a real pixelon product.
Speaker 1: It was just a you know, just a facade. But
Speaker 1: Feldman he comes on and he's told his title as
Speaker 1: Chief Technology Officer, but as I mentioned, the titles were
Speaker 1: real Lucy Goosey. Feldman himself said that maybe that was
Speaker 1: something that Michael Finney was doing intentionally in order to
Speaker 1: keep people kind of off balance and at odds with
Speaker 1: each other so that no one could really challenge him
Speaker 1: as a leader, which should sound a little suss. So
Speaker 1: Feldman starts to work on establishing the technical components to
Speaker 1: make Pixelon's business possible. The company built out a server room.
Speaker 1: They established a few co located server spaces and other
Speaker 1: cities because they knew that if they just depended upon
Speaker 1: one centralized server room, they would not really be able
Speaker 1: to provide service across the country, Like there would be
Speaker 1: severe lag and latency issues the further out you got
Speaker 1: from the main server room, so they started to who
Speaker 1: locate servers in other places. There really wasn't any existing
Speaker 1: infrastructure for the company to rely upon, like there were
Speaker 1: no other providers out there that already had established server
Speaker 1: farms where you could lease space in the farms. That
Speaker 1: that that business didn't really exist yet, so they were
Speaker 1: kind of making it up as they go along. Now,
Speaker 1: the company also purchased some extremely expensive video encoding stations,
Speaker 1: so the idea was that users would generate video, they
Speaker 1: would upload it to pixelons servers. Pixelon would then use
Speaker 1: these very expensive encoding stations to encode the video to
Speaker 1: make it suitable for streaming, and then visitors to Pixelon's
Speaker 1: site would be able to watch that video on demand.
Speaker 1: While the engineers were trying to figure out streaming video,
Speaker 1: Michael Finna was planning some pretty massive moves. He was also,
Speaker 1: at least according to Fellman, hurling verbal abuse at various
Speaker 1: pixel On employees over the office's p A system. He
Speaker 1: would get on this p A system and talk about
Speaker 1: people need to go back behind the shed for a
Speaker 1: whooping because they weren't um performing up to his expectations.
Speaker 1: I suppose. He also occasionally would lead mandatory prayer services
Speaker 1: in the office, again something you don't typically see. Some
Speaker 1: folks would later liken a few of his activities to
Speaker 1: that of a cult leader. Now the biggest pr move
Speaker 1: that he made, and it was one that would really
Speaker 1: become the stuff of legends. Was a twelve million dollar
Speaker 1: party some accounts have it as high as like sixteen
Speaker 1: and a half million dollars that was held in Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: Nevada at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino and it
Speaker 1: was called the Eye Bash Laura case I Big b
Speaker 1: I Bash. By the way, this is you know before
Speaker 1: like iTunes and stuff, So really edgy there, now, y'all.
Speaker 1: I work for I Heart Radio, and I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: really knows how to put on a big live music
Speaker 1: event like they do one every year. I've never been,
Speaker 1: but it's this huge event that happens again in Las Vegas, Nevada,
Speaker 1: and they get huge names on there, so that's not
Speaker 1: that unusual to me. However, if you look at the
Speaker 1: list of performers for Pixilons October debut party, like this
Speaker 1: is their launch party, it really boggles the mind. Let's
Speaker 1: do a quick rundown of some of the acts that
Speaker 1: performed at this insane launch party. Keep in mind we
Speaker 1: are talking about nine because at least one or two
Speaker 1: of the acts you might say, well, that doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like that's that big of a deal. These days you
Speaker 1: might find that person performing at a county fair. Not
Speaker 1: not the same in so up, first up we got
Speaker 1: the Brian sets Or Orchestra, which was desperately clinging on
Speaker 1: to the fading days of the swing revival fad of
Speaker 1: the early to mid nineties dark days. Indeed for some
Speaker 1: of my friends who some of them actually really got
Speaker 1: into swing dancing, so they loved it, but the others
Speaker 1: were like, why did swing come back? Um? There was
Speaker 1: also Tony Bennett, a familiar face on the Vegas scene.
Speaker 1: There was Faith Hill, Leanne Rhymes, Natalie Cole. There was
Speaker 1: Kiss you know, they rock and roll all night and
Speaker 1: party every day. There was Sugar Ray, which all right,
Speaker 1: get your jokes in now. And there were the Chicks.
Speaker 1: Back then they went by the name Dixie Chicks. They
Speaker 1: dropped Dixie in twenty twenty. This was also before they
Speaker 1: raised the ire of certain branches of their fandom when
Speaker 1: they started to criticize certain American military policies in the
Speaker 1: early two thousand's. But Happening Things Off was an incredibly
Speaker 1: expensive reunion of the Who. Big big deal there, I mean,
Speaker 1: the Who are like they're there at that upper echelon
Speaker 1: of rock Star right there, like at Rolling Stones level,
Speaker 1: and the plan was to live cast this party to
Speaker 1: a digital billboard in Times Square, New York. Feldman actually
Speaker 1: requested to be put in charge of making that happen
Speaker 1: because it meant that he could work on a technical
Speaker 1: challenge and more importantly, not be around Michael Finney, whom
Speaker 1: he found to be extremely abrasive. However, he discovered that
Speaker 1: the company's tech just couldn't do it, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was actually on the billboard side of things. They were
Speaker 1: leasing billboard space from a company and maybe that was
Speaker 1: where the problem was. In fact, he said that they
Speaker 1: were not able to figure out what was going wrong.
Speaker 1: They just knew it wasn't working. So instead of streaming
Speaker 1: over the inner Net to this digital billboard, Feldman and
Speaker 1: some other folks were able to set up a satellite
Speaker 1: dish on top of a telephone pole and connect that
Speaker 1: to the digital billboard and use the satellite dish to
Speaker 1: catch the satellite feed of the party and send that
Speaker 1: to the billboards. So, in other words, the video being
Speaker 1: shown on the billboard was not being streamed over the
Speaker 1: Internet at all. It was a satellite feed. See pixelon
Speaker 1: was actually beaming this feed via satellite, so that the
Speaker 1: offices in California would be able to receive the broadcast
Speaker 1: and then stream it. It's just that the streaming part
Speaker 1: wasn't working. Now. On top of that, the plan was
Speaker 1: to make video clips of this party the eyebash, available
Speaker 1: on pixel On the following day, the idea being all right, well,
Speaker 1: you know, well, we're going to cut this up into
Speaker 1: performance sized pieces, upload the videos to the service, and
Speaker 1: then people can watch it later. However, it turned out
Speaker 1: that Michael Finney had not set up the proper contracts
Speaker 1: with the talent to secure the rights to do that,
Speaker 1: and so apparently everyone except maybe Kiss, denied Pixelon permission
Speaker 1: to make available their performances at this party. So the
Speaker 1: twelve million dollar party was largely a bust, at least
Speaker 1: as far as demonstrating Pixelon's technology. Uh. It might have
Speaker 1: got a lot of press, but didn't get a lot
Speaker 1: of movement on the tech front. Now, towards the end
Speaker 1: of nine, Pixelon's investors had had enough of Michael Finney
Speaker 1: as chairman of the company. They felt that he was
Speaker 1: a detriment to the mission. They thought they still thought
Speaker 1: that the company had merit, but that Michael Finney was
Speaker 1: just a destructive force need to be taken care of,
Speaker 1: so they had decided to force him to step down
Speaker 1: from his role at the company. Now, according to Robert Feldman,
Speaker 1: this is when another really bonkers thing happened. Finn A
Speaker 1: apparently hired some armed guards to prevent folks from coming
Speaker 1: into his office. Uh so, really a couple of like
Speaker 1: big beefy bodyguards who at least according to some accounts,
Speaker 1: were armed. Now this was just as the investors were
Speaker 1: supposed to visit the company and convince Michael finn A
Speaker 1: two step down. And Feldman says that after contacting the
Speaker 1: Orange County Police Department, a SWAT team showed up and
Speaker 1: the guards ended up being dismissed. Like it, it didn't
Speaker 1: escalate from there, but it did require the SWAT team
Speaker 1: to arrive. Finn A was on the out skis because
Speaker 1: the investors told him he had to go, and Feldman
Speaker 1: and team rushed to lock finn A out of the
Speaker 1: company systems. Paul Ward would take over s CEO. But y'all,
Speaker 1: things are about to get even more crazy. See Pixelon
Speaker 1: was still trying to get services up and running. But
Speaker 1: just wait, at do we come back from this break,
Speaker 1: things are gonna go super nuts. So I said before
Speaker 1: the break, things were about to go super crazy, fun bonkers,
Speaker 1: and here we go. It turned out that Michael Finney
Speaker 1: wasn't Michael Finney. In reality, he was a man named
Speaker 1: David kim Stanley, or, as one Wired article accidentally put it,
Speaker 1: Paul Stanley. Paul Stanley is in fact a member of Kiss.
Speaker 1: But no, it was not Paul Stanley of Kiss who
Speaker 1: was posing as Michael Finney. It was David kim Stanley.
Speaker 1: Now David kim Stanley had a history of running cons
Speaker 1: and scams. He was a pastor's son. In fact, his
Speaker 1: grandfather was also a preacher, so he was the son
Speaker 1: of a preacher man. He had initially focused on tricking
Speaker 1: parishioners and his father's church out of their money. This
Speaker 1: graduated into an all out general stock fraud scheme and
Speaker 1: he was caught in nineteen nine. He was convicted on
Speaker 1: fifty five counts of fraud related charges, which authorities said
Speaker 1: amounted to around one point two million dollars of ill
Speaker 1: gotten gains. He was sentenced to thirty six years in prison,
Speaker 1: but the judge suspended all but eight years on the
Speaker 1: condition that Stanley repay his victims. So Stanley goes to
Speaker 1: prison for a while. He agrees to this this judgment,
Speaker 1: he's released from jail, and then when it came time
Speaker 1: for him to show up and pay restitution, what do
Speaker 1: you know, he didn't. He skipped town. So nearly a
Speaker 1: decade after his conviction, he would establish himself in California
Speaker 1: under the identity Michael Finney. He recognized pretty early on
Speaker 1: that there was this frantic rush towards funding businesses that
Speaker 1: were built on top of the web, and he knew
Speaker 1: a good opportunity when he saw one. Now, I've said
Speaker 1: this many times in the past, but whenever you've got
Speaker 1: yourself something that people do not fully understand, but they're
Speaker 1: excited about it, it opens up the opportunity for scam
Speaker 1: artists to take advantage of people's ignorance and enthusiasm. In
Speaker 1: the nineties, the web represented exactly that kind of opportunity.
Speaker 1: We see the same stuff happening today with stuff like
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency and n f T s. Now, I don't mean
Speaker 1: to say that all crypto is just a scam, or
Speaker 1: even that all n f T s are a scam.
Speaker 1: But what I am saying is that when people are
Speaker 1: eager to pour their money into something they don't fully comprehend,
Speaker 1: there will be plenty of other folks who are just
Speaker 1: willing to take said money. And Finney was one of
Speaker 1: those folks. Now, to his credit, he did actually put
Speaker 1: together a team of engineers who were legitimately trying to
Speaker 1: make the vision of Pixelon work, even if they ended
Speaker 1: up leaning very heavily on other companies products to do it. Now,
Speaker 1: this kind of makes me think of para no nos.
Speaker 1: I get the feeling that Elizabeth Holmes had a fairly
Speaker 1: good idea towards the end, that her vision of a
Speaker 1: device capable of running more than a hundred medical tests
Speaker 1: on the tiniest drop of blood wasn't really likely, maybe
Speaker 1: not even possible. Uh. She certainly didn't know how to
Speaker 1: make it actually happen, but she did have a whole
Speaker 1: company filled with engineers who were trying really hard to
Speaker 1: make that vision come true. They just couldn't do it. Now,
Speaker 1: I feel like Pixelon was in a similar place, only
Speaker 1: maybe Elizabeth Holmes might have been a bit more sincere
Speaker 1: in her initial effort. Maybe her earliest days were based
Speaker 1: more on naivete rather than you know, just a cold
Speaker 1: calculated approach to scamming people out their money. But finn
Speaker 1: a slash Stanley feels like it was more on the
Speaker 1: let's get as much cash as we can approach. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe Finney believed it too. But eventually authorities
Speaker 1: in Virginia sussed out that the Michael Finney in California
Speaker 1: was in fact the David Kim Stanley who was wanted
Speaker 1: in places like Virginia and Tennessee. So they called him
Speaker 1: up and they told them they were onto him, and
Speaker 1: he would subsequently turn himself into the authorities. Now, as
Speaker 1: you might imagine, this sent some shock waves through Pixelon,
Speaker 1: even though he had already left Pixelon or been forced
Speaker 1: to leave. Finding out that your founder wasn't who he
Speaker 1: said he was is a bit surprising. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: that at least some people were not surprised that he
Speaker 1: had been involved in illegal stuff, but they might have
Speaker 1: been surprised to learn that he wasn't Michael Finney. Now,
Speaker 1: if Finney had just been an overenthusiastic but naive founder
Speaker 1: who had made some really questionable calls, Pixelon might have survived.
Speaker 1: But the revelation and that he was a wanted fugitive
Speaker 1: and had a history of running scams. Was obviously a
Speaker 1: big strike against the company. People were worried that maybe
Speaker 1: he had stolen money from the company he had apparently
Speaker 1: been demanding that he be paid out of like the
Speaker 1: Petty cash fund. Anyway, Pixelon would possibly have recovered from
Speaker 1: it if he had just been a well meaning but
Speaker 1: inept founder. But the company also had to face another
Speaker 1: big challenge. It turned out that Pixelon owed several different
Speaker 1: parties a significant amount of money and shares of stock.
Speaker 1: So there were vendors that had done work on the
Speaker 1: office space they were owed cash, there were consultants who
Speaker 1: were promised shares of stock and returned from their work,
Speaker 1: and Pixelon was facing creditors who just wanted to get paid.
Speaker 1: The whole situation was unsustainable. While under other circumstances, the
Speaker 1: Pixelon team might have been able to get a working
Speaker 1: system up and running and make it a reliable one
Speaker 1: and perhaps even become YouTube before YouTube was a thing,
Speaker 1: it all came crashing down. The investors booted the management team,
Speaker 1: and Pixelon went into Chapter eleven bankruptcy, effectively disappearing in
Speaker 1: two thousand one. As for Michael finn a slash David
Speaker 1: kim Stanley. I'm not entirely certain what happened to him
Speaker 1: after he turned himself in. He has a YouTube channel
Speaker 1: which was established I think in eleven as maybe a
Speaker 1: dozen video clips in it, some of them dating to
Speaker 1: the days when he was a piano player and his
Speaker 1: father's church back in the late eighties. There's also the
Speaker 1: star Trek promo spot that Pixelon did for Paramount on
Speaker 1: that channel. But yeah, I don't know how his legal
Speaker 1: issues ultimately resolved. If you happen to know, you know,
Speaker 1: give me a shout out. Let me know, because I'm curious.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you want to see a dramatic
Speaker 1: retelling of the events of Pixelon, um not necessarily a
Speaker 1: accurate retelling, but an entertaining one. National Geographic did a
Speaker 1: series a couple of years ago called Valley of the Boom,
Speaker 1: which follows multiple threads during the dot com boom days,
Speaker 1: and one of them is the story of Michael Finney
Speaker 1: and pixel On and Steve's on Blaze Michael Finney. So
Speaker 1: you should check that out if you're really curious to
Speaker 1: see a dramatization of this tale, because it's again pretty entertaining.
Speaker 1: Robert Fellman actually said that he felt that the other threads,
Speaker 1: the ones that followed Stuff like Netscape, were perhaps more
Speaker 1: accurate than the pixel on version, but still something to
Speaker 1: you know, check out if you haven't seen it before.
Speaker 1: And that's set for this episode. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for future topics session tackle on tech Stuff, reach out
Speaker 1: to me. The handle for the show on Twitter is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows