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Building Through Every Wave: Mike Mcue on the Internet, Mobile, & AI Eras
Mike McCue has spent 40 years building the tools that made the web more human, Paper Software, Netscape, Tellme Networks, and Flipboard. In this episode of Deployed, he sits down with Brad Porter, the founding engineer he once recruited at Tellme, to talk about what it actually takes to ship hard technology across the internet, mobile, and AI eras. They get into the first-principles call that saved Tellme (walking away from a company-defining AT&T check), how to build teams that compound, why he shipped voice AI two decades before the world was ready, and two unforgettable Steve Jobs stories: including the day Jobs picked up an iPad and explained Flipboard's purpose better than Mike could himself. 00:34 Welcome and introducing Mike McCue 01:14 Internet, mobile, and AI: are they really different? 03:58 The art of timing as an entrepreneur 04:50 Building his first robot in 7th grade 06:49 Writing video games and founding his first company 08:55 The vision: bringing the internet to phones via voice 09:47 Building cloud computing and speech recognition before their time 12:41 Tellme's culture check for hiring 14:26 Billion-dollar seed rounds then and now 15:41 Netscape's growth and the economics of tech 17:40 The dot-com crash during fundraising 20:08 Democratizing access to information 22:40 Flipboard's vision: reimagining the web with people in it 27:26 Lessons from mentors Bill Campbell and John Giannandrea 30:25 Making 50/50 decisions as a solo founder 33:46 Meeting Steve Jobs and debating the stylus 36:02 Demoing Flipboard to Steve Jobs 41:16 His wife Marcy's MS diagnosis and remarkable recovery 46:37 Closing thoughts
