A Fortune Cookie Determined My Future

April 20, 2013 by David Gelphman 4 Comments

After working at Adobe Systems for five years and with an extremely stressful software project behind me, I took a much needed 6 week “sabbatical” at the end of 1992. When I returned to work afterwards I was somewhat refreshed but also pondering what to do next.

A few months after my extended break I got a call from a job recruiter named Sondra Card. In the past I had ignored such calls but this one caught me at a time when I was wondering about my future with Adobe. And this wasn’t a call about just any company either. The company Sondra was recruiting for was General Magic, a company co-founded by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two superstars from the original Macintosh development team.

I didn’t know much about the company beyond that, but I soon found out a lot more. General Magic was creating amazing software to power a new kind of handheld computer. Called Magic Cap, the software and the devices it would enable were almost certainly going to take the world by storm. As if that wasn’t bold enough, the company was also inventing a new programming language, called Telescript, that allowed creation of a program that would travel the internet on behalf of a user to do his or her bidding. To top it all off, they had the coolest company name and logo on the planet. 

After finding out a bit about the company, I definitely had to pursue the job opportunity further. Because of my strong background in 3rd party developer support at Adobe, they were considering adding me to their existing 2-person developer support group. My responsibility would be to support the first 3rd party developer building a product on top of Telescript.

As part of the interview process I met the senior people on the Telescript team and found them all to be fantastic people who were both extremely smart and quite amicable. I also found out that in addition to Andy and Bill there was a huge roster of superstar programmers, many of whom were formerly from Apple. I apparently did well enough in the interview to merit a demo of Magic Cap by none other than Andy Hertzfeld. The software was still unfinished but it was clearly something special. The use of the word Magic in the product and company name was well deserved.

With my head spinning, I was taken to lunch by one of the General Magic employees I already knew well. Paul Gustafson and I had worked together at Adobe for a number of years and no doubt it was Paul who had suggested that General Magic recruit me. Paul took me to Hunan Homes, a good Chinese restaurant just across from the General Magic office.

Paul was there to tell me how great it was to work at General Magic and find out my thoughts about working there. I don’t remember much from the lunch because my head was in a cloud. But what I do remember is that at the end of the meal when we got our fortune cookies I got the best one ever. It read: “A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard (sic)”.

Paul and I just stared at each other. We were both dumbfounded. 

A few days later I was offered the job by General Magic and I left Adobe to take it. I’ve got to say that the fortune I got at that lunch probably influenced me more than I’d care to admit. When you are promised a starship ride by the galactic wizard you just have to take it.