from television to speakers and phones and tablets. It was the ecosystem
that Samsung sought. T.J. set out to meet the pair and urged his boss, G.S.
Choi, to look into an acquisition of the company.
—
DAREN TSUI AND ED Ho were software visionaries. They could have
become billionaires, featured on the cover of Fortune—save for their
premature timing.
“It’s not just the idea you have. Timing is everything—that’s the lesson I
learned,” Ed Ho told me over coffee near his home in Palo Alto, California.
Daren was the deal maker, running around and impressing partners and
signing deals, while Ed was the programmer at the computer, the one who
attended to the product’s coding.
Daren kicked off his career in 1994, that allowed publications to bring
their classified advertising and articles to the Internet. In late 1997,
Pantheon was acquired by Elon Musk and bundled into his first company,
an online city guide called Zip2. It offered “door-to-door directions and
Yellow Pages and so forth,” Daren told me.
It was at Zip2 that Daren and Ed met, developing the door-to-door
technology that Nokia used on an early mobile phone. They went on to co-
found a mobile advertising company called SkyGo that was also acquired.
“The problem we had is that the idea was perfect, but the timing was too
early,” Daren said.
Why let themselves be acquired by Samsung?
“This would be a great chance to become a formidable company,”
Daren told me, “to put out software used by millions of people with Galaxy
phones.”
But what started out as talks to preload mSpot on Samsung phones
turned into a full-blown acquisition. And Daren was uneasy about the way
Samsung approached it.
“We really thought that these guys were playing with us,” Daren told
me, “that they were just stringing us along to get the information and then
possibly build it themselves.”
Samsung’s due diligence was intense. Streams of accountants and
engineers and lawyers filtered through mSpot’s nondescript, warehouse-like
space in a California suburb, driving the pair crazy.