article about Mike Matthews in Forbes

[zachary vex]

http://www.forbes.com/2005/05/26/cz_ds_0526harmonix.html?partner=editrules

Behind The Music: The Entrepreneur
David Serchuk, 05.25.05, 2:00 PM ET

NEW YORK - Floating on a cushion of pot smoke in 1970, entrepreneur Michael Matthews was told by his wife that he needed a goal in life. Matthews, then 28, had already accomplished a bit. He had founded an electric-guitar-effects company, and it was expanding rapidly.

Though stoned, Matthews liked to think big. So he picked a worthy target: to defeat death. He made a plan to double sales at Electro-Harmonix annually until he hit $1 billion. Then he would fund an immortality think tank.

Amazingly, Matthews followed through on the sales plan, and for years it actually worked. But the think tank was never born. Ironically, this same plan would also ruin him several times: Instead of becoming immortal, he simply became an entrepreneur who refused to die.

<more at link>

[Mark Hammer]

Neat!!  and fascinating too.  Always interesting to find out how people got started, who the people are behind the technology and instruments we know and love, and how they think about business and organization, and in Mike's case the relationship between life and work.

Several years ago, I was reading a book entitled 301 Great Management Ideas or something like that.  It was a compendium of ideas that had been contributed to the magazine Inc.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of great ones in there from none other than Hartley Peavey.  It was kind of nice to see a terrific idea aimed at keeping plant staff safe and injury free coming from the music technology sector.

[puretube]

[MartyB]

So those Russian BMPs have bits of soviet subs in them.

[sean k]

Great article but its a pity is so short and only charts his peaks and troughs.I'd love to see a book about that guy that delved into his interests and motivations but I suppose thats a while off.

 Is forbes one of those mags thats basically says that this guys got a great company and worth buying stock in.The fact that the article is on the web suggests they may be a little deeper than that but the page took so long to load that I didn't hang around to find out.

 I've done a whole bunch of stuff thats taken me from success to ruin several times over and I'm at an age now,43,where I'm starting to do more evaluation of the actual process and why it happens.I suppose in one sense you could just call it the learning process where you have to go  out there and try things out and live with the consequences of those actions but I'm also starting to think that our own motivations about doing stuff needs to be examined and even modified to suit conditions out there in the markets.But my favourite quotes, one by George Bernard Shaw

 "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world:the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

tempered with one by St Augustine

 "To many,total abstinence is far easier than perfect moderation."

 So I've just gone out and spent 3k getting this knobs and enclosures thing off the ground...and it ain't
 So now I've got to put together some fx to get some more money together to reinvest.On one hand I could just accept defeat and say it hasn't worked out because I didn't have enough knowledge when I started spending but on the other hand I can say,well I've learnt a whole bunch of stuff about the processes involved and with a little more forward thinking about where this needs to be and some backstepping to raise capital I might just get my foot in the door this time.

 I was thinking about how I actually got to this point,yesterday,and if I'd been more conservative at the beginning and spent more time realising the extent to which I'd have to go to make it happen then,chances are,I would have bowed out at the enormity of it but because I just got right into it,dived in boots an' all,I've actually got somewhere and acheived something I can work with...if I apply a bit more realism and conservative thinking.Temper my passions,as it were,with some pragmatism.But the overall thing still has to be that I'm doing something I enjoy and keeps me motivated and passionate about what I believe in and hold dear.
 I've been doing my networking and market research by putting out the work I've been doing here and at a few other forums to,on one hand,gauge reactions,and on the other to feed my own passions to carry on with responses that...make me feel good!

 So my first run of stuff has failed,no bones about that,but failed only in a production sense.It was a very expensive experiment in learning about production casting and making prototypes suitable for the various rigours of those processes.But I've had such a great response,especially from europe and the americas,that I'm actually quite determined to go on.Quite a few people have said I'm onto something big and I'm half wondering that the bigger something is going to be then the harder it is to get on top of.I don't know,maybe it is,maybe the idea is to realise it is going to be a big climb,you know,try and be aware of the investment of time and ideas and rebuilding motivations in the long run but as well its lots of little hills and plateaus that can be taken a step at a time.

 Whatever,eh!,I am such a complete nutter and I'm sorry about burdening you souls with my ravings trying to come to terms with my own motivations.

[nelson]

"Full disclosure: The author worked in sales at Electro-Harmonix in 2002."

That is unbiased reporting for you

[vortex]

Amazing and inspiring!

Power on MM!

[puretube]

you can`t buy E-H stock...

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

It's lucky he's given up on the search for immortality, seeing as he's smoking cigars. Cigars kiled my stepfather.
Another emusic pioneer, Ray Kurtzweil, is still chasing the fountain..

[puretube]

Mike doesn`t smoke them - he just has it cold between his lips...
(and chews a bit   )

[loki]

puretube,
i really thought YOU were the E-H chief  

[puretube]

I`m not even employed...

[Mark Hammer]

One of the missing bits in the article is filled in by Mike's interview for the Dave Hunter Effects Pedals book.

This answers the question:  Why Russia?

Apparently one of the things that collapsed along with the first E-H empire was Mike's marriage.  True to form, he rose from the ashes, and for whatever reasons began dating a woman who was from Russia and managed the tube-importation on the Russian end in St. Petersburg.  Her father was one of the co-inventors of the hydrogen bomb.  I gather her military connections facilitated Mike's access to the various manufacturers on that side of the curtain, before it fell.  He notes that he was "...the first American allowed to visit some Russian all-military cities...".

To the best of my knowledge, the tube/transistor distinction described in the article is not one of "melting", but rather the capacity to continue functioning in the presence of fallout.  The continued production of tubes in communist nations (China, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Russia) was largely a response to planning around the worst outcomes of the cold war.  In contrast, the declining production in the west seems to have been largely a commercial response to the increased overhead costs of managing the environmental impact; i.e., once you made sure that all pollutants were minimized and satisfied environmental protection criteria, the odds of producing a tube that was priced competitively dropped considerably.  In other words, tube production also kept up in Iron Curtain countries because they were slacker about their environment.  Just another one of those backhanded evolutionary lessons where someone becomes besotted with trying to gain an upper hand in defending against conflict, while at the same time systematically destroying the very country they intend to protect.  It happens.

I wouldn't make too much of the cigar.  The pic of Mike and George Clinton showing off the Tube Zipper in Dave Hunter's book portrays a Matthews whose long tresses and t-shirt are comfortable in the presence of Clinton's raindow hair.  I gather the haircut, suit and cigar is part of an almost "joke" picture for Forbes, depicting Mike as some sort of old-school style tycoon.  All that's missing is the watch fob.

BTW, in the "old days" there used to be jam sessions at the E-H facility, or at least they were advertised.  Do any recordings exist of such events?  Did anyone here ever attend one or at least get some second hand reports?

[JimRayden]

Wow, cool article. Thanks, Z.

Just found a lil' mistake.

"He declined an invitation to join up with a young, slick blues and R&B guitar player, Jimmy James. Not many years later, James would change his name back to his birth name, Jimi Hendrix. "

His birth name was Johnny Allen, not Jimi. Then was renamed to James Marshall (That's where the name "Jimmy James" comes from I think).  Jimi is just his final artist name.

----------
Jimbo

[DiyFreaque]

A long, long time ago, I remember picking up a Reader's Digest and reading an article about EH, of all things.  It surprised me, because the title of the article had nothing with EH, but was about organized crime and labor and blah blah blah.  So, a few paragraphs in, it mentioned EH and I thought "so that's what happened...".

This was after they'd gone belly up the first time.  IIRC, the article was about how organized crime had put them out of business, but I can't remember the details.  I imagine it had something to do with the violent strike mentioned in the Forbes article.  Of course, this *is* Readers Digest, so there would be a bit of a slant, I'm sure.....

Cheers,
Scott

[puretube]

there`s a running joke, claiming we share the same coiffeur...  :lol:

[zachary vex]

...To the best of my knowledge, the tube/transistor distinction described in the article is not one of "melting", but rather the capacity to continue functioning in the presence of fallout.  ...

EMP.  tubes have a much greater liklihood of surviving EMP and coming back to life.

[scratch]

Zachary beat me to it ... solid state electronics are easily fried by EMP. Tubes are not.

[Hal]

cool article :-D.

Russian subs have TOTAL MOJO!

[stuartgsmith]

I'll always have a soft spot for E-H.  Drummer in my previous band went to high school with Mike Matthew's son, Scott, and once when we were in NYC for a gig he took us for a tour of the E-H offices in Cooper Square.
It was a very cool and laid back place.  I remember shelf after shelf of NOS military tubes, a little workbench with a bunch of perfboarded prototypes in various states, three elderly asian ladies assembling pedals, and getting to play around with an original 16-Second Delay. Very cool.