were at the point where we were growing so fast and expanding into other countries and hiring tons of people even with the efficient supply chain we needed capital it was the only place to get the capital and you started we actually did a private placement before we went public um you know about nine months before you started to go to china at that time as well what was going to china in the late NUMBER_TOKENs like to look at the supply chain what were the factories like what was that world like at that time and also japan i guess was was even bigger right i think yeah it was you know the the the component supply and you know advanced technology a lot of it was in japan um and also you know korea taiwan china was sort of just getting going as sort of a place to process uh you know capital and labor and it was kind of basic assembly so you had a lot of the more simple you know uh you know components and ingredients that were being built starting to be built in and around the the hong kong area and the shenzhen area and so you know i would i would go over there and you know meet with the companies and tour the factories and uh you know really really understand uh everything that was going on yeah akihab was that was it the akihabara district in japan like where all the components in tokyo yes yeah yeah i still love going there still love going there fascinated with technology and gadgets and gizmos and they have you know the most amazing display of all that there yeah people don't know about akihabara but i found out about it when we started engadget the blog somebody who was a super fan of it started emailing us and they're like hey here's pictures from akihabara of like cool stuff and we're like okay we'll pay you ten dollars per blog post to write about akihabara and we would have all these incredible things but you go there and there's a building and you know this is the robotics building and as you go up the floors it's like it starts with the components and as you go up you get like more fully built robots and there's a floor for water robots and flying robots and crawling robots and just one building after the next it's like a geek's paradise it's super super fun yeah and i i started i started going to japan and then in NUMBER_TOKEN you know we started what we call del far east which was our our kind of uh technology liaison and procurement organization for for asia and we were working with all the leading japanese companies because we needed their this you know their their displays their semiconductors their optical disk drives and you know floppy disk drives at the time and you know all the all the components and ingredients you know the japanese had had great technology yeah they still do of course you had a great um moment i think it was in south korea where you looked at the menu and you're like yeah three choices kimchi one two or three i mean it's not like that anymore but but when i was there that that's that's what it was like um so the company goes public it starts to grow and you have all these great stories of meeting steve jobs and also becoming friends with uh bill gates and then i think it's a good transition to start
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