Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back, everyone. This is Rashad woods, your host at the Tron podcast, the Randomness of Nothing. Today. I have a very, very special guest today. He's an entrepreneur, Michigan native, U of M graduate, author, product manager. Originally started at HP and they grew 20% every year while he was there. Then transitioned to Apple as a product development manager. Worked the same position as Steve Jobs and helped create the app help with the Apple 3 home computer. Thank you, Mr. David Fradin. It's an honor.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Glad to be with you.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: You know, I mean, just listing that off doesn't even do justice to what you've done and accomplished, sir. So I saw. I'd love to hear you just talk about your story, please.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Well, I was born and raised in Detroit, the northwest side. Went to Cass Tech High School, which is a high school for honor students from each of the junior high schools. I went to the University of Michigan. By the time I got to Michigan, I had my private pilot's license because I'd been in the Civil Air Patrol and won a scholarship for 15 hours of flying out at Ridelstead Air Force Base in Nevada. I was quite surprised that being in aerospace engineering, that Michigan did not have a flying club. So I made the mistake of starting the flying club, which still goes on today, because we, we had a mission statement, we had a set of values, we had a vision that over 5,000 pilots have been trained through that flying club, including the head of the Blue Angels.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: I saw that, I saw that.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: And he grew that with no capital, no money, into a five million dollar business. In my senior year in college, we had 25 airplanes.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: That's incredible.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: That we owned or were buying. Then my sophomore year, Professor Wilbur Nelson was my aerospace engineering professor, came to me and he had been on Lyndon Johnson's advisory committee for supersonic transport. And the SST was in trouble in Congress because some environmentalists thought it was a danger to the ozone layer and they were wanting to cancel this Department of Transportation funded advanced aircraft development. So he asked me if I'd be interested in organizing a student organization, national Student organization in support of the supersonic transport. And he says, we can call it fast. F A S S T for fly. America's sst.
So not knowing what I was getting myself into, I said sure. By the time I had finished my, let's see, sophomore year in college, I had testified before the House of Representatives Aeronautics Astronautics Committee in favor of the SST and had gone to meetings at the White House in my pink polyester suit, which was the John I Forget his name had popularized, set up 40 chapters, about 15,000 members on campuses around the country. Then when the SST got shut down, we felt that it was caused as a result of the anti technology feeling in the country. The feeling that technology causes all of our problems. Which by the way is coming back a little bit now. People are blaming technology for all of America's ills. Well, technology is not inherently good or bad, it's how we choose to use it. The definition of technology is the organization of knowledge for practical purposes. And if you do it poorly, then of course you're going to have problems. If you do it well, then we can clean up the environment and increase the well being of the environment and of society.
So when I graduated, I couldn't get a job as a interdisciplinary engineer. So I moved the FAST headquarters to Washington D.C. and lobby Congress to get the space shuttle built. I was successful in helping that a little bit and also lobby Congress to do Project Independence so we would not be reliant on foreign oil, including being an expert and alternative energy like solar and wind and so forth.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Even back then. Even back then, yeah.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: This was 1974.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: And I was not very successful at that.
And then I decided a year or two later that I can't be a student anymore. So I was recruited by a group of labor, business and agricultural leaders in Minnesota to come there and run their newly started Environmental Balance association of Minnesota.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Which I did. I moved to Minnesota, which is probably one of my biggest mistakes. I guess I didn't get enough snow in Detroit. So I got to Minnesota, there was even more snow there.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: After I left Minnesota, I said the only time I want to see snow is when it's in my martini.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: So I pioneered the field of environmental mediation. Helped resolve the Anheuser Busch Moorehead malt plant dispute. It contributed to resolution the granddaddy of all environmental conflicts, the reserve mining dispute up in Silver Bay. And then HP recruited me to come to Palo Alto and head up their efforts in terms of new sightings of new facilities around the country. And so I did that. And the interesting thing is I had word processing way back to my fast days. I had word processing, Environmental Balance Association. I had word processing. When I ran John Connolly's presidential campaign in Minnesota, I got to the corporate PR department, 32 people, the only department at the company that knew how to type.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: I saw that when you gave your speech at Productized. I saw that.
That was incredible. It's so centralized to just a certain group of people.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: So we, I Rolled out word processing. And that turned out to be an internal product management role role. And one of the nice things about HP is you could move laterally any place in the company that you wanted. So I was able to transition into product management in the information networks division and had a couple of products. One that was just about to come to market, which is more of a job of a product marketing person. Another product at its inception stage, which is more coming to the product management position. And I, by the way, would advocate changing the title from Product Management.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: I saw you said that. I saw you said that. Chief Product Success Officer.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Right. Call it a success manager. That way people would know what you do. Yes, that Apple recruited me to do the impossible job of bringing this really cheap hard disk drive to market. The first one on a PC profile was only 3, $500. Tremendous capacity as 5 megabytes in size, which I think was burned up in the last 30 seconds. And so I brought that product to market and they noticed I knew how to manage. So they asked me to become the group product manager for the Apple 3 product line, which is one of the two profitable product lines at Apple at the time, before the Macintosh came out. So I took on that job. And the first product manager for the Apple III was a fellow by name of Steve Jobs. And he screwed that up. So they stuck him off in a corner someplace where he would not leave the company, but he wouldn't hurt anybody else. And that's when he took over from Jeff Raskin the Macintosh and convinced the executive committee in the spring of 1983 cancel the apple III product line, because he had not yet learned that if he doesn't cannibalize his own product, somebody else will. And he convinced him to cancel it because he felt it was occupying a place in the business and office market where his not yet shipped Macintosh, where he wanted that to go. So about a week after they canceled the product line, I was coming out of the Mariani Building, which was the corporate headquarters on De Anza Boulevard, and Ida Cole ran out. She was the marketing director at the time for that, my division. And she later went on to be VP of International for Microsoft and made a lot more money. And she ushered me into a meeting with John Scully, the president, with Graziano, the cfo, and with Del Yoakum, the VP of manufacturing and the future president of Apple. And he says, Dave, we've got a problem. And he's looking at a super Visico spreadsheet. And he says, we've got $30 million piece parts spread across our manufacturing facilities. Singapore, Dallas, Cork, Ireland. What should we do? And I said, what do you mean, we, pale face? And he didn't laugh. So I had to explain the joke to him. That the Lone Ranger and Tonto were galloping through the desert. Tonto was his Indian sidekick. When I tell this story in India or to Indian Indians, I have American Indians not kick right TTO or the Lo Ranger turns to Tanto and says, we're surrounded by 10,000 yelling, screaming Indians, and all they want to do is scalp us. What should we do, Tonto? Tanto says, what do you mean, we, pale face?
So everybody in the room stickered. And I said, you canceled the product line. You have me assume full responsibility with no authority. And he didn't ask me about it. He says, well, what should we do? I said, well, if you gave me the authority. Commencement with the responsibility. Which is where product management started as brand management at Procter and Gamble in 1932. But when HP adopted the model into product management, they took away the budgetary authority, where the product manager could spend and budget and had authority over the money spent for market research, for sales tools, for marketing and so forth. And I said, you know, if I had the independent authority to get things done, we'd be able to sell the Apple III's and eliminate that $30 million projected loss, which would have been huge. About 10% of the company's profits that year.
Which, of course, Scully did not want to happen because that would affect his product, his price of his stock options.
So he. I told him stories of how independent business units have been successful, from the soul of a new machine to the IPM PC to the skunk works of Lockheed. And he told me the story of when he was president of Pepsi usa. He went to a cocktail party in Connecticut where he lived. And one of his neighbors was the president of Xerox. And Scully said to the president of Xerox, I have a candid personal copier on my desk. How come Xerox doesn't have a personal copier?
The president of Xerox responded, come on, John. You know Xerox. We never do anything original.
Dang, that's a joke. Because all major copies.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: He said that canon put 10 of their best engineers on it. They're shipping their personal copier now. Xerox put 100 of their best engineers on it, and they're still a year away from shipping.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: So I said, scully, John, give me the authority. Commensurate responsibility. So he says, okay, make me A proposal. So I gathered up as much data as I could. About 80 people the company to contribute. And then a core group of 7 to 12 of us wrote an 8 page, 80 page business plan which I then presented to the executive committee in July 15, 1983, a day that will live in infamy, at least in my mind.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: One of the key things at that meeting was that in the back of the room was a lady by the name of Ann Bowers who was VP of HR at at Apple. And she was, I think instrumental. At least I found found a reference to it when I was researching my book Building Insanely Great Products that she helped get the company to develop some Apple values. I found out later that she was also VP of HR at intel and was married to Bob Noyce, one of the co founders of intel. And she had helped bring values to intel by bringing over the HP way the HP set of values. The bottom I get to fit HP or Intel. So some of the values that Apple adopted, which they still follow today is empathy for the customer, achievement, positive social contribution, team spirit, individual performance, innovation and vision, quality, excellence, and lastly, perhaps most importantly, good management.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Right?
[00:12:42] Speaker B: So I laid out the options that the executive committee could take on the Apple III product line. And one of them was to shut the product line down. The other was to let the market decide when they're going to stop buying the product.
And at that point, executive Vice president Floyd Kwame asked me, if we pick one or the other options and a dealer called you, what would you say? I said, if dealer called me and you guys said let the market decide, I'd tell them that to go out and continue to sell and market service and support the Apple 3.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: But if you decide to shut the product line down, I'll give the dealer your phone number.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Floyd, I saw that, I saw that.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: So everybody laughed and they clearly got the point I was trying to make that it was not good management and it was not consistent with Apple values, which the dealers knew about also. And one of the reasons they wanted to sell Apple products is because they had a decent set of values. So a week or so later I was asked to take over as the independent business unit manager of the Apple III.
Give it a $4 million budget, 17 people I could sign up to $200,000 without anybody questioning. I I should have bought myself a Tesla or something like that.
The we went out and sold all the Apple 3 inventory, plus the Apple 3 + inventory and manufacturing 25,000 units along with the hard disk that I had Brought to market.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Average selling price was about $7,000, which today would be about $30,000, and generated enough profit to keep a thousand to fifteen hundred highly paid Apple people employed and enough profit to help pay for the final development of the Apple Macintosh so Steve could get his little baby. And I said, when they first asked me, can I be a general manager? They said, no, you have to be a business unit manager, or BUM for short.
So, so that's, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: So here's, here's what I thought was most interesting was the example when you talked about the customer and market and obviously your high experience when it comes to product management, you know, AKA Chief product success manager, was when you use that Disney example in your speech where they were like, should we put sidewalks? Should we put sidewalks? And then everybody was adamant about it. And then you were like. There was one person in particular, the dissenting voice, so to speak, that said, why not give it a week and see where people walk first, and then we can determine where things need to go. And that was kind of letting the market decide what the customer will do with their. At the facility. Which, you know, correlates to your example of the Apple 3 computer.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of companies, especially the ones that are highly staffed with MBAs, I saw that they're smarter than the market. The market is always smarter than you. Just for example, in this last week we're talking Here, in late February 2025, Elon Musk sends an email to the 2.1 million employees throughout the federal government saying, tell me what you did last week. Five things you did last week. And a lot of them are answering in very humorous ways just to insult them. In fact, in some secretary or department meetings that are online, people are using the spoon emoji all over the place in order to make fun of Musk's fork in the road email a few weeks ago saying that we're going to fire everybody. It also epitomizes this notion which somewhat developed here in Silicon Valley about 10, 15 years ago, which says, ready, fire, aim, break things, act quickly, fix things later. Well, that may or may not work with a startup or with a company, but it certainly doesn't work in a bunch of services, such as the services that a government is supposed to deliver to their constituents.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Well, you know, obviously Apple came back from some very dark times as well, too, when it came to, you know, when Jobs was let go versus when they find they came out with, I believe, what was the Deal.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: The imac.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yes, yes, correct. I was in school when that came out. But there was like a 10 year period where they were on, really on the, you know, basically on the ropes because of some of the decisions that they made. And it kind of correlates to what you said where decisions were made in a vacuum, so to speak, where they weren't listening to how things were evolving. And that's what you, what you constantly have have focused on. Not just in your career but you've also started your own consulting business as well too to focus on market trends in teaching people what customers want and how the market can decide their needs.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I always felt that the market is smarter than the rest of us. And some of the senior management at apple from around 1985 until when Steve came back, I think that was in 1998. One of the things before I left the company they gave me a nice severance package. I said I really doubt if Apple's going to survive because were a little company. The total Penetration of the PC market was only at 4% and Apple had a piece of that. And we had four different operating systems. We had DOS on the Apple ii, we had produce on the Apple ii, we had the Lisa operating system. Really we had the Mac operating system and then we had the Apple III sophisticated operating system or sauce. So excuse me, across your own product line. Really five different operating systems.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Unbelievable.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: I know that there's another little company out there, I think it's called IBM and they have one operating system.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: And the other one they leased or rented or was Microsoft's disk operating system. We just don't have the resources to support five of these within one ear of John Scully and out the other ear. And he then started. It was kind of strange. One of the great things about Apple's, their notion of design and that came primarily from Steve. He hired a, a fellow by the name of Henrik Essinger who was the industrial designer for Sony in the 60s and 70s and started the concept of Sony style. And Steve was very impressed with that. So he hired him to design the design language for, for Apple, which he did. It was called the Snow White design language. And some of the products I brought were the early versions of that design language which we still see today in the, the iPhones and the iPads and.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Nice, nice. That's really cool.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: But Scully, despite being a trained architect, had no sense of design. He wanted the Macintosh to look like the IBM PC which was this rectangular steel or plastic box that you stuck the monitor on top of it's funny.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Because I remember seeing those when I was in junior high and high school actually. That's crazy. I remember they were in our library at our school. Yeah. When they started bringing some of those in and it. You could. That's real. There was no distinct style of the. And let me just say this as well too. When you, when you have a computer operating system, this is just me just being on the outside looking in, using technology, you confuse the customer. When you're a software company and you have five different platforms, right. That's all like there's no way, like, okay, you know, if you turn on a Windows computer, you know, if you turn on an Apple, you know, if you turn on a Linux device or you have an Android, you know definitively what you have when you bought it in your hand and it resonates exactly with that specific brand. Five operating systems, I had no clue. That's insane.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Well, today the operating system for the back is a derivative of Unix, which Steve's software team at NeXT, his last computer company developed. And that's what they acquired. What Apple acquired NEXT and that same operating system, pieces of it are used on the iPhone and on the iPad. So Apple's pretty much supporting one operating system now, which is what I suggested they do in the early 80s, not that they would ever listen to me.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: You made your mark though. You made your mark. Don't undersell yourself, all right? You made your, you know, I mean, I'm talking, you know, a portion of tech royalty right here. I mean when I saw, you know, I'm sure that at the very beginning there was, everybody was the smartest person in the room. This is just me talking from the outside looking in. And you know, it you just from a guy who's obviously post technology when it started and kind of saw it when it was, you know, in its infancy stages. A home computer was kind of coming big. When I was a kid, you guys didn't, I can imagine, didn't have the luxury of saying this is exactly what the customer wants. You're figuring it out as it goes along. And you know, you mentioned earlier in your speech, and I don't want to over talk you, a lot of people were looking, weren't looking at smaller businesses. They were just going for the quote unquote big fish. Right.
Which is a totally huge market that a lot of people didn't even think that would be prevalent to everyday usage.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: But one of the things we tried to do with the Apple 3 was we called it niche, that puppy find a Market niche and focus all of our resources on that niche rather than the overall federal market.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: That's why we ran an ad campaign that says the Apple 3 means business, as opposed to the Apple II, which was used mostly at home and in education.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: I had a 2C, actually. I had an Apple IIC. That disc was like this big. Yeah. I had an Apple IIC on it. I remember that. That's like 85, 86.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: No, the Apple IIC was introduced in April of 1984.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, I remember. Yeah. I was born in 82, so I think we got one when I was like, five or something like that. I mean, I got very small memories of it, but. Yeah, that's crazy.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Well, I canceled the Apple III product line on the same day that the Apple IIC was announced so that nobody. Nobody would notice.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: The reason I canceled it is because the Apple II people kept saying, Apple II forever.
And they said the Apple III is part of the Apple II forever thingy. But they're gonna have 24 demonstration stations at the Apple II release up at. Oh, no center in San Francisco. But they would only let one of them be the Apple 3. And the Apple 3 is a big part of the revenues of the company at the time, and the dealers. And we felt we couldn't explain again why the company is trying to eat its own young or the market had given up on it.
So I made the decision that the game's over. And for my boss, we made the announcement that day. I think it was like, April 12th or something like that.
And didn't affect the stock price at all.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Right. Because it coincided with a new product release.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Yeah. A couple years later, when Steve, out of revenge, had taken over as the general manager of the LISA division and he canceled Lisa without any other announcements around it, the stock market was in shock, and the price of the stock went down significantly.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: That was one of the many dumb things that he did into the early days of 1985 that resulted in Apple asking him to go find something else to do.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Yeah. See, these are stories that I just, you know, I've read in passing about different drama, but I never dug deep into it like that. But you were there. How did you transition to Spice Catalyst and getting into consulting? And that's a wonderful endeavor that you've been into for quite some time. And I would. I have to ask about that?
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Well, after I left Apple, I brought the first text to speech software only to market on the Macintosh called.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: Did you really? Wow.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Called Smooth talker.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Sold $1.2 million worth of, of it at 150 bucks each, only to find out that it was about the only software program on the Mac available at the time.
Okay, it was, I thought it would be used to read back spreadsheets so people could proofread them and things like that. But its number one use was at a party where you put your Macintosh in the middle of the table and people would go up and they would play around typing in their favorite swear words, listen to the Macintosh talk back. So it was a, it was a, it was an amusement piece.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: It's the little things in life, right?
[00:25:20] Speaker B: So then after I left there, I went to Data Quest where I was the associate director of market research for the personal computer industry service. And then I bounced around at another hard disk drive company. And then my uncle, who was the number one investment banker in Wall street at the time, had put some money into a company called Docugraphics. So I went there. I was a VP of marketing and sales. I stayed there for about four years and then left there. Went to Digital Effects, which was desktop video editing. And after I got fired from that job, I started my own company called Desktop Video Products. It got the Avid dealership for digital video editing. And 93, I was called in the San Jose Business Journal the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley. We're over a thousand percent per year.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Jeez.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: And I made the mistake of bringing some business partners in and lost less than 50% control. They decided that they could get rid of me, they could keep all the money themselves. So we then went on to a nine year legal fight which they lost. And the company went out of business about halfway through those nine years because they'd lost its visionary, namely me. They're supposed to, according to our buy sell agreement, pay me $200,000. They refused to do that. It ended up costing them 1.1 million to settle the lawsuit.
So I then played around with a company called Digital Enterprises and Communications, developed computer based training for Ross stores where everybody in their stores were trained. I used cash register systems in the back office, cash systems on educational programs that I developed. I developed sales training for Unisys for the Unisys PC and then got invited to give a speech at a technology conference in Maui, which I did and fell in love with Maui. Had decided to try to help Maui get high tech companies to locate there and get started up there.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: How big of a challenge is it to get a high tech company to.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Go out there, A big one, a Big one.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Just to travel alone, you know, I mean, obviously the amenities, I'm sure are stellar, but I don't want to cut you off. But that just seems like a large endeavor. That's not like moving from like, you know, a landlocked state to another landlocked state.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Well, it wasn't that. That was the issue. The issue was having the venture and angel funding to get started and to have enough entrepreneurial business experience to know how to put together a company. I thought I did at the time. So I started a little company called Maui Games because I thought we could do games for cell phones that had embedded advertising and advertising on PC. Games was just coming into knowing, and I figured we'd just replicate that model on cell phones.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's dope.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Tried that for a while. That failed because I didn't do my market research and did not develop a product market strategy, which is what I teach now, to know that I should not have targeted a Nokia a cell phone because it was not part of my distribution. It was mostly in Europe and Asia. And I was trying to sell ads on cell phones in the United States, where I put together an advertising sales force.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: So I was then recruited by a company called Rich Relevance, which is a bunch of people that had left Amazon. And they did a company which I called Amazon, like Recommendations. And I did a $15 million sale of it to Sears to embed in the Sears.com, kmart.com and other Sears websites.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Like the E Commerce platform and things like that. Okay.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: It was based upon wisdom of the crowds, where it would say things. People that looked at this, looked at them. People who bought this, bought that, people like this, like that, that type of.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: Thing, we all get caught in that.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: So that increased the sales. We called it the lift in sales on Sears. And after I left there, I was approached by a company that did product management training and consulting. And I. And I said, well, I didn't ever thought there would be a market for this. So I joined them for several years and the last year I was heading up their business development. Sold about $800,000, consulting and in trading in about 11 months. And then I had a conflict with the founder over values. His value was he would take all the profits and we not share that with me or anybody else. And I said, okay, I'm not going to do that. So that's when I started Spice catalyst, which was 14 years ago.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: You know what's amazing is, is that. And you're also a distinguished professor as well. Too. And you're an author of multiple books that involves the, you know, market research, the product creation, knowing your customer and avoiding the pratfalls. What are the common pratfalls that you see when a product needs to be introduced to the market?
[00:30:15] Speaker B: They have failed to do their product market strategy. They don't know what their competition is. They don't know what it is that their product does. They don't know what its positioning in the market should be. They don't know its value proposition is. They don't know what its pricing strategy should be. They don't know why people should buy the product and so forth, which are part of the 32 elements of a product market strategy. They've done the ready, fire a move fast and break things kind of approach, and as a result of that, they're going to fail. And about 35% of all new products and services introduced worldwide, according to a study by a couple of professors out of North Carolina University, found that they fail in the marketplace and it represents a loss to the world of economy of over a trillion dollars a year.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: But here's a, here's a question too, and you know, this is just me thinking as a consumer is that success always breeds really quick imitators. So if you, you know, one minute, you know, to the, to the person outside looking in, you know, either a company doesn't innovate or they get cannibalized really quickly by, by people who do something very similar. Quick example off the top of my head would be MySpace. Facebook. Right. Facebook just became the better version of MySpace, essentially. So if you're a product, that means you're constantly evolving your product and listening to your consumer at the same time to add value. Add frequently.
[00:31:39] Speaker B: Exactly. Well, MySpace was acquired by a guy that did mergers and acquisitions and so forth. So it lost its creative, entrepreneurial innovation.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: I was on MySpace and it went. You could tell the difference between when it started versus when it got sold because it was spam bots. And it was really, really, really, really terrible at that point.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: And keep in mind, innovation is nothing more than doing something better or faster or with higher quality or an example like the Apple Watch style.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right, right. And I just find that very fascinating because you can, you can quickly get your lunch taken. But I, I also just want to talk briefly too about the books that you've wrote. I know I saw four of them listed. One of them obviously was with your father, who, which, you know, that's a great, great subject and it seems like a very compelling story. Do you care to share about the books that you've written?
[00:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I've got Building a Sale Great products, which is 198 pages long. And then for management of product management.
And the CEO suite is organizing and managing insanely great products that I wrote a little pamphlet that WY published, 796 pages long, called Successful Product Design and Management Toolkit. And it's used at a couple preeminent universities in India for executive education programs. Over a thousand people have gone through those programs. That book. All three of those books are available under Amazon. If you just search for my name, David Fraden, on Amazon. And then the last one I just released at the end of December called Letters for My Hymie. My dad's name was Hyman. Sometimes he went by the nickname Hymie. And a cousin of mine had gotten somehow all the letters that my dad wrote home during World War II when he served in the Marines, the Army, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and on kitchen patrol because he was always getting into trouble in the military. So punishment in military at that time was you had to peel potatoes day and night.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: That's real. That's real. I used to see that, like in cartoons as a kid. And I wasn't that. I didn't know that that was real.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that was my dad. So it takes a little history from my grandmother. 26 generations ago was escaping the Inquisition in Spain, was traveling through southwestern France, and she was 15 at the time. Time was surrounded by some thieves and gallant man on horseback with a sword with some friends came to her rescue. His name was Freden. So Freden is a French name. The Freightens, through the centuries rose up to the point where one of them served at Napoleon's army as a general. Others were mayors of Lyon. Some of them were winemakers. So the family crest has a wreath of. Of of grapes around the edge.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: They were later driven out of France. This is after my great great, great great great grandfather was anointed a duke by the king of France. And then ignoring the French Revolution of 1880, all aristocratic titles were revoked. So I just ignore that revolution. So that means I'm a duke. And if you look up Duke David Fraden on Amazon, the letters from behind me will come up.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: My family eventually immigrated to Ukraine, near Chernobyl. And back in 73 or so, when the Soviet science fair came to Washington D.C. i hosted a couple of their adult leaders at a at the Watergate Hotel. And they were serving me shots of stolen vodka in Test tubes and obviously I had too much to drink. So by the time we were done, they asked me, what's your name? I said Freighten. And they were very familiar with the name because there's a lot of freight around Chernobyl. So I'm quite certain many of my relatives glow in the dark and they say Freighten. And they immediately said Jewish. And as part of the letters that I got there was an 18 page dictated biography of my grandfather Lewis that was born in 1880 in the Ukraine. Became over time a blacksmith eventually for the governor of Kiev. And governor he gave him several hundred dollars to get out of the country. For the. The Cossacks kill you because they had had six inquisitions, six pogroms, it was called then Holocaust, trying to kill all the Jews in, in Russia or Ukraine. So he left and eventually made his way to Baltimore, where my dad was born in 1917.
That goes through the rest of that, my dad's life up until he passed away.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: That is an incredible story. That is, I mean, you know, it's. And I looked at it just briefly and I saw the COVID up and I was reading about it, you know, that, that you have an incredible story and you know, this is what the Tron podcast is all about. And we've only truncated this in like 40 minutes. And I'm sure that there are, you know, multiple indentations that in bullet points that we could go over. But you know, I want to be very conscious of your time and your story about, you know, product development, the various companies that you work with, where you've been in the travels that you've taken, and then the current work that you do, you know, has. Is an inspiration when it comes to, you know, all the things that you've accomplished. And I would very appreciative of your time by taking time out to get on this, you know, bums podcast over here just outside of Detroit here.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Well, thanks for putting up with me.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: No, no, it's been, it's been an honor. I asked this of every single guest. I always want to say, how can people find you? They don't need me. What's the best way to locate David Frank?
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Well, you just Google my name. You could go to Amazon and search for my name and you can connect with me. Just search for my name on LinkedIn. And I also have a website which is spicecatalyst.com for my product management books. And then I have another website for letters from my Hymie and soon to be published. My last book is called Trippin and it's Life's Little Laughs. An Unauthorized Autobiography. And you can learn more about that and a letter from my hymie@david fraden.com.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: That'S wonderful. And I'm honored to have you as a guest on here and with the work you've done, the great work you'll continue to do. This is Rashad at the Tribe podcast. Mr. David Frayton, I want to thank you so much for your time and your story, sir. Appreciate you.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: You're welcome.
