I grew up in Brooklyn. My first team sport was being one of seven children in a big family. Growing up, I loved sports. There was a very fancy school called Poly Prep that had a good sports program and I couldn’t afford to go there. But I was lucky. The coach saw me play and he offered me a scholarship.
My dream was to become a professional quarterback. I was only missing one thing: talent. So I went to Williams College, a small college in western Massachusetts. By the end of my freshman year, I realized I was not going to make any money playing football.
I went back to Brooklyn at 19 and became a construction worker, and I was working on the 50th floor of a high-rise. Geez, I thought I had made it. I was making what I thought was really good money at the time. Certainly enough for an apartment and to buy all the beer I needed.
tony florez photography
[An uncle] asked me what I was doing. I said, “I’m working construction. It’s great and I’m making seven bucks an hour.” And he said, “You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re a bright kid. You oughta go to MIT.”
As soon as I got [to MIT], I realized I was a born engineer. I loved every course that I took and I couldn’t take enough. And, that’s where I met Dr. Bose, originally. He was a professor there.
[Dr. Bose] asked me to come and work for Bose, but I had higher ambitions. I went to Hewlett Packard Research Labs and they paid for my master’s degree at Stanford. After finishing that degree, again he asked me to come back to Bose, but I wanted to work on medical imaging. I went to Philips Research Labs for a few years. Then, he called back one more time. Third time’s the charm.
I was strictly in research and never wanted to be anything but in research. I just loved it. I loved it as much as I liked being a quarterback. It was really, really energizing for me.
[Noise-cancellation] was a technology that most people thought was impossible. We had some theory on how we could do it. And we could make it work in the lab. It was hard to reproduce it in production.
After five years, we turned it around, made it profitable. Our first consumer-like product was American Airlines in 1999. We put it in business class. The response was so overwhelming that we decided to sell it directly to consumers.
What we build and how we market things, how we run our business, always changes. If you’re an innovative company, innovation means that in order to be better, you have to be different. You have to change.
We were approached by the NFL to do the headsets. We didn’t want to just do a headset and put our logo on something. We didn’t look at it as a billboard. In fact, how many people remember Motorola used to be on the headsets? Do you know they didn’t make the headset? That was just billboard space that they bought there. That’s fine for them, but it wasn’t for us. It seemed inauthentic.
What I like about the commercial [with J.J. Watt and John Urschel] is we kind of make fun of ourselves. We’re kind of nerdy. We’re engineers. We love technology. We live for that and use that technology to create experiences for people.
Competition makes us better. Our focus is not on the competitors. Our focus is on our customers.
Bob Maresca
We’re very, very careful about who we work with. We want people that model our same essence in values: integrity, hard work, giving back. And, you could not ask for better ambassadors than Russell Wilson or Larry Fitzgerald or J.J. Watt. These people are phenomenal athletes but phenomenal human beings of the highest character.
Competition makes us better. Our focus is not on the competitors. Our focus is on our customers. As long as we are giving them the best experience that they can get and we are pushing ourselves to always get to the next level, then we don’t need to look at the competition.
This is going to sound funny from a guy who lives in Boston, but [my favorite player is] Derek Jeter. Jeter is one of the classiest, hardest-working, greatest teammates that you could ever ask for. When Jeter came up to Boston in his last year, his last game at Fenway, he got a standing ovation from the Red Sox fans. That says a lot about the character of somebody.
I was out at the Super Bowl with my wife, and my daughter and her husband, and my son and his girlfriend. At halftime, they [New England Patriots] were down 21-3 and at some point in the third quarter, they’re down 28-3. And, my wife is saying, “Oh, it was a nice weekend anyway. Didn’t we have fun?” They’re just looking at her like, “Oh, God.” To be with them and see the greatest comeback in NFL history, it was an unbelievable moment.
