Steve Schuster: In this series of videos from Rainier, my colleague, Alan Ryan interviews me about a variety of topics related to technology marketing. He starts by asking me to describe the origins of Rainier Communications.

So very early on in my engineering career, in fact, within the first year, I realized, in an epiphany, that I didn't want to be an engineering. I wanted to be in marketing. I wanted to interact with people and we were creating some really advanced technology for the time in speech recognition.

And a time came when the president of the company brought in some potential investors into the lab and I happened to be sitting there doing something and he asked me to demonstrate our product. So I did a demo, just spontaneously, and the investors started asking me questions. And I remember looking up at the president going, is it okay if I talk? And he nodded his head and I just started telling the story and it was a great conversation.

They asked a lot of questions. I answered them. I felt like I could do that storytelling on my feet and it resulted in them writing a check. So that was a very, very powerful lesson for me about the power of communicating what technology is about, as opposed to just having it be the technology standing alone.

Alan Ryan: Could you give me a sampling of some of the technologies that you and your teams have ushered in and elevated over the years and why you thought they were really important?

Steve Schuster: Every single year there's something very, very cutting edge that we get our eyes on and get our hands on and have the privilege of marketing. Some examples over the years are things like advances in HDTVs. So we all know that 1K to 4K to 8K to 16K, those kinds of resolutions are advancing, but at the same time, it's the underlying technology that's driving this TV realism and quality and viewing experience to new heights all the time.

A couple of examples – we marketed, Texas Instruments' DLP devices, their digital light processing, little teeny weeny millions of tiny mirrors that reflect the light in a very high fidelity way. We marketed that to TV manufacturers, and many of them designed them in and adopted them and brought them to market. Similarly, we marketed the technology for a company called QD Vision. It was quantum dot technology. So this was yet another advanced type of display technology. So, not only do we get to see the power of the ingredients, but actually the results, because we would be at trade shows like CES with the TVs, with these products designed in, and see how people reacted to them.

In the smartphone arena, there have been so many advances that we've been privy to over the years, I'll go way back to the early days where we marketed the first what was called FOTA, firmware over-the-air updates. And this over-the-air update was really novel at the time because, you might remember there was a time when, if you wanted to update the software on your phone, the firmware, you had to go into your carrier, Verizon, AT&T, whatever, they would plug it in and they would do it and then they would give it back to you. So at the time, this was really novel that we could now do it over the air.