In my upcoming article, I share a bit of $ROKU's background to show that this company has evolved a lot during its history. A thread.
Roku was founded by current chairman and CEO Anthony Wood (1/15)

As Michael Liedtke of @AP Associated Press wrote succinctly in 2014:
"If Netflix CEO @reedhastings is the star of the Internet video-streaming phenomenon, then $ROKU CEO Anthony Wood is the best supporting actor." (2/15)

You know what often happens with best supporting actors: if they execute well, they can become stars in their own right.

Just as a lot of visionary leaders, Anthony Wood has a very interesting history. (3/15)

$ROKU is not his first business, it's actually his 6th and therefore he named the company Roku. It's the Japanese word for 6.

Wood is credited with inventing and commercializing the DVR, the digital video recorder, in the late 1990s with his company ReplayTV. (4/15)

As a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation Wood was often very frustrated that he missed episodes because of his busy schedule and he wanted to solve that problem. He did this by inventing the digital video recorder (5/15)

One of Wood's early backers was Marc Andreessen @pmarca, now probably the most famous and successful venture capitalist @a16z , but then starting in VC after he had sold the company he had founded, Netscape, to AOL. (6/15)

Andreessen proved to be a sharp observer. He invited people to see $ROKU as a kind of Netscape for TV, saying it would “provide a portal to personalize and manage the chaos of thousands of hours of television programming raining down on people daily.” (7/15)

An example of Wood's visionary foresight is this quote of him in 2012, when DVRs were still a lot more common than streaming:
"DVRs are a stepping stone feature to a world we are moving rapidly toward which is every video is available on demand in the cloud" (8/15)

Wood wanted more. Even with a DVR, you were dependant on the broadcaster that had to air the movie that you wanted to see. And DVRs had limited recording capacity, so you still had no unlimited choice. In 2002, Wood sold ReplayTV and founded $ROKU. (9/15)

There was no possibility of TV streaming yet in 2002. Bandwith was still limited then and $ROKU started by developing SoundBridge, a digital audio device, SoundBridge Radio, PhotoBridge (digital pictures). and Brightsign, a music subscription for retail environments. (10/15)

These products bridged the time until the technology and the market would be ready for Wood's vision of the future of TV. $ROKU gathered valuable people, formed a basis for software development, explored brand marketing and formed a retail distribution network. (11/15)

Then, in April 2007, Wood was appointed as Vice President at $NFLX and he helped to develop a player for Netflix. The project was top-secret and was named Griffin, after the name of a character in the film The Player (do you see the pun?) played by @TimRobbins1 (12/15)

It was a streaming device and in December 2007, it was ready for launch. But despite the big efforts of a team of 20 full-time employees for years to develop and design the product, the project was killed by $NFLX CEO @reedhastings just before launch. (13/15)

Hastings was afraid that if $NFLX made and sold its own hardware, it would get into trouble with other hardware producers, especially $AAPL. How could Hastings have called Jobs to put $NFLX on an Apple TV if he was a competitor on the hardware side? Reed was right, imo. (14/15)

The device was spun out of $NFLX to $ROKU, Wood left $NFLX to fully concentrate on $ROKU and in mid-2008, Roku launched the Roku Netflix Player and the rest is history.

For $ROKU now: my free article will be out soon. Potential Multibagger subs already have it. (15/15)