The call from Apple came the first week of January 2001. A couple of weeks later I became a consultant leading the iPod investigation. But it wasn’t the iPod yet. The code name was P68 Dulcimer—and there was no team, no prototypes, no design, nothing. In March, Stan Ng and I pitched the idea for the iPod to Steve Jobs. The first week of April I became a full-time employee and pulled the Fuse team with me. By the end of April, Tony Blevins and I found our manufacturer, Inventec, in Taiwan. In May I hired DJ Novotney and Andy Hodge, the first additions to the original Fuse team. On October 23,
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