So I did what I thought was a very common-sense thing after we had all spent around a half hour asking about this device—I asked the founder to show it to us in use.

It didn’t work. There were lots of excuses and while you almost have to admire the guts of someone bringing a piece of technology that didn’t work and would never work to a pitch, we ended the meeting and the founder got pretty aggressive pretty quickly. We were told that we just didn’t understand—this was going to be revolutionary.