Gadgetory

so I started building pcs for for my friends late 97 I said to myself you know what I am going to send one of my machines out to a review see if they think that I built a pretty kick-ass machine I sent out the machine to boot magazine back in the day it got 8 out of 10 which was pretty good I called Alex I said hey Alex listen I got this idea what do you think of you know building pcs for for people who aren't as technically adept as we are calling it aiming work he goes wow you know it's a really cool idea but yes I'm interested I told here's the caveat you gotta drop everything you're doing quit your daytime job put a $5,000 and join me in this fiasco we looked at Dell and Dell had a pretty good business model so we decided to take to the online ordering thing back in 98 99 and it was a huge success I'll never forget that Alex told me one day hey there's no way you're gonna sell a machine online this is the $5,000 no yeah 5,000 our machines back then in 1990 the circuit card they're not gonna get it for 30 days we're asking for $5,000 I mean from day one I had a website okay it was a very rudimentary you know website but I had we had a had a programmer who eventually became our CTO programmer configurator but you couldn't order it you would just configure and then send a text to us and then we would call you and process working that way yeah I asked him hey listen how much would it cost to turn that quoting system into a into a custom ordering ecommerce solution because all thousand bucks our lives and that's it yeah that's it's a no-brainer let's do it when it got really hairy was when we started introducing colors and we started introducing different jassi's with different colors and at first we thought hey you know where was gonna order or yellow computers bent over yellow keyboard and compete a little mouse right a yellow monitor and I know speakers yeah but you know here comes purple here comes red here comes white and we're like oh my god this is a supply chain nightmare I was always into sci-fi and fantasy and into the whole alien conspiracy thing the x-files were were you know was was the biggest hit show on TV at that time and obviously I was it's a hardware so I said okay let me see here a news aliens and hardware alien where that's that's how that's how I became and I always wanted a company with a to start off with an a actually because it would be the first on the list you know I said well you know what so it kind of almost became triple-a right anywhere I just didn't know how successful that name would ultimately become and with the logo sort of part of the idea from the very beginning or did that come later no that was from the very beginning I wanted an alien head for I mean that was from the get-go was there any pushback about having the Elliott hit I mean a lot of people thought we were nuts it's just the only people understood this was was us I always ask people when it comes to sort of people were very into gaming PCs and and and game and what games made them realize they first had to start building their own systems or really learn a lot more about how this stuff worked I think for me back in the 90s it was an embarrassing game it was one of those full-motion video games called the Ripper with Christopher Walken yeah and I saw that in a friend's computer like well now I got to get into gaming computers and then later only came the building my own systems it was Mara when it was the first one was like okay now I got to build everything rain scratch what presented what was something like for me it was I was a big flight sim Civet a simulator guy so was Alex and and Falcon drove that one and then there was doomed I mean doomed for me was like you know doom was like oh my god this is crazy when we went into this you know we said you know the core competency of Alienware has always been the product marketing the product development the product engineering side and there was a breadth of autonomy that you know Michael and Kevin at the time you know allowed us in fact you know we took our time purposely to even integrate into Dell we're still in the same building we were before dough acquired us just as this I mean just think of the symbol that that's a sense around you know the autonomy that we operate within we're still located in Miami Florida where the company was founded we're a mile away from the original office that we all started working at we all have the same cause that you actually had sort of a demographic profile a certain person of a certain age you know with certain interests it's so hard to do I don't we don't look at the demographic in terms of age or gender because this is a very old man next to me games you know the gaming the population has is so diverse nowadays I mean we have more women playing games and we've ever seen before we have kids coming into gaming as early as ages like five and six years old and then we have veterans like those of us at the table that play games and we're much older than that right so if I go and I and I profile somebody as 34 years old predominantly male they like to read this and listen to this kind of music I'm focusing on like 10% of my market so what we look at is what are the common factors amongst this demographic the gaming demographic in general male female any age group whatever what do they care about the most and what they typically care about is performance value quality innovation design and a couple other attributes and that's where we train excel