We called 40 hotels across Napa before we found hers and sent her a bottle of her favorite bourbon, jotteddown after an offhand comment she made during dinner.
Doan's third inspiration, jotteddown by his yellowing hand on yellow pads in 1998, was that small businesses would one day surpass large businesses as consumers of software and services.
His venture began in a Jamaican restaurant in 1990 when he jotteddown on a napkin plans for informing Africans about AIDS. The Ethiopian-born lawyer and son of a diplomat then set out for a conference in Torremolinos, Spain, where he convinced 127 countries to grant him 25 MHz of the L-band, a slice of the 1000 MHz spectrum.