Daily Inspiration Quote by Andy Hertzfeld

Silicon Valley loves a creation myth; Andy Hertzfeld gives you the unvarnished version where the gods get jealous. The line turns a familiar startup arc into a darkly comic fable: the patron funds your experiment, then decides the experiment should be owned, absorbed, and rebranded as the patron. “Benefactor” is almost medieval in its politeness, which makes the pivot to “BE General Magic” land like a betrayal in a boardroom suit. It’s not just competition; it’s ontological theft.

The phrasing is doing careful work. “Tried to make us blink out of existence” borrows the language of magic tricks and extinction events at once, a neat double-bind for a company named General Magic. In one clause, Hertzfeld captures the soft violence of platform power: Apple doesn’t need to win on the merits; it can alter the conditions of reality, starve distribution, poach talent, shift narratives, and let its gravity do the rest. The antagonism is delivered with a shrugging cadence, a veteran’s tone that implies: of course this is how it goes.

Then comes the punchline: “which we eventually did, but it took a few years.” It’s gallows humor and a small act of defiance. Yes, Apple couldn’t quite vaporize them on command; General Magic still got time to exist, to build, to influence. The subtext is a warning wrapped in wit: in tech, your benefactor is often your future predator, and survival is measured not in victory but in how long you can stay real before the larger story edits you out.