[MUSIC] So I started building PC's for my friends. Late '97, I said to myself you know what, I'm going to send one of my machines out to a review, see if they think that I built a pretty Kick **** machine. I sent out the machine to Boot magazine, back in the day. It got eight out of ten, which was pretty good. I called Alex and I said, hey Alex, listen I got this idea, what do you think of building PCs for people who are not as technically adept as we are, calling it Alienware? He goes, wow, it's a really cool idea but yes, I'm interested. I told him, okay, here's the caveat. You gotta drop everything you're doing, quit your daytime job, put up $5,000 and join me in this fiasco. [MUSIC] 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 going to sell a machine online. This was $5,000, these were $5,000 machines back then. In 1998. People giving us their credit cards, 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 website. We had our programmer who eventually became our CTO program a configurator. But you couldn't order it, you would just configure it and then send a text to us and then we would call you and process the order that way. And work it out. I asked them hey listen, how much would it cost To turn that quoting system into a custom ordering e-commerce solution. He goes, 1,000 bucks. I go, I said, yeah, 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 chassis with different colors and At first we thought, hey, whoever is gonna order a yellow computer is gonna order a yellow keyboard and a yellow mouse, right? And a yellow monitor. And yellow speakers. [LAUGH] Yeah. But here comes purple, here comes red, here comes white. And we're like, my god, this is a supply chain nightmare. [MUSIC] I was always into Sci-Fi and Fantasy And into the whole alien conspiracy thing, the Xfiles was the biggest hit show on TV at that time. And obviously I was into hardware so I said okay, let me see here, Aliens, Aliens and Hardware, Alienware. That's how. And I always wanted a company with A, to start off with an a, actually because it would be first on the list. [LAUGH] So I [CROSSTALK] just go [CROSSTALK]. Yeah I just, you know I said, well you know what, so it kind of- It almost became triple A. Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] I just didn't know how successful that name would ultimately become. And was 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 alien head. I mean, a lot of people thought we were nuts. The only people that understood us was us. [MUSIC] I always ask people when it comes to the sort of people who are very into gaming PCs and gaming, I ask what games made them realize that they 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- My god, yeah. And I saw that on a friend's computer and was like, well, now I have to get into gaming computers. And then later on when it came to building my own systems, it was Morrowind. That was the first one. It was like okay, now I gotta build everything from scratch. What were some of the ones back then? Well, for me I was a big flight simulator guy, so was Alex. And Falcon drove that one. And then there was Doom. Doom, for me was- Doom and Quake, yeah. Doom was like, my god. This is crazy. [MUSIC] When we went into this we said the core competency of Alienware has always been the product marketing, the product development, the project engineering side. And there was a breadth of autonomy that Michael and Kevin at the time allowed us. In fact, we took our time purposely to even integrate into Dell. We're still in the same building we were before Dell acquired us. Just think of the symbol that sends around, 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, right? We still have the same call center. [MUSIC] Do you actually have sort of a demographic profile, a certain person of a certain age, you know, with certain interests? That'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, and he plays games. You know, the gaming population is so diverse nowadays. We have more women playing games than 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. So if I go and I profile somebody as 34 years old, predominantly male, They like to read this, and listening to this kind of music. I'm focusing on 10% on my market. So what we look at is, what're the common factors among this gaming demographic in general, male, female, any age group? 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 what we try and excel.