Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-633

Description

David Friend grew up in New York and made his first oscillator using a dual-triode vacuum tube at about age 8. Throughout his teens he built many more, especially after he could get his hands on transistors. At Yale, Friend double-majored in engineering and music composition and designed and built most of the Yale Electronic Music studio as a bursary job. While he was in grad school at Princeton, he got a call from the best analog designer he's ever met named Alan R. Pearlman who wanted to start a company to make synthesizers. Moog had appeared on the scene while Friend was an undergraduate, so he packed up and moved to Boston and they founded ARP. Pearllman used to initial his schematics “ARP” and even though the company had a different name at that time, the initials stuck.
Moog had a lot of technical problems, the most annoying of which was pitch stability. Friend will talk about how they solved that problem at ARP. But most importantly, Friend turned out to have a good marketing head and realized that if they could make a low-cost portable synthesizer, they could sell them through retail musical instrument stores, just like guitars or drums. Friend made what he believse was the first sales call of a synthesizer manufacturer on a retail music store. For the next 8 years, he chased rock bands for endorsements and managed to sign up The Who, Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Herbie Hancock, and probably more than 100 others.
Running a company with 400 employees and travelling constantly to visit music stores and sign up artists left no time for engineering, and in the last ten years the books on the history of synthesizers haven’t treated Friend kindly. He's the guy that took the synthesizers out of the electronic music labs and universities and made them available to every high school rock band. He's ok with that because ARP had more impact on the lives of performing musicians than any other synthesizer company of the era. And he learned enough about business that he could go on and found 5 more successful companies (so far).

Biographies

David Friend has been a successful technology entrepreneur for over 25 years. After serving as President of ARP Instruments, he co-founded four companies: Sonexis, FaxNet, Pilot Software, and Computer Pictures Corporation. In 2010, Friend was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Emerging Technology category for the New England Region. He has been featured in USA Today, Tech Capital, The Boston Globe, Mass HiTech, Fortune, Forbes, and Tom Peter's best-selling management book, The Pursuit of Wow! Friend has been a lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and is an active supporter of music and the arts in Boston. He is a trustee (emeritus) of the New England Conservatory, Berklee College of Music, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Friend holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Yale University and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow.

Host/Chair: Joseph A. Paradiso