Vision Pros Live Podcast
Original podcast
What's your vision? Featuring David Fradin. Podcast Session 1.
1,600 words · 3 speakers
So David, tell me about your vision.
Well, about thirty-five percent of all new products and services that are introduced each year fail in the marketplace, representing a waste of human resources of well over a trillion dollars a year. So my vision is to help products and services be more successful and to succeed.
Tell me more about that.
Well, the keys to that success is embodied in the name of my company, Spice Catalyst. The word spice is a mnemonic for those five keys, where the S stands for you've got to have a product market strategy. The P stands for processes need to become mature and repeatable. The I stands for having the information necessary to make informed decisions. The C discusses what it is that your customer wants to do. It's the C is for the customer. When do they want to do it? Why do they want to do it? How they want to do it? Where do they want to do it? How important is it for them to get that thing done?
And how satisfied are they with the current way of getting that thing done? And lastly, the E stands for the one hundred and thirty employee competencies necessary to be in an organization in order to have a successful product or a successful service.
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I actually resonate with what you've shared today. Similar to you, how you deal in products, we deal in companies. And I don't know if you've read the book, Emeth or not, ninety-six percent of businesses fail within the first ten years. But that's also a huge waste of human resources there and then.
Pretty staggering numbers and thirty percent in the products market.
Overall company cannot be successful unless it has the foundational successful products and or successful services. If their products fail or their services fail, the company will ultimately fail.
Correct.
And your expertise, is it both in service and products? Or is it just related to products that consumers probably consume or use tangible goods?
No, I've been consulting and bringing to market and dealing with both products and services across telecommunications, the web, internet, e-commerce, hardware, software, video, and so forth.
Thank you for sharing that. David, you mentioned that thirty-five percent of businesses fail. I understand that part of the story. But where did your vision come from in recognizing, hey, this is something getting wasted, maybe something I want to build towards or work towards?
Well, I was classically trained as a product manager at Hewlett Packard. Then Apple recruited me to bring the first hard disk drive to market. And then they noticed I knew how to manage. So they asked me to take over as the Apple Three Group Product Manager, which was one of the two profitable product lines at the time. And then after Steve Jobs convinced the executive committee to cancel the Apple Three, then the president called me into his office and said, Dave, what are we going to do? We got thirty million dollars in piece parts for the manufacturing of Apple Threes, spread amongst our manufacturing facilities in Cork, Ireland, Dallas, Texas, and in Singapore.
And I told him that I was given all the responsibility for the product line, but none of the authority. So he said, make me a proposal, which I did with the help of about eighty other people at the company, a business plan. And he allowed us to take the product line off as an independent business unit. And we then sold twenty-five thousand Apple Threes, earned, I think it was about six hundred million dollars in profits, kept about a thousand to fifteen hundred highly paid Apple people employed at the company, and helped provide funds for the Macintosh, our research and development.
That's amazing.
You have more to say, I think I cut you off.
No, that's it.
That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing.
So leaving Apple and and starting your own thing.
How did that come about? How did how did your company?
And the spice catalyst, how did that come about?
Well, one of the things that came up during the presentation to the Apple Executive Committee to set up the the Apple three was the issue of Apple values. And I found in my book, Building and Sailing Great Products, that I went out and I researched the 500 companies that were the first Fortune 500 list. And I found that about 300 of them have failed and are still are no longer in business. And that the primary reason is that either did not have values or if they did have values, they didn't follow those values. So I thought, I wonder if that pertains to me in terms of my career.
So I made a list of the 25 organizations I've been associated with over my career. And whether or not they had values, whether or not they followed the values, and whether or not those values attracted to mine. And almost without exception, in those places where the company either had no values or didn't follow those values, I was very unhappy. And eventually, either I would get fired and that was a mercy killing and I would feel better the next day, or I would quit. But in those organizations that had values and followed values, like Hewlett Packard, like Apple, I thrived, I was happy and I got promoted to senior management levels.
So that's a that's one of the key things that I look at.
Thank you for sharing that. We have, we have our five core values too. I don't know what is it for you. I'd love to hear yours too. We thrive with love, patience, consistency, persistence, and reliability. These are our five core values, our company, we are building towards and building through. I'd like your thoughts on yours and if you have any feedback.
Yeah, my values are much more extensive than that. And in fact, they're on my website, spicercandologist.com. And it's a combination of the HP Way, which was the Hewlett Packard values up until 1998. And was principally responsible for why HP from its founding 50 years earlier, grew in sales 20% a year, every year for 50 years, because they had a set of values. And likewise at Apple, we all knew when we went into a meeting, that everyone was coming from the same place. Whereas in other organizations that I was associated with, they would have no values. And then the name of the game was playing politics to see if you can get the guy above you screwed
and fired so you could get their job. And it was out of my frustration with working in that kind of environment, which could care less about the customer, rather than making the customer the most important thing and customer satisfaction the most important thing. Then I decided back in 1990 to start my own company, which I did, called Desktop Video Products. And it was given credit to be the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley that year. We were a reseller of the Avid video editing system and a reseller of Apple Macintoshes, which was a necessary platform for the digital video editing on Avid.
But then I brought in a partner and added investor. And that person, they decided that the most important thing was to just make a profit and not take care of our customers. So we got involved in a buyout. They refused to honor the buy-sell agreement. And so we had to sue each other. And 10 years later, they ended up paying 10 times what they could have paid me if they just followed the buy-sell agreement that they had agreed to. So from there, I started several more companies and have been pretty much an entrepreneur
since then. And then about, let's see, 13 years ago, I started Spice Catalyst to teach others how to have successful products worldwide. My number one client is Cisco. Between myself and my other instructors, we have trained about half of all the product managers at Cisco worldwide over the last 10 years. And the idea is to train companies and people to have product success and avoid product failure.
That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that with us, David. That was a very helpful and very extensive answer. I really, really, really enjoyed that. What would you say, David? I think that's also be our last question for our segment today. Where are you going with your vision if you see future with Spice Catalyst? Where do you see it going and where do you see your vision thriving?
Trying to get our training into more and more organizations throughout the world
and either with in-person instructors or online instructors, or have people buy my courses which are available online. And you can, on demand, you can find links to those and all the core syllabuses on my website, spicecatalyst.com.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
Page updated November 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
