Media Vision - Company History

Company History

Media Vision was founded in May 1990 by Paul Jain (aka Prabhat Jain) and Tim Bratton. Early employees also included Russ Faust, Sandy Pfister, Dan Gochnauer and Bryan Colvin. Many of the founders and early employees had worked together under Mr. Jain at Video Seven, a video card maker which by then had been purchased by and absorbed into LSI Logic. As Mr. Bratton recalls, he wrote the company's business plan while an engineer at National Semiconductor and studying for his MBA at Santa Clara University. Mr. Jain and Mr. Bratton used the plan to raise $1 million in funding and by July 1990, after returning from the MPEG standard committee meeting in Porto, Portugal, Mr. Bratton joined the company as its first full-time employee. Mr. Faust and Ms. Pfister joined soon after. Mr. Jain remained at National Semiconductor for another month and joined the company full-time in August 1990. Within its first two years of operation, Media Vision had become the second-largest producer of personal computer sound cards, providing strong competition to Creative Labs.

In 1992, Media Vision was the first company to publish Microsoft Windows with Multimedia Extensions on CD-ROM; having beat Microsoft to market with its own product, Bill Gates's assistant telephoned and ordered two copies. During the same year, the company acquired Pellucid, Inc., a computer graphics company, and began producing a line of high-performance video graphics cards for the PC. Media Vision became a publicly traded company in late 1992.