JimMarggraff

The Inventor Who Keeps Asking
"What's the Problem to Solve?"

A preschooler in Oakland, California points a glowing wand at a picture book. The book makes a sound. The wand lights up. The child reads the word aloud, then reaches for the next page. She has been at this for 28 minutes. Most four-year-olds last five with a regular book. That gap - 28 minutes versus five - is Jim Marggraff's life's work in a single data point.

Marggraff grew up to become a different kind of engineer: one who reads toy aisles as carefully as technical journals, who thinks the definition of "impact" starts with whether a child reaches for a product twice. He attended MIT, earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, and came out looking not for the biggest computer but for the place where machines could speak to people in their own language.

His first company, StrataCom, co-founded in the mid-1980s, solved enterprise networking. The FastPacket IPX switch it produced was the world's first commercial ATM switch - a piece of infrastructure that quietly moved data around the planet before most people knew the internet was coming. Cisco bought StrataCom in 1996 for $4.5 billion. Marggraff had already moved on.

The company after that one, Lexico, tried to make an interactive globe and failed. Marggraff describes it as a crucial education. He took that lesson to Explore Technologies, where he and a MIT roommate built the Odyssey Atlasphere - a talking globe operated by a stylus. Sales crossed $100 million. LeapFrog bought the company in 1998 and handed Marggraff the keys to a much larger platform.

What he built at LeapFrog changed the toy industry. The LeapPad Learning System launched in 1999 and became the #1 best-selling toy in the United States two years running, in 2001 and 2002. Within five years, 77% of American households with children between four and seven years old owned one. Global sales crossed $1 billion. LeapFrog's revenues went from the teens to $680 million annually. The LeapPad is now on MIT's official list of the 150 most significant inventions by its graduates.

While at LeapFrog, Marggraff also developed the Fly Pentop Computer - an early experiment in turning writing into computation - and oversaw the adaptation of 20,000 LeapPads into Pashto and Dari for Afghan women's health education in 2004. The humanitarian detour was not unusual for him. It was the obvious thing to do with a platform that could speak.

After leaving LeapFrog in 2005, he founded Livescribe. The problem he was solving: what if handwriting could carry more information than a piece of paper? The answer was a smart pen - a device that recorded audio synchronized to whatever you were writing, so that tapping any word in your notes would replay exactly what was being said when you wrote it. The Livescribe Pulse launched in October 2008. It became the world's first commercially successful smart pen. Anoto acquired Livescribe in 2015 after sales crossed $100 million.

In 2013, Marggraff turned his attention to eyes. Eyefluence, the company he founded that year, developed technology that let people navigate digital environments - augmented and virtual reality, primarily - using eye movements alone. No hands required. The technology enabled more natural, fatigue-free interaction in AR/VR headsets. Google acquired Eyefluence in 2016, and Marggraff served as director of Google's Virtual and Augmented Reality division. He also co-produced a VR film called "One Small Act" in partnership with Rotary International in 2017.

The pattern across all seven companies is not difficult to see once you know to look: StrataCom made data travel faster, Explore Technologies made globes talk, LeapFrog made books interactive, Livescribe made notes speak, Eyefluence made screens respond to a glance. Each product expanded the bandwidth between humans and information. Kibeam Learning, his current company, does it without a screen at all.