Psion

"David Tupman was in Scotland traveling to a wedding reception from the ceremony when an old friend said he’d just gotten a job at Apple. The chance encounter was in the summer of 2001, and it would alter the trajectory of his entire career. Both men had worked at Psion, a UK-based computing company that in the late 1990s made subnotebook PDAs, messaging devices with a full keyboard and packaged in a clever clamshell. Tupman was enamored with Apple designs and mentioned he’d love to work there. Well, good news: Apple was hiring engineers. Tupman sent over his CV, detailing his niche experience in Asia working with silicon and hardware to make handheld electronics. Within days he received a phone call from Tony Fadell."

"Tupman had no honeymoon period, no welcome, no introduction to Apple systems. But Fadell sent him schematics for the circuit board before he departed from Heathrow. During the twelve-hour flight, he made his mark spotting problems with the circuit diagrams—how the chips connect together and the resistors pass through the printed circuit layout. He knew this flight from his five years at Psion, which had also partnered with Inventec. The engineers did a double take when he walked in. They all knew him, and together, they got to work immediately on the problems he’d spotted. Then he got to hold a prototype iPod for the first time and immediately knew he’d made the right choice to join Apple. “It was like, ‘This is so cool!’ ” he says."