Early career McCue was fascinated by software and began his first business in his early teens, writing
video games at home that he licensed to magazines and in the end to a games publisher. He had wanted to be an astronaut and his first real app, he said, was a space shuttle flight simulator he wrote in
TI-BASIC in 1981. Admiring technology entrepreneurs like
Steve Jobs,
Mitch Kapor and
Bill Gates, McCue joined
IBM in 1986, giving up a congressional nomination to attend the
US Air Force Academy.
Paper Software and Netscape In 1989 McCue founded his first company, Paper Software, aiming "to make using a computer as easy as using a piece of paper". Paper Software's first product was Sidebar, a set of icons designed to make using a computer more intuitive, but after discovering
Mosaic, McCue began to develop technology allowing
web browsers to display complex 3-D graphics. McCue acted as CEO, winning nearly 80% market share in 3D internet software from
Microsoft and
SGI. before selling to
Netscape for $20 million in February 1996. When McCue later paid $200,000 for a 48-foot classic wooden sailboat he named it "Constellation". Tellme launched in July 2000 with the ambition of creating a 'voice browser' by using voice-recognition software to allow users to find internet-based information through their telephone with simple voice commands. "When you pick up a phone," McCue explained in 2001, "you'll hear a friendly voice say, 'What would you like to do?' and you'll be able to place a call or do a whole variety of things using simple key words." and in March 2007 the company was acquired by
Microsoft for a rumoured $800 million. McCue described his efforts to make design a higher priority at Microsoft as a work in progress during his time at the company, "I'd give it probably a 'C-plus' to a 'B' right now," he said in 2009.
Flipboard McCue left Microsoft in June 2009. In January 2010, he co-founded, with
Evan Doll, one of the early engineers on the
iPhone team at
Apple,
Flipboard, the "social magazine"
app for Apple's
iPad. Flipboard launched in July 2010 having secured $10.5 million of
venture capital from investors including
John Doerr of
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who had also invested in Tellme), Flipboard evolved from a thought experiment undertaken by McCue and Doll in which they asked what the web would look like if it was washed away in a hurricane and needed to be built again from scratch with the knowledge of hindsight. "We thought," said McCue, "it would be possible to build something from the ground up that was inherently social. And we thought that new form factors like the tablet would enable content to be presented in ways that were fundamentally more beautiful." With this in mind they recruited Marcos Weskamp, the designer who in 2004 had built newsmap.jp to graphically display a
heatmap of stories from the
Google News news aggregator. Flipboard became what they called the first social magazine, allowing people to consume media from
Facebook and
Twitter in an easier and more aesthetically interesting way. Apple named Flipboard its iPad app of the year. In April 2011 McCue confirmed a $50 million round of financing, valuing Flipboard at $200 million. In August 2018, Flipboard claimed they had 145 million monthly users with 11,000 publishers.
Twitter McCue served on the board of directors at
Twitter from December 2010 until August 2012. He was initially appointed as a compromise candidate between the company and
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, from whom Twitter had just raised $200 million in a round of funding. His recruitment led to speculation that Twitter was heading towards creating a media and publishing business.
Ellen Pao, who was a junior partner at the firm when he joined the board of Twitter, was also a board member at Flipboard having worked with McCue at Tellme. In September 2012, McCue cautioned Twitter against compromising its existing relationships, telling
The Daily Telegraph: "Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that." == Personal life ==