33 GENIUS INTERVIEW David Ross
FEED: I know you’ve told the story before, but can we start from the beginning? How did Ross Video come together? DAVID ROSS: I’ve been around since the start of Ross Video, when it was founded in the basement of our family house in Montreal in 1974. I was nine, but I remember quite a bit about how it happened. My father, John Ross, started the business making analogue production switchers. I worked there through high school and as a university co-op education student, then I worked at some other places and finally landed at Ross Video in 1991. My father really enjoyed small companies. He’d been in some big ones and seen some pretty significant dysfunction, so he decided he wanted to have a small, cosy company where he was
the prime designer. And that went really well – until digital came. When digital came, the paradigm changed from one engineer who was a genius analogue designer nobody else could match to a whole bunch of people thrown into a room who can design any product as long as they’ve got the right specifications. It stopped being a kind of black magic – an art form – and became more of a process. When I started in 1991, after graduating from computer engineering, I told Dad, because I was seeing it in my own school: “Dad, all they have to do is hire a bunch of people and they will crush you.” We have to grow, we absolutely have to grow. It has to become part of the DNA. So you can say from the day I started, it was the number one goal, and kind of explains why we’ve had 27 straight years of record
THE ART OF TECHNOLOGY “My father, John Ross, started the business making analogue production switchers”
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