The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest is a 2002 movie based on a novel by technology-culture writer Po Bronson. The film stars Adam Garcia.
Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers
Garcia stars as Andy, a man who gives up his cushy marketing job to do something more fulfilling. He gets himself hired at LaHonda Research Institute where Francis Benoit (Enrico Colantoni) assigns him to design the PC99, a PC to sell for $99. He moves into a rundown apartment building where he meets his lovely artist next-door neighbor, and puts together a team of unassigned employees: Salman Rushdie (Anjul Nigam), a short, foreign man with an accent who is hacking into CIA files when Garcia's character meets him; Curtis "Tiny" Russell (Ethan Suplee), an overweight, anthrophobic man; and Darrell (Jake Busey), a tall, blond, pierced, scary, germophobic, deep-voiced man with personal space issues who regularly refers to himself in the third person.
The team finds many non-essential parts but cannot come close to the magical $99 mark. It is Salman's idea to put all the software on the internet, eliminating the need for a hard drive, RAM, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy-disk drive, and anything that holds information. The computer has been reduced to a microprocessor, a monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and the internet, but it is still too expensive. Having seen the rest of his team watching a hologram of an attractive lady the day before, in a dream Andy is inspired to eliminate the monitor in favor of the cheaper holographic projector. The last few hundred dollars comes off when Darrell suggests using virtual reality gloves in place of a mouse and keyboard. Tiny then writes a hypnotizer code to link the gloves, the projector, and the internet, and they're done.
But immediately before he finished, the whole team (except for Tiny, who was still writing the code) quit LaHonda after being told that there were no more funds for their project, but signed a non-exclusive patent waiver, meaning that LaHonda would share the patent rights to any technology they had developed up to that point. After leaving LaHonda, they pitched their product to numerous companies, but didn't get accepted, mainly because
- the prototype emagi, electronic magic, as it was now called, was ugly,
- something always seemed to go wrong during the demonstration of their product.