By Trip Gabriel
Mike Wood was a young father when his toddler’s struggles to read led him to develop one of a generation’s most fondly remembered toys.
Wood’s 3-year-old son, Mat, knew the alphabet but couldn’t pronounce the letter sounds. A lawyer in San Francisco, Wood had a new parent’s anxiety that if his child lagged as a reader, he would forever struggle in life.
So, on his own time, Wood developed the prototype of an electronic toy that played sounds when children squeezed plastic letters. He based the idea on greeting cards that played a tune when opened.
Wood went on to found LeapFrog Enterprises, which in 1999 introduced the LeapPad, a child’s computer tablet that was a kind of talking book.
The LeapPad was a runaway hit — the bestselling toy of the 2000 holiday season — and LeapFrog became one of the fastest-growing toy companies in history.
Children of the 2000s remember LeapPads — like Game Boys and Tamagotchis — as among their first electronic devices. Many from that generation recall LeapPads helping them to read.
Wood, who retired from his California-based company when it had about 1,000 employees, died April 10 in Zurich. He was 72 and lived in Mill Valley. His brother Tim Wood said he had Alzheimer’s disease.
Former colleagues recalled Wood as a demanding entrepreneur who was driven by a true belief that technology could help what he called “the LeapFrog generation” gain an educational leg up.
He had “famously fluffy hair,” Chris D’Angelo, LeapFrog’s former executive director of entertainment, wrote of Wood on the Bloom Report, a toy industry news site. “When stressed, he’d unconsciously rub his head — and the higher the hair, the higher the stakes. We (quietly) called them ‘high-hair days.’ It was funny, but also telling. He felt everything deeply — our work, our mission, our audience.”
Wood’s company released its first product, Phonics Desk, in 1995. A rectangular tablet that sounded out letters and words as children pressed them, it was the result of five years of tinkering as Wood consulted engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as an education professor at Stanford University.
A shift in reading pedagogy in the 1990s toward phonics — helping early readers make a connection between letters and sounds — drove interest in LeapFrog’s products among parents and teachers.
The company attracted the notice of two powerhouse investors: Michael Milken, a former 1980s junk bond king, and Larry Ellison, founder of the software company Oracle. An education company they founded, Knowledge Universe, bought a majority stake in LeapFrog in 1997. That brought in millions of dollars to develop new products.
Wood, who remained president, acquired a company that developed a prototype of what became the LeapPad, and he pushed its founders to accelerate the technology so that LeapPads would retail for no more than $49 at Toys R Us.
The first-generation LeapPad was a rectangular clamshell computer in green and blue. Interactive spiral-bound storybooks could be inserted inside. Children used a pointer to touch a word or an item in an accompanying picture to hear it spelled or sounded aloud.
By 2001, the company’s reading devices and programs were in 2,500 schools, the Los Angeles Times reported, and by 2002, the LeapFrog was in 9 million homes.
The company’s stock, offered to the public in July 2002, soared almost 99%. It was the best-performing initial public offering of the year. By 2008, about 30 million LeapPads and related products were sold.
Wood stepped down in 2004 at age 51. When asked why he retired, he told the Wall Street Journal: “In 2003, we had 1,000 employees, $650 million in revenue, $60 million in earnings, and I had a headache every day. There would be four or five problems on my desk every day that had no good answer — you had to pick the least-worst answer.”
He went on to found and sell another reading education company, SmartyAnts, an online learning program.
He then spent years as a volunteer reading teacher at a school near his home where more than half the students are classified by the state of California as socioeconomically disadvantaged.
“He went on eBay and bought a ton of the products he’d developed and brought them into the classrooms,” Bob Lally, co-founder of LeapFrog, said in an interview. “He’d have pizza parties for the kids. He loved going to that school and teaching the kids.”
Michael Carleton Wood was born Sept. 1, 1952, in Willits, in Northern California, and raised in Orinda, east of Berkeley. He was one of three sons of Michael Webster Wood, a building contractor, and Anne (Mathewson) Wood.
Mike graduated from Miramonte High School and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Stanford in 1974. He earned a master’s of business administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a juris doctor from University of California Hastings College of the Law (now UC Law San Francisco).
From 1978-91, he practiced corporate law at Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May (now Reed Smith) in Oakland, and from 1991-94, he was a partner at Cooley Godward LLP (now Cooley LLP) in San Francisco.
Wood’s marriage in 1985 to Susan (Cotter) Wood, the mother of his only child, Mat, ended in divorce. In 2021, he married his former high school girlfriend, Leslie Harlander.
In addition to his brother Tim, she survives him, along with his other brother, Denis; his son; and three grandchildren, Walker, Boone and Penelope. The family has asked for any memorial donations to be sent to education nonprofits Bridge the Gap and 10,000 Degrees.
In 2023, his daughter-in-law, Emily Wood, posted a TikTok video of Wood teaching her daughter to use a forerunner of the LeapPad. The video received 391,000 likes and thousands of comments.
“I owe him my entire childhood,” one viewer wrote. “I spent hours on my LeapFrog with my ‘Scooby-Doo’ and ‘Shrek’ books.”
“I sell books now because of him,” another viewer wrote.
“I’m learning disabled and have a stutter,” wrote a third. “This man helped me learn to speak.”
“I’m 25 and I loved my LeapFrog,” a fourth commented. “Coming from an immigrant family, reading made me have so much imagination. I never stopped reading.”
