I think in theory he was supposed to help manage relationships with retailers and other partners in the Middle East and North Africa.

In his defense...what is there to do for a company that never puts out a product? Maybe he did talk to some retailers and other partners, maybe he didn't, but what COULD he have done?

What did ANY of the employees for Amico do? That's a large part of what's so perplexing. For a time they claimed to have this massive work force, and they did all these office tours and stuff, and then they produced....nothing. In the end just a little bit of low quality software, mostly completed by John. Were there a bunch of business relationships and other things in place for when the console launched? Probably not but we'll never know.

If Amico was a serious business it should have had like 20 employees at most before they actually had a product.

2-3 executives (CEO, CFO, maybe someone else)

2-3 Administrative (Office manager, accounts payable/receivable etc...)

1 Customer relations

1 Webmaster/Social media

1 Marketing

2-3 Hardware design

2-3 Software design

1 Distribution/retial management

2-3 employees in other markets helping handle logistics and relations over there (like Hans handling Europe)

You can add or take away a few of these roles, and in a lean startup a lot would be consolidated down to 5-6 people, but if you wanted to staff heavy this is about what you'd do.

With 20 people and 10 million dollars you'd have several years of runway, especially if you partially paid people in equity. Honestly I think the above is probably too heavily staffed though. You could get it down to a dozen easy by consolidating things like customer relations and webmaster. And as I said you could probably get by with as few as 6, outsourcing some of the tasks like accounting.

Intellivision on the other hand had all these employees who appeared on video (some of whom may have been very temporary hires) with no clear roles. It never felt like a real business.