Mike Wood, Whose LeapFrog Toys Taught a Generation, Dies at 72

New York Times

19-04-2025

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.
Mr. Wood's 3-year-old son, Mat, knew the alphabet but couldn't pronounce the letter sounds. A lawyer in San Francisco, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 best-selling toy of the 2000 holiday season, and LeapFrog became one of the fastest-growing toy companies in history.
Children of the aughts remember LeapPads — like Game Boys and Tamagotchis — as among their first electronic devices. Many from that generation recall LeapPads helping them to read.
Mr. Wood, who retired from his California-based company when it had some 1,000 employees, died on April 10 in Zurich. He was 72.
His brother Tim Wood said he had Alzheimer's and made the decision, before the disease progressed too far, to end his life at Dignitas, a nonprofit organization that offers physician-assisted suicide, where he was surrounded by family. He lived in Mill Valley, Calif.
Former colleagues recalled Mr. 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 Mr. 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.'
Mr. 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 Mr. Wood consulted engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as an education professor at Stanford.
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 R. Milken, the former 1980s junk bond king, and Larry Ellison, the 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.
Mr. 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 nine million homes.
The company's stock, offered to the public in July of that year, soared almost 99 percent. It was the best-performing I.P.O. of the year. By 2008, some 30 million LeapPads and related products were sold.
Mr. 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, a 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 on 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 B.A. from Stanford University in 1974. He earned an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from University of California Hastings College of the Law (now U.C. Law San Francisco).
From 1978 to 1991 he practiced corporate law at Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May (now Reed Smith) in Oakland, and from 1991 to 1994 he was a partner at Cooley Godward L.L.P. (now Cooley L.L.P.) in San Francisco.
Mr. 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.
In 2023, his daughter-in-law, Emily Wood, posted a TikTok video of Mr. 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.'