Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2000?

Jason Wells: I had spent a lot of time internationally while at A.T. Kearney. In January of 2000, I left A.T. Kearney to start my first entrepreneurial venture. The company was called Globient. This was at the peak of the dot-com era. There were many companies that were in mezzanine financing. Their business models were being copied overseas and they were concerned about that. People didn’t know how to deal with that.

Convirza was essentially building out hubs or landing pads for a lot of the companies that were expanding. These companies were typically in mezzanine financing and looking to IPO. We did a cash retainer plus equity in the companies and then we acquired URLs and did business development. As part of their IPO story, we would build financial strategy for them. That was really taking off until the NASDAQ crashed. I think that was in May of 2000. All the money dried up. I kept going on through the end of the year, but I had to fold that business.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Jason Wells: The interesting thing is we were a small company. We had only about 10 employees at that time. What was fascinating is that I was working with about six different companies at that time. I had the chance to know the inside and outs in these companies and figure out which ones are going to make it through this dot-com bubble burst. I went to a venture-backed startup in Dallas. The name of the company was Handango. I don’t know if you were active in the Palm Pilot days.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, absolutely.

Jason Wells: We built the first app store and aggregated probably about 20,000 apps for Palm Pilots, Windows CE, and Nokia Symbian devices. Because I had a lot of relationships in the telecom space, we expanded as the Palm Pilot handheld days moved into smartphone era. I took that piece of business and I became the Vice President of all channels. I worked with Motorola, Microsoft, and Nokia.

We took this app market place and provided it as a third-party solution. Then, we built them on devices. It was really the first app store. It shaped a lot of the things that I do today. When I joined, we were doing about $3 million in revenue. It grew to $48 million over the next five years during the dot-com bubble burst. We didn’t raise any additional capital at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Where were you based when you were doing this?

Jason Wells: I was based in Dallas, Texas.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to about 2005?

Jason Wells: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company?

Jason Wells: It was sold a few years after I left. It tapped out. Apple was just coming out at that time. They sold to another company. Everyone did pretty well out of it. It still exists. Handango is out there as a marketplace for these other applications – non-iOS and the non-Android. As you can surmise, Apple and Android took a lot of that space.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells
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