Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today from the revenue range point of view?

John Underkoffler: Our revenues are now well into the respectable double digits – that’s with two commas. We’re vectoring towards an intermediate goal of a hundred million dollar run rate. The proposition that we’re working on is broad enough for it to be a very brief and temporary waypoint. What we’re after is a new kind of computation – a new ubiquity for collaboration that’s supported by, rather than impeded by, these digital machines.

What we ended up with is almost infrastructural. We get a situation where the world is always on collaboration and, at every minute, you could be deeply engaged with a number of different people working on the same process and documents. Literally at an operating system level, the machine will expect that >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 5)

Taylor Tyng: By focusing on the organization and how teams collaborated, we could assist with making sure the intellectual knowledge was captured and shared. What we saw in our competing niches were people who were trying to solve more individualized and lighter weight problems. Another major inflection point for us was how cloud has been developing in a way where the economies of scale are also matching some of the needs for security. Security has always been a major focus for us because our customers are movie studios, television networks, and brands like Beats by Dre, Nike, and Red Bull.

96% of Super Bowl commercials go through our system and virtually, every major motion picture and advertising promotion goes through Wiredrive. You, pretty much, can’t turn on the television without actually seeing something that hasn’t been collaborated on in our system. Because of that, security has been a incredibly important for us and we implement at a high level across all stages. >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else happened? It sounds like it’s a fairly straightforward enterprise software go-to market strategy. The beauty of that strategy is that you get these large deals and good cash flow. I think we understand that model. Is there anything else you did strategically that was particularly interesting?

John Underkoffler: We’ve made it sound linear and streamlined. The truth is, as with any young company, it’s a roller coaster ride and, for us as with many companies, there were near-extinction moments.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of these near-extinction moments? What were some of the challenging moments? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Wiredrive?

Taylor Tyng: Wiredrive was officially founded as a sole business in 2008, but its story probably started around 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the story?

Taylor Tyng: We got to a point where we had a lot of legacy issues. We were trying to move from a web  design agency-based world into a product-based world. There were a few things that became turning points within our organization. Number one was, we were early in the game, so there were no commercially sound or viable frameworks for building the technology. We were building all our platforms ourselves so we needed to make some quintessential decisions of how we wanted to shape the future of Wiredrive. >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about the commercial. How much did these three major accounts pay you to do their projects?

John Underkoffler: I will probably decline to give actual numerical figures in this context. This was more than enough to keep us going as a young startup.

Sramana Mitra: This was your seed financing, right? I imagine multi-hundred thousand, if not, millions kind of deals.

John Underkoffler: In that range. No one likes to admit that luck is actually part of success, but it is.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a huge part of success.

John Underkoffler: We were incredibly fortunate to have a number of early contracts and very enthusiastic adopters of technology who let us bootstrap >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the chronology, where are we in now?

Taylor Tyng: I’m going back and forth within that. We’re probably around the mid-2000s.

Sramana Mitra: What is the next major strategic move and what year?

Taylor Tyng: As I mentioned, we’ve never been venture-backed. We ran two businesses side by side — the design agency and the software business. We reached the critical mass around 2008. We were at a place of profitability with our software business, so the next major move was to close our design agency, which was a rather well-renowned and profitable business and focus on Wiredrive. At that time, we also started looking at how we were to >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You did a PhD as well at MIT?

John Underkoffler: I did. I stuck it through.

Sramana Mitra: What was your PhD in?

John Underkoffler: My PhD was in a set of systems called the IO bulb and luminous room. The intent was to show, through prototypes, what would happen if we abandon the old keyboard and mouse paradigm for UI. By that time, the GUI and the keyboard and mouse that supported it were 15 years old. It seemed to be that we can, usefully and valuably, move past that. Inventing and using a radically more capable UI will let people do new kinds of things entirely. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers were adopting video advertising at that time? Who were these early adopters of video?

Taylor Tyng: A lot of them were post-production companies and commercial production companies. In particular, post-production companies were very interesting early adopters for us. They’re built around pipeline workflows for technologies so they understood the investments and how asset management systems are critical to what they do. They saw the value in us for a few reasons. One is they were trying to send videos to their customers for review and approval.

They were also trying to archive everything that they’ve done and put it into a context so that they could use it for their own marketing promotion or sales purposes. We fell into two primary workflows for them. One was servicing 11th-hour creatives – things that need to be seen and approved immediately. The >>>