Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 5)

Here Maggie discusses her move as the CEO of Wink, which was an ideal fit based on her experience with software and the cable industry. We also catch a glimpse of the early interactive content market, pre-broadband.

SM: After McCaw Cellular you said you found a startup called Wink. How did you find it? MW: Actually I was contacted by a company called Benchmark Capital, by Bruce Dunlevie and David Bierne. I don’t know if you recall, but David Bierne was a partner with Benchmark and at the time was running an executive search company called Ramsey Bierne out of New York. David was the leader in headhunting for startup companies. He placed people like Jim Barksdale at Netscape. I had worked with Jim Barksdale at McCaw Cellular. He was President of McCaw while I was there, and he had given my name to David and said “This is a talent that you should entice to go do a startup at some point.”

SM: And so David called you about Wink!
MW: Yes. Wink was a technology which had been developed so that it would work on both the wireless platform as well as the cable television set top box platform. With my background, 12 years at the time in the cable industry and 7 years with the wireless industry, I knew my experience could help leverage that capability into an interactive television and wireless business.

SM: What year was this? MW: I started with Wink in 1996.

SM: So the Internet boom had started? MW: It was just starting, and AOL was in a leadership role at the time, mostly with dial up. You had internet services providers, but you did not have broadband networks at the time. We provided a technology that would enable customers, with their television remote controls, to be able to interact with programs and commercials on TV. The technology also worked on the wireless platform, but at the time wireless devices did not have capabilities of interactive devices. There was not enough throughput and CPU capability in cell phones in the mid 90’s, so we shelved that capability and focused entirely on the television space.

SM: You were interacting with the TV through the remote control? MW: That is correct. We had distribution with about 30 million households in the US. DirecTV was our largest customer. We also did business through EchoStar, as well as all of the major cable operators. We were working with ComCast, Charter and Adelphia, as well as Cable Vision and Cox. We had more installations on the direct satellite side because once you installed you had 100% of their customer base while the cable industry was more of a system by system approach to selling.

We were the largest interactive service in the country, and we worked with set top box manufacturers, programmers, cable operators, DBS providers, as well as with advertisers and programming networks to bring this business model together. Our goal was to build a capability that could transcend all of these stakeholders in a market that had been closed to new ideas for a long time.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]

This segment is part 5 in the series : Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter
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