Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 5)

Sramana: You have gained a lot of experience working with media and entertainment brands. What does a typical project look like for a company in those spaces? For example, what do you do for NASCAR?

Alan Knitowski: NASCAR is a very interesting use case. NASCAR.com is owned by Turner Sports, but the title sponsorship is handled by Sprint. In those situations there are multiple parties that are involved, which is less typical than working with CBS or NBC on a specific show. In the case of NASCAR, we are the branded mobile environment for anyone on mobile who wants to consume NASCAR content.

We will let people pick their 10 favorite racers on their smart phones, and they can watch them in real time as they are going around the track. We have RaceBuddy, which will let you pick your favorite driver and you can follow their cars as they go around the track via a live video stream. We also let you tie into the live radio traffic between the driver and their pit crew while showing all the data and statistics of the race.

Sramana: Do you deal with the data rights as part of your platform?

Alan Knitowski: We have several modules that deal with monitoring content. Some are tied to cross promotion activities and others are tied to first and third party advertising. We have also created www.PhunDeals.com you will see a daily deal offering that we have created in 107 cities across the U.S. We have created the equivalent of Groupon in that space because we can control everything that is going to be put in front of those user bases.

Sramana: Where are you in terms of revenue?

Alan Knitowski: We almost have 100 people. We are profitable, debt free and do all of our own internal work. We don’t have outsourcing or partnerships anywhere else. We have a creative team that is in-house and comes largely from the gaming world. A lot of our team came from Midway Games. The “Ware” side of PhunWare is the ex-Cisco, Alcatel and Nortel people. They deal with mission-critical, carrier-level technologies. We are headquartered in Austin, Texas, with other offices throughout California. We are above the $5 million to $10 million revenue range.

Sramana: Your revenue sharing partnership model that you used to build your business required upfront investment. You were going in and making investments before revenue was coming in. How did you build this company from a financial point of view?

Alan Knitowski: We are very warped by my time in Silicon Valley. We are a Delaware C Corporation. We look very much like a Valley company from that perspective. We also want every employee involved in our company to be an employee, so everyone who works here has equity awards. We currently do not have institutional investment in PhunWare, but I will say that we have raised institutional sized money. It has come from us or from key friends and associates. Three years into this company the board comprises the three founders, our CFO, our CTO, and me.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski
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