Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That’s how things happen.

Makr Hyland: So, Shift was a great entrepreneurial experience. We had to raise money. We had to explain ourselves, explain our vision. We were all in our early 20s at the time, so I think we had the naiveté of youth on our side. Starting a magazine at that time – there was a bit of a recession going on in the early 1990s. It wasn’t the best time. The other lucky thing was that in 1993, 1994, we started to have the Internet coming and Mozilla and so on. We actually jumped right on the Web, built a Web page for the magazine. I probably sold the first banner ad in Canada, which is maybe not a great claim to fame for those who hate banner ads, but it was pretty early on. That was all a great education.

For me, it was a great taste of the entrepreneurial life. I actually went back, in some ways, to learn about bigger companies. So, I worked for a bigger publishing company. I worked for a bigger broadcaster, running their Internet stuff and doing their broadband video, eventually, when that got going. That was a Canadian broadcasting company in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the business at Shift and the life of being on the line as an entrepreneur really set me up for wanting to do that again. I was kind of looking for the right opportunity when Raja Khanna, who is the other co-founder of QuickPlay, and I sat down for lunch.

I knew him from the business. It’s probably like here, a small-town environment when you’re in the digital space. So, we knew each other. I think I sat down to pitch to him about joining me on an IPTV venture. It would have been an early cable company or something like that. Then he pitched me back on QuickPlay and said, “Look, mobile, you can kind of do what you want to do, but let’s look at what’s happening on mobile networks and the mobile revolution.” I was intrigued.

SM: What did he say? What was his pitch?

MH: Basically, the big thing for me was that he was all in. He had a previous company that he was selling into this company, to take a stake in it. So, that was a big signal to me.

SM: What was the value proposition? What was the company going to do?

MH: The value proposition was that everyone’s building faster and faster wireless networks. So, there are all these billions being spent in Europe and elsewhere on 3G licenses. The business case for all of that was video, essentially. People were saying, There’s going to be video flowing over these networks. But at the time, the wireless operators did not have a great deal of experience with video, and they didn’t know the content providers. They didn’t know the rights issues. There was a lot that they didn’t know. QuickPlay’s value proposition was to make it easy to distribute video over any network to any device, starting with those wireless networks and the early wireless devices. For me, I could see it growing into something intriguing.

We didn’t know exactly how it would turn out, but one of the biggest rules for me as an entrepreneur is that the rising tide lifts all boats, so let’s find a big market that’s going to get bigger. Even with cursory research about the stats on mobile and the incredible growth that was happening all around the world and the incredible growth of network speeds … you might not have known what was going to happen. You might not have predicted the iPhone per se, but you knew that there was going to be a lot of innovation and a lot of investment and excitement.

SM: I’d called the convergence device trend very early.

MH: Yes. I really bought that pitch. So, I think once I got to QuickPlay, my first job was to build the pitch deck.

SM: You joined as CEO?

MH: No. I joined at a quite junior [level]. We had Wayne Purboo, who’s still the CEO today, as the CEO. And Raja was the CMO. Those two guys were the founders. I was brought in to do a bunch of different things, mostly around marketing and sales. That’s what I continue to do today.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media
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