Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 2)

Martin Manniche: In a very short period of time, I figured out that I really liked understanding the technology and the software. I picked it off fairly quickly. When I was out delivering these products, every time I would sell them something. I started, together with my brother, a component distribution company for distributing memory, hard drives, and monitors.

My brother ran his distribution company, but when his customers needed printers or other equipments, my organization could supply that. We grew fairly well. From that company, we transitioned. Multimedia was just starting. There was a company called Creative Labs that owns that market. As we know the PC market, I thought of building a multimedia kit where we give the retailers their own brand. We thought that the Creative products were very hard to set up.

We focused on building a brand experience for the retailers where we can put all the different peripherals. Sometimes even the Creative Labs sound card was in the device, but we bundled it all together. That company grew to be the leading distributor in this field fairly quickly. We worked with several companies that also built chips. That’s where I got my passion for architecting chipsets. I worked with two very big Korean companies that built these chipsets.

I actually managed to get distribution rights in Scandinavia for both of them, which was a little awkward because they were direct competition. I am still friends with the executive teams even though those companies were no longer there. In a very short period of time, I drove their roadmap. I forced them to say yes. I said, “I understand you want to do this hardware technology but I do believe that hardware will go away. We should do it in software.”

The company was sold. We moved into another company where we focused on taking that knowledge and build software stacks for multimedia. At that time, broadband is not what you have today. We were even discussing to do broadband over satellite, which was weird. We built chipset hardware that could do this. That came to the foundation of saying, “Why are we not combining that knowledge with the knowledge that the Internet will drive, what I call, over-the-top content. I architected and built the first connected consumer product which was a DVD player that could go on the Internet.

The first service we had was web radio. That company generated 120 innovation awards over three years. On our hardware recorder, we put an Ethernet connection so we could download content to the hard disk. We were the first DivX-certified player in the world and then also worked on a high-definition player. That was a quite successful journey. A majority of what I’ve done, I’ve done with my brother. My brother and me have gone through a journey of building companies together.

Sramana Mitra: How far did this one go?

Martin Manniche: I sold it to Cisco Systems. My brother and I owned 93% of the shares at that time. It was a good exit for us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems
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