A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You knew that you needed to move out. You didn’t know where to move out to.

Aviram Jenik: Exactly. It’s not that we had a brilliant idea at that time. We just thought, “Education is nice, but it’s not big enough. This new market that’s coming is huge.” Our engine was like a Java applet. They were little engines that you could give instructions to to do stuff over the Internet.

With the education software, we would use them to tell the engines what to show the students and how the course would look like. That fitted the Internet well. At that time, Internet had a limited bandwidth. There was not a lot of information that you could transfer over a dial-up connection.

But if you had our engine installed on your computer, you could send that engine some instructions and then there were a lot of amazing things you could do. That was before Java, ActiveX, and broadband.

Sramana Mitra: It was this file transfer kind of environment.

Aviram Jenik: Kind of. The key was to have our engines pre-installed because you couldn’t really install them over the Internet. They were too big. If you had them pre-installed, then there were a lot of things you could have done. In fact, we had two early competitors. One took it towards video. The other one took it to audio.

The audio one was a company called Vocal Tech. They basically invented VoIP. They started at the same time as us. They had the same idea, which was putting an engine on the client side and we could send something over IP and it’ll talk on the other side.

The video company was too early. It was the same idea of engines and transferring stuff. They could display videos over the iInternet which was pretty amazing, but it was too early. They couldn’t make the video fast and interesting enough for customers.

Sramana Mitra: Who were buying into your value proposition?

Aviram Jenik: Mostly, we worked with the manufacturers and some of the ISPs. They had two issues. How do we make our customers use our services more? There was actually a problem of getting the users to use the internet more. AOL was thinking of making the content rich so that users will use it more. They were using our engines to do fun stuff. The PC manufacturers wanted to sell more PCs.

The answer was, “If a Sony PC comes with a really interesting software that you can activate over the internet, then that’s an advantage of Sony over some other company.” As Sony, you turn on the computer and you can do all these amazing things which you can’t do on other computers. One of the most popular software at that time was full communication that included an answering machine.

You turn on your PC and you can send and receive fax, send and receive calls, or play a recording. The Internet was too slow to download that. You had to buy your PC with that software pre-installed. People would say, “If I buy a Sony computer, I can also use it as an answering machine.” The pain we were solving was how do we make content more rich and how do we make some of these PCs more useful. The key was to adapt the technology of these small engines to solve a pain.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik
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