A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It was the height of the bubble. The market was really crazy. It’s no longer possible, thankfully. But at that time, it was possible and a lot of crazy things were going on at that time. Did you blow through all those dollars and not make it?

David Stubenvoll: Pretty much. We had actually solid routing technologies that were also able to determine an organization’s hierarchy based out of the communication that was taking place. In the end, it was too early and the VCs were too impatient. This was the time when you’re being lambasted at your Board meeting for not spending $40,000 a month on PR.

Sramana Mitra: Then you moved on.

David Stubenvoll: I moved on and helped a friend out who had a little investment bank for a while. Then I ran Mergers and Acquisitions for Adobe.

Sramana Mitra: How long was that stint?

David Stubenvoll: About a year and a half. Then I became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Adobe doing an internal startup that was codenamed Kitty Hawk. Kitty Hawk was a marketing collateral automation system.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to it? Did it make it?

David Stubenvoll: That was the shame. Kitty Hawk did very well. It was a large-scale enterprise software system that did things like catalog and directions for use. We charged $100,000 for people to be in our beta. We had this one consumer products company that was able to do the directions for use with 3,000 consumer products in 37 different languages all off of a single template. That’s something very hard to do.

Kitty Hawk did quite well. However, when I ran Mergers and Acquisitions, we kept pushing towards an acquisition of Macromedia. When the Macromedia acquisition finally happened, a number of the seed projects were shut down including Kitty Hawk. Given the fact that it was enterprise software and something very different from the Macromedia focus, it made sense. I got it. I would do the exact same thing. That was unfortunate, but I do believe it was the right choice of the company.

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

David Stubenvoll: 2005. Then my partner in crime at Kitty Hawk and I were out of jobs. We were supposed to find something else to do at Adobe, but we decided to leave. This is where things come back. Looking at the experiences that we had at Gulp, Intuit, Freeworks, and Kitty Hawk, we decided we were just going to do something that we find interesting.

We didn’t have a particular plan in mind. By this point, we’ve each been successful enough that we weren’t dependent upon a paycheque. We simply wanted to work together. We defined a search pattern. Based on our prior experiences, we found that one of the more interesting things that we’ve come across were ideas that came out of other businesses. Even back at Gulp, there were tons of ideas floating around. At Intuit, QuickBooks grew out of Quicken. Payroll grew out of QuickBooks, and Kitty Hawk grew out of another project there.

We decided that the way to figure out what business to be in is to be in business first. We were going to start a business arbitrarily. We spent less than 30 minutes deciding what it was. If we couldn’t figure out how to support a daily Starbucks habit after three months, we would have to pivot. The theory was that if we can make a little bit of money in a short time, we can figure out how to make a bit more. The thing we jumped into was video blogging. Not knowing anything about video or blogging, we mashed together WordPress and, what was at that time, Slash Communication Server.

We created something called Blog Cheese. It was not my best marketing moment. We made it to do one-minute video blogs. It’s what you see on Instagram and Snapchat. We went through that and, very quickly, we realized that Slash Communications Server was not a piece of software that we were comfortable building a company on. We decided to write our own and kept going with Blog Cheese. At this point, MySpace was big. Facebook was barely a bleep. We decided to do video messaging for social media applications. It was a little widget that you can embed in your social media page.

That went nowhere as well. All along, we kept talking to people and going to trade shows and trying to find out what opportunities were out there. We were cognizant of the fact that what people say, what they mean, what they want, and what they need are not all the same things.

This segment is part 4 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll
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