A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did Gulp do?

David Stubenvoll: We were your very typical startup in that we wandered a little bit. We started out providing mutual fund information on the Internet. It blossomed into creating websites for mutual funds. We actually created a trading platform, and became one of the larger personal finance sites on the Internet. It was called Net Worth. We sold the entire business to Intuit, and Net Worth became Quicken.com.

Sramana Mitra: I see. That was a pretty major product for Intuit.

David Stubenvoll: This was the website – not Quicken itself. In the end, we brought the Internet foundation to Intuit. I had the great pleasure of working with Bill Campbell who is pretty legendary in Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about the company that you sold to Intuit. You said your fund invested in them. How much money did you raise? How did you go to market? Tell us a little bit about how you built that company? At what point did you become CEO? It sounds like you joined as CFO and became CEO.

David Stubenvoll: Just to give you a quick overview, we sold Gulp to Intuit and moved everyone from Pittsburgh to California. I ran corporate development for Intuit.

Sramana Mitra: That’s after the fact. I’m asking for details when you were doing Gulp.

David Stubenvoll: I understand that. I want to give you a quick overview so you can see how the Gulp story will relate into other stories. I did Corporate Development for Intuit and then launched the payroll business at Intuit. Then I left and started another company that we also sold to Intuit. When I joined Gulp, we were bootstrapped. We raised $1 million from Point Ventures. It was very much hand-to-mouth.

As CFO, I can’t tell you how many times I made payroll by the skin of my teeth. It was certainly one of those classic stories where thank goodness, we closed the deal because it was the only way we were going to make payroll and keep the lights on. This was also very early. It took us a while before we even had an Internet connection at the office. We would dial-in to CMU in order to get Internet connectivity.

Sramana Mitra: Who were you selling to at this point?

David Stubenvoll: At this point, we were selling to mutual fund companies. We were bringing mutual fund companies onto the web. We were building websites for them. We invented a few pieces of technology, which was cool. That enabled the mutual fund companies to manage pieces of their own website after we built it for them.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically doing contract development work. At what point does that switch into product?

David Stubenvoll: It wasn’t strict contract development because we ran the websites for them as well. It was more of a managed service. No one knew how to do that stuff back in 1993. Then we began creating the personal finance site, which was Net Worth. We always had this cornerstone where we would link in the mutual funds. As we were able to get market data, we turned it into a generalized personal finance site and began offering advertising space on Net Worth. That was the real product that we created.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll
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