A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? How big is this company? Where are you going from here? What does the market landscape look like?

David Stubenvoll: We’re 115 people. We’re north of $20 million in revenue. We introduced a number of new products. Up until last year, all we sold was Wowza streaming engine. We sold it in a number of different ways but that was our only product. Believe it or not, we have 19,000 customers worldwide. We deliver well over 350,000 hours of live content a day. That’s actually just on the transcoding side.

We have viewers consuming 15 million hours of live video every day. We are a significant part of the landscape. Our customers include 40% of content delivery networks and 70% of enterprise video platforms. We are used in about every use case from live sporting events to concerts. We are the foundation of Olympics streaming. Every camera that the Olympic Broadcasting Services uses go to Wowza before they get distributed. We’ve added 24/7 support. We’ve added maintenance support options and service level agreements. We’ve added Wowza streaming cloud. We’ve added our own mobile encoder with a software development kit.

Sramana Mitra: What does the competitive landscape look like now?

David Stubenvoll: In the typical Internet and video fashion, it’s a very cooperative situation where we power live streaming. We compete and work with Elemental and all these other people. From a direct competitive standpoint, because we are so broad-based and affect so many different type of industries and geographies, it really depends upon what market segment you’re talking about to determine who the competitive set is. We deal with a lot of competitive issues.

Sramana Mitra: Is there one or two that you particularly need to be worried about or are particularly tracking more closely than others?

David Stubenvoll: The ones I worry about are someone like an Amazon. So many of Amazon’s customers are in this place. We have a  good number of folks on Amazon Web Services. If you look at what they’ve done, you can say they’re going to try and kill me at some point.

Sramana Mitra: I have to agree with that.

David Stubenvoll: Since they’re sizeable, I worry about them. Are they competing with us today? Not really. Do I worry about them? Yes, I do.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great story. What do you want to do from here on? I know you have Summit as a venture capital partner. What does it look like at this point? Do you want to sell the company? What is the logical next step here?

David Stubenvoll: We’ve done a boatload of investments this year. Since the lawsuit was put to bed and we’ve freed up that capital, we’ve done a tremendous amount of investing. We have a lot more that we can do as well. We’re entering new markets. Wowza is in a unique position in that there are certain aspects in media and entertainment that we’re uniquely qualified to solve. We’re going to be investing in those areas as well.

Sramana Mitra: What’s an example of that?

David Stubenvoll: I’m stuck because the one we’re starting next week is the one that’s in my head at the moment. At the same time, I look at the position that we have. We have tremendous technology. We have the end-to-end technology from encoding, server-side transcoding, packaging, delivering, and play out. We’ve got a very large footprint of customers worldwide. I do look at other options to see if there’s another way to get to the next level.

As we talk to major companies out there, we’re raising the profile to have the more strategic conversation. It’s one of these weird things. As an M&A guy, I know the times when I was ridiculously overpaid for companies was when they didn’t want to sell. That was always the genesis behind Wowza. That was the mistake that we made at Gulp and at Freeworks. At Wowza, we built it to last. We built it to stay independent knowing full well that the financial value of the company, at some point, is going to be significantly less than the strategic value to someone else.

Are we in a position, when someone comes knocking and willing to overpay for the company, where I’ll gladly sell it to them? We get excited by this business. The purpose of Wowza is to help our customers thrive and to drive the streaming revolution. That’s the thing that gets Charlie and me excited. To a certain extent, whether we do it as an independent company or as part of something more interesting, it’s all about doing cool stuff profitably.

Sramana Mitra: It was nice talking to you. Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll
1 2 3 4 5 6 7