The View From Silicon Beach

The Santa Barbara Techology Family Tree (1998 - 2009)

2009-10-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

It would be interesting to try to calculate the total technology knowledge base that has been developed here in Santa Barbara. Those of us in the local technology industry have been the beneficiaries of knowledge gained from our colleagues who, in turn, learned from their colleagues in other companies. Maybe we should call it the "conservation of local technology knowledge." Or maybe it's the preservation of software heritage? The point is that we all have roots. Even when successful companies grow up and leave town, they always leave behind a few talented folks who refused to leave Santa Barbara and who then join other existing companies or start their own. And when companies fail, those employees often learned a lot of valuable lessons that they take with them to their next company here in town. Much of the knowledge gained stays here in Santa Barbara.

In my experience over the past ten years, I have witnessed first-hand the valuable institutional knowledge and know-how that was passed from one company to another. At CallWave, for example, we benefitted greatly from the collapse of PulsePoint / Digital Sound (which became part of Unisys). We recruited more than twenty engineers from that company as it wound its Santa Barbara operations down. Those engineers had extremely valuable experience in digital signal processing, database management, and telephony -- which was precisely what we needed at CallWave. Our new CallWave engineers had trained in a TQM environment at Pulsepoint and had learned to design and create software for some of the largest telephone companies in the country. Those companies (GTE, Pacific Bell, etc.) required software and equipment that could perform at what they call "5 Nines" of reliability. 5 Nines refers to 99.999% uptime, or roughly only 5 minutes of down time PER YEAR! That expertise enabled us to create an extremely robust Internet 'soft-switch' platform that managed billions and billions of phone calls and served millions of customers. That platform also generated hundreds of millions in revenue.

Fast foward 8 years later . . . As CallWave began to change its business model and shrink its local presence, several new companies formed that were able to take advantage of some great engineering and marketing talent that had now gained valuable new skills. At it's peak, CallWave had nearly 50 engineers. Now, those engineers are contributing their valuable skills at Cogi, RingRevenue, Appfolio, Kaseya, Citrix, Microsoft's AdECN division in Carpinteria and other local emerging companies. We are very proud to have the former VP of Engineering from CallWave, Dave Giannini, leading our team of engineers at Cogi. Colin Kelley, the former CTO at CallWave, is now doing great things at RingRevenue, where he is joined by three other CallWave alumni, including Jason Spievak, Rob Duva, and Bob Smith.

We are using the latest techniques in software development here at Cogi and combining that with all of the great knowledge gained from our previous lives. When I hear Venture Capitalists say that they only back 2nd or 3rd time entrepreneurs, I now fully understand why.

I am sure I am missing some very important companies in my discussion above. For example, I know Software.com also spawned a few companies, like Sonos, for example. We've also had some innovative advertising companies started here like Commission Junction, ValueClick and Fastclick. Some of the other early technology companies in town included Comdesign, Connected Systems, and D2 technologies. Please chime in with a comment about other companies I am forgetting and how they are connected to the Santa Barbara technogy ecosystem or family tree.

A quick history of Cogi

2009-10-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

Cogi was started in 2007 by Santa Barbara entrepreneurs, Bob Dolan, Mark Cromack and Palmer Jackson. Bob was the founding CEO of CallWave, a local Internet Telephony company that went public in 2004. Mark Cromack was a co-founder of another local telephony company, CrystalVoice, that was acquired by Global IP Solutions in 2007. Palmer was a seed investor and early employee at CallWave and had worked with Bob for years.

We have to give credit to Bob for coming up with the original idea. What was that idea? Well, if you know Bob at all, you know that he's constantly on the phone and even he would admit he's got a bit of ADD (as do all 3 of us). Bob is one of those people who sees problems and wonders about how to fix them, while the rest of us just deal with those problems and wouldn't even think of trying to solve them.

So here's the problem that Bob felt was not being addressed: how do you accurately capture the valuable content within our day to day conversations and meetings? We have become accustomed to having a searchable archive of our important email communications and our important documents, but we have no way of recovering the valuable, fleeting insights that often come up when we talk to eachother -- either in person or on the phone. We try to take notes, but that can present two problems -- first, our notes are often illegible, and second, we have to take our focus off of the conversation for a moment to write notes. With our backgrounds in telephony and Internet, we began to think of ways to solve this problem.

Early on we were fortunate to work with a couple of very talented marketing folks at Santa Barbara's own Ideocore. Brett Posten and Robert TenEyck helped develop the name Cogi (a contraction of the phrase 'Cogent Idea.' ) Brett and Robert also helped us develop our 'Core Idea.' We decided that the Core Idea for Cogi is as follows: Cogi helps you capture your important conversations and meetings so you can review the content, search it, and share it with others.

Around that time there was a lot of buzz around Voicemail-to-text services such as PhoneTag and Grand Central -- even CallWave had developed a so-called 'gist' service that would send you a text message of your voicemail message. However, we used to joke that voicemail was so 1990s and, after all, THAT'S THE CALL YOU MISSED!

What if you could have a written transcript of a critical conversation you had with a client, your boss, a prospective customer, your lawyer, your doctor? Wouldn't that be a lot more valuable than a transcript of a voice-mail message (Hey, Bob, call me back)? YES!

So, Cogi was born. Two years later, we have a real service that does exactly what we talked about some two and a half years ago and we have customers using the service every day.

In my next post, I will detail the features of Cogi and talk about the process of how we developed them. Of course, you can always get a free 30 day trial of Cogi by visiting our site. Probably the easiest way to understand how our service works is to watch our demo here.

Reflections from our experience at VentureNet LA on 10/7/09

2009-10-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday we headed down to Costa Mesa to participate in VentureNet LA. Cogi and 12 other companies were selected as capital preseenters. I only learned on Wednesday that the 13 companies were selected out of a total group of more than 100 startup companies in Southern California. There were about 300 attendees at the conference and the composition seemed to be about one third entrepreneurs, one third Angel investors and VCs and one third vendors and/or professional services. The event was held at the Westin Costa Mesa.

First of all, I have to thank the good folks at the Technology Council of Southern California as they did a great job on the conference. I watched all 13 of the company presentations and, for the most part, they were concise and focused. Each presenter was limited to 10 minutes in total. I will list all 13 of the presenting companies below. But I thought I would give some quick reflections on what I saw.

The winner of the Best In Show award was RightSignature. As a Santa Barbara company, we were proud to see some recognition for another Santa Barbara company (though, of course, we would have preferred to have won)! Daryl Bernstein did a great job on the RightSignature presentation. This company provides a way for individuals to sign documents online using your mouse! But in addition to that, they have clearly thought through the document signing process and how to accomplish something complicated via the Web.

I was particularly impressed with Cyber Rain -- a great new way to track and control your home sprinkler system. It ties into weather forecasts on the web and reduces or increases your watering based on the weather. I can't tell you how many times I have forgotten to turn off the water when it starts raining! Which reminds me, I need to do that tonight!

Serial entrepreneur, Will Schroter presented Affordit.com, which was also an interesting new idea. They plan to enable down-market consumers to purchase expensive items on credit using kind of a lay-away type plan with direct ACH access to these customers' bank accounts.

I was particularly proud of Cogi CEO, Mark Cromack, who did a great job on the Cogi presentation. Though I may be biased, it seemed that everybody in the room was particularly focused on the Cogi presentation -- perhaps because they could all identify with the problem we are solving -- or maybe because of the cool flash demo we used to start our presentation.

After the afternoon presentations, there was a panel discussion by several local VCs, including Jin Andelman of Rincon Ventures, here in Santa Barbara. The panel only mentioned 3 companies speicifically in their discussion: Cogi, Affordit, and TrueCar. Jim Andelman (thank you, Jim), mentioned that he was impressed with the relevant background of the Cogi team as both CallWave and CrystalVoice are examples of successful Internet / Telephony companies.

The keynote presentation by Zorik Gordon of Reach Local was also very impressive. I am going to try to get a copy of his presentation and post it here. Zorik spoke about current trends in Internet marketing, social networking and the Internet in general. Fascinating stuff!

All in all, I came away from the conference feeling enthusiastic about the state of American entrepreneurship and, more specifically, entrepreneurship in Southern California. All of the presenting CEOs were impressive in their own ways. If I could, I would have made small investments in nearly every company.

Here is the complete list of presenting companies:

Ad.ly Inc.

Affordit

Cogi, Inc.

Cyber-Rain

ExpenseBay

FlipGloss Media, Inc.

RightSignature

SharesPost

Social Approach

TrueCar

Viewdle

YouMail

Zadspace, Inc.