Board of Directors Presentation 2007Q1 – Part 1/3

Presentation to the

Board of Directors

of

mVisible Technologies, Inc.

 

 

Myk Willis

Founder, CTO, EVP Products

2 Feb 2007

 

[Note: this is based on the original presentation script, and not an actual transcript. Also note that some confidential information has been excised where necessary by contract.]

First of all, I’d like to welcome everyone to the first really formal board of directors meeting for mVisible Technologies, Inc. I guess it’s still not really all that formal, but this is the first time I remember wearing shoes at a director’s meeting, so I guess we’re moving more in that direction. Quite a few more lawyers here than I remember, too…

Let me start by saying that it is truly an honor and a privilege to be addressing my fellow board members, my fellow shareholders, and my friends (some of you are all three), all of us compatriots and companions on this crazy journey into the uncharted waters where the mobile industry meets the internet.

As I sat staring at Microsoft Word last night, trying to figure out how to segue from here into the meat of my soon-to-be-written presentation, an email dropped into my inbox announcing IDC’s estimate that over 1 billion mobile phones were sold last year alone. Holy crap. That’s a lot of ringtones!

Unfortunately, that didn’t make for a very good segue, so I’ll have to engage the abrupt gear-shift method instead, before I run out of time.

In preparation for this meeting, in true corporate America style, I whipped out PowerPoint and started building the scaffolding for my presentation. The handy little outline view on the left side makes it really easy to craft a perfectly balanced presentation – the intro slide, the agenda slide, the 3-5 slides for each item on the agenda, the summary – in about 5 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to simply fill in the bullet items at your leisure (for example, in the backseat of Bill’s car on the way to the meeting).

You may note that we’re still on the intro slide, and so you may be quietly wondering to yourself, if not quite concerned about the matter, precisely how many items are there on said agenda slide to follow?

Let’s cut to the chase. I’m the founder of mVisible, so I get to talk about the Vision (capital ‘V’) of the company. I’m the chief technology officer, also, so I’m going to spend some time talking about the state of the technology we’ve been growing. Finally, I’m responsible for Products, so I’m going to talk about our product management, development, and marketing activities.

Now might be an appropriate time to point out that mVisible doesn’t have a Vision statement, nor for that matter do we have a Mission statement. If you vaguely remember seeing some such thing in a document resembling a business plan for mVisible that may or may not have been distributed prior to our recent Series A funding round, well, I’m sorry to report that you must be mistaken, because we don’t have a business plan either.

So this part of the slide deck should go pretty quick, right?

The truth is, we do have a vision (and a mission, and a mantra), but instead of being some suitable-for-framing holy words that we mount above all of our desks (and put at the beginning of our PowerPoint presentations), our vision is a living being; an amorphous, low-frequency life form that lives inside us and uses us, the host being, to shows facets of itself from time to time; in late-night emails from conferences; in spontaneous comments to reporters or analysts; in job interviews; at the bar of the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, CO; in the products we build.

I’ve collected an assortment of mission- and vision-like emissions from my email Sent folder that will hopefully prove useful to show what we’re about. I’ll warn you in advance that I plan to spend a fair amount of time on this topic, because it’s extremely important to our success as a company.

“Myxer is a startup company founded with the intent of revolutionizing the manner in which people use technology for personal communication. Myxer is focused on bringing powerful and unique capabilities to the mass-market through existing wireless devices.”

10/1/2004

 

So even at the very beginning, in fact before the very beginning, we can see that our core beliefs (and even our trademark rights to the Myxer name!) were well-established.

 

“[Our mission is] to develop innovative enabling technologies and products that empower individuals through mobile phone technologies.”

10/1/2004

 

Innovate, enable, empower: these concepts were baked in from the very beginning of our company, and they continue to be what drives what we do.

 

“We’re working to fulfill the promise of the mobile phone as the first truly personal computer.”

11/10/2005

 

I used to hammer on that truly personal computer theme a lot, but it might have lost some of its luster after being co-opted by H-P’s new “the computer is personal again” ad campaign. Because that’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. The idea I’ve always tried to conjure up with that phrase is that what we’ve previously called personal computers are anything but. Sitting at a desk in a back room of your house, staring at a bulky computer screen – is that personal? The mobile phone should not be treated as a shrunken-head version of an IBM PC. It is a conduit that has the potential to enable communication and entertainment in a very personal way. But to reach that potential to be truly personal, we – as an industry, as a company, as individuals – have to rethink every application and try to unlearn a lot of how we did things when the computer was on a desktop.

Obviously, this is a very high level idea, which is why it’s in the Vision part of the presentation and not the “features coming soon” part later.

 

“We have a vision of a mobile internet in which everyone is empowered to use, produce, share, market, and sell content and services unique to the mobile platform, and we’re creating valuable products in pursuit of that vision.“

11/10/2005

 

Now this is something that’s a lot more concrete and I think we can all appreciate how we’re making dramatic progress on this front. The fact of the matter is, we are delivering on this vision every single day, when thousands of bands use our products to share or sell their content through Myxer.

 

“I have visions of cheeseburgers dancing in my head.”

ScottK, 7/4/2005

 

Now, I just had to use this quote from ScottK, from an email in which he was expressing glee (I think) upon some milestone achievement or another. I still have no idea what this means, but it’s obviously a vision, right?

 

“everything’s mobile”

1/7/2006

 

This is what Kawasaki-San would probably refer to as a mantra. It’s a tight little phrase that is meant to be repeated in a barely audible, semi-conscious manner, several times a day, to help maintain focus on what’s important to our company. The MyxerMagic product feature, which we’ll speak about later, is a direct bloodline descendent and concrete incarnation of this mantra, and many more offspring are in the works.

 

“Myxer is about […] leveraging the respective strengths of the internet and the mobile phone to make digital content easily discoverable and accessible anywhere you are”

1/25/07

 

This is a very recent glimpse of our vision in which you can see our product bias toward digital content leaking through. While perhaps this statement would be too limiting for a traditional Vision statement at another company, the fact that we are content to allow our vision to live and breathe means we can embrace it fully without losing our understanding of larger goals waiting to be achieved after this one is accomplished.

 

Now, before jumping into my next topic, technology, I do want to talk very briefly about the industries we’re involved with. We like to think that we’re positioned at the center of three more or less distinct industries:

The Mobile Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Music Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Internet – what a beautiful mess!

 

While the mobile industry struggles under the sheer weight of the carriers;

While the music industry struggles with how to stay relevant in a world where musicians can get their digital content to their fans without requiring the distribution that labels have historically provided;

The web continues to produce a beautiful, if fractured and unpredictable, steady stream of innovation, built on an open network. Today’s web applications are flourishing because of the ‘openness’ of web 2.0, and we’re right in there. It’s a great time to be writing software for the web, there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of expectations.

…continued in part 2…