Before recording meetings was a button
This is a guest post by my dear friend, colleague, business partner, startup whisperer, technologist and a lifelong learner,
. For those new to or disconnected from the Des Moines startup ecosystem, Christian is easily the OG startup whisperer who convened a large number of individuals, inspired people like me to #givefirst to this community, conceived of and brought together what was once described as the ultimate ‘island of misfit toys.’I will address the story of StartupCity Des Moines more fully separately as this story stands on its own. Christian is the person who inspired me to launch a blog and so many stories, so I am particularly grateful that he accepted my invitation to tell the story of a startup he conceived of and invested in as a part of our StartupCity Des Moines initiative.
I present his words largely unedited but have provided brief commentary as blurbs.
Founder backstory
In the mid-2000s, I was busy rounding out the collaboration portfolio at Cisco. We had already built the IP telephony business via organic development and five acquisitions. We partnered with companies like Polycom on audio conference devices, and the video conferencing market was still nascent. While we were actively building what would eventually be known as Telepresence (video conferencing room systems), and before we acquired Webex, we were brainstorming what we could do with the data being communicated in these audio and video calls, pre-metaverse virtual worlds such as SecondLife, as well as asynchronous mediums like blogs and wikis. There was so much content, and context, being delivered in the form of verbal and written (slides) material, that we thought if we could capture it and decipher it, we could build an enterprise knowledge graph that could be mined by any number of internal systems to enhance productivity without adding tedious data entry to everyone’s job descriptions.
But this was the mid-2000s. Most meetings were still conducted ‘over the table’, not ‘over the wire’ (or you may have 80% of the people around the conference table with the remainder ‘on the bridge’). It would be less useful to only capture the 20% of content that went over the wire if the other 80% just floated away into the ether.
To the well of innovation
So, I started doing research into companies and researchers who were ‘mining’ live meetings in any way. My embedded team at the MIT Media lab struck out, as did the good folks at Stanford Media X. Luckily, I stumbled upon some old work done by Xerox PARC that was being maintained by the research teams there. For those of you who don’t know Xerox PARC (short for ‘Palo Alto Research Center’), they are the storied birthplace of personal computers (Alto), the graphical user interface now used in Windows and Macs, laser printing, Ethernet, and too many other innovations to count. They had developed a system that would capture the audio and any slides shared during meetings, differentiate between speakers, and parse the spoken text and written text on the slides so you could capture and search it later. Essentially, it was TIVO for live meetings. I was fascinated by the work and envisioned how I could splice it into the telephony, video, virtual world, and asynchronous collaboration mediums we had developed.
Assembling a company
Cisco ultimately passed on licensing the tech from Xerox, but I immediately thought of it when I created a new startup in 2010. I reached out to Xerox and agreed on licensing terms for their work to date. This was one of the peaks of the domain squatting era, so finding an unused domain name was challenging, but eventually I found that the domain Present.io was available and there was no active company using that name that I could find. Boom, we had a name! (I found out much later that there had been an earlier company by the same name that created unrelated technology that sold to Facebook for an undisclosed sum, which I am sure would have created big problems had we been more successful).
For engineering, Jason Funk agreed to work on the front and back-end software using the IP provided by Xerox, and I stopped by Fry’s Electronics on my way to Mineta San Jose Airport for half a dozen micro-PC boxes that we would use as reference platforms and early field trial units. My recollection of those early days is a bit hazy after the tornado of StartupCity, which was happening at the same time, but I recall Jason being frustrated at the quality of the code from Xerox and coming in one day to ‘apologize’ for just rewriting it from scratch over the weekend, as well as adding some remarkably clever provisioning mechanisms for enterprises to get the box on the network. Just amazing.
These micro-PCs and single board computers like the Raspberry Pi have kept the original spirit of innovation in computers alive over the past decade. In the hands of passionate developers such as Jason, these relatively inexpensive computers are expanded in unimaginable ways to support myriad technologies previously accessible only to advanced embedded system developers.
What we (mostly Jason, to be fair) created was a hybrid cloud/on premise system that would capture live and hybrid meetings for later use, as well as annotating them with a live/searchable transcript that could be leveraged with other content from around an enterprise, something currently available in Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Graph, but was still entirely novel in 2010. We found local early trial customers in enterprise and higher ed who were willing to kick the tires and provide us feedback in exchange for free service.
What went wrong
First and foremost, let me state that the engineering Jason did was brilliant. There was no fault of the product engineering other than the abundance of cables and janky reference platforms that we deployed. I had planned to source a custom appliance specifically for this to avoid the hydra cables seemingly emerging from everywhere on the box, integrated microphones, to streamline aesthetics, but that was slated for after we received feedback from the early deployments. Step 1, make it work. Step 2, make it pretty.
With the benefit of a dozen years or more of hindsight, the primary reason for Present.io’s failure to launch was attention, followed closely by undercapitalization. I must have told a hundred entrepreneurs that their startups needed to be priority 1-100 for them, because with the billions of people on the planet, there was statistical certainty that there were other people with similar ideas elsewhere in the world that were laser focused on the product execution and were well funded. Putting in the one-night-a-week-after-work amount of effort that many of these entrepreneurs could spare would not get the product built, or if it miraculously did, it would likely be less than competitive with these other contenders. I should have listened to my own advice, because while I worked hours every day on Present.io, I was also working with Tej to get StartupCity funded and furnished, interviewing startups for our initial cohort of rock stars, and trying to be a present father and husband for my family. Ultimately, when push came to shove, Present.io was the thing that got less attention than the others.
The proverb, "the shoemaker's son always goes barefoot", holds true in the startup world. When attention is divided amongst multiple endeavors, the startup usually suffers. Angel and venture investors will frequently pass on investing in a company because the founders have multiple initiatives or run the startup as a side gig.
The other thing about cloud and hardware startups is there was/is a fair bit of out of pocket spend (burn rate) to keep it going. While I’d done well at Cisco, funding StartupCity and Present.io meant that I was burning through my family savings at an unsustainable rate. I reached out to my network of venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, some of which were initially interested, but followed by the inevitable ‘When would you move to Silicon Valley?’ question. The market was emerging from the hangover of the 2008 financial crash and there were more startups looking for funding than VC funds available, so they were being deliberate in where they deployed capital and didn’t have to make more headaches for themselves by having portfolio companies in a non-direct-flight location.
The final thing that we learned from the enterprise and higher-education early field trial customers was that people REALLY didn’t like the idea that they were being recorded in meetings, and would try to yank the power cord so they wouldn’t be on the record for saying “I can’t believe John didn’t show up again, he is such a slacker!”. Unfortunately, the power cord controlled the signal being passed to the projector in the meeting so that created customer satisfaction issues. I think how Microsoft and others have solved this with a software ‘record’ button and live transcription would have been the eventual destination for us, but we didn’t get that far before I ran out of the financial runway to sustain the company.
The End
Ultimately, I held a wake for the company at StartupCity (the counterpoint to the rather notorious launch parties we would hold for startups at the city) where we discussed the lessons learned so others could benefit from the experiences of others and not keep tripping over the same rocks. It was important to declare it dead and not have zombie startups that seemingly wander around and never achieve escape velocity.
Present.io was one of the nine companies in the StartupCity portfolio and saw its products tested by midsize and corporate prospects. As this Substack chronicles the stories of technology companies across the state, it remains important to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons persist for the advantage of future founders. I suppose in that spirit of lessons learned, an original motivation of StartupCity Des Moines lives on.
I am a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative and the Iowa Startup Collective. Each writer is independent and publishes via Substack across Iowa.