Jud Bowman: Founder at 18, Went From .COM bust to Unicorn and Much, Much More!
00:00:03 - Jud Bowman
We were doing a deal to be the search engine for the Olympics. NBC Olympics, I remember. And so we were discussing terms and they said, you know, this could be a $500,000 deal. And I'm thinking, wow, this is going to be our first significant revenue contract. And when they sent over, when we sent over the deal terms, they said, no, you pay us 500,000 for the right to be the search engine. I think that's when I started to realize the Internet economics weren't really adding
Announcer - welcome to Triangle Tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to the exit and all the lessons in between. With an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Tweener Talks is produced by Earfluence. Now here is your host, serial founder and General Partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo.
00:00:55 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to this episode of Triangle Tweener Talks featuring Judd Bowman. So far on the Tweener Talks podcast we have released 12 triangle based founder interviews. None of them has had as many ups and downs as the story we're going to hear from Judd and also his downs are lower and his ups are bigger than probably anyone we've talked to. Judd was 18 when he decided to prefer going to college and become an entrepreneur. He started Pinpoint when he was 18 and then this in this interview we're going to hear how he went from Pinpoint to Motricity. A long journey there and that's an important one for the Triangle because a lot happened there. Then he went, then he started Appia and that became Digital Turbine. And then finally we're learning about his current company, Sift. This episode's brought to you by our sponsors, Whitley Recruiting Partners Whitley Recruiting Partners specializes in recruiting top tech talent for growth stage startups in the Triangle. They target industry specific entrepreneurial employees who drive immediate results through a fast, accurate and scalable recruiting process. Aligned Technology Group Unlock the power of the cloud with Aligned Technology Group's Free Catalyst Program. As an AWS Advanced Tier Consulting partner, they specialize in cost optimization, security assessments and tailored cloud strategies for startups and SMBs. Let ATG help you maximize your cloud investment and navigate your AWS journey with ease. Bank of America Their transformative technology group helps game changing tech businesses and founders realize their boldest ambitions across a wide range of technology sectors. Eisner Amper, Formerly hpg, one of the world's largest business consulting firms with a dedicated technology practice offering outsourcing, accounting, tax and advisory services. Eisner Ampere's experienced professionals serve more than 2,000 technology companies from early stage startups all the way to public enterprises. Discover how Eisner Amper stage specific solutions and industry expertise can help you achieve your milestones. From startup international expansion, M and A to IPO. Eisneramper.com Tech Robinson Bradshaw they are a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Smashing Boxes, a Durham based design centric digital transformation company. And special thanks to our friends at earfluence. This podcast would not be possible without their awesome partnership. And now without further delay, here is my interview with Jed Bowman. Buckle up everybody. It is going to be a bumpy ride. Hey Jud, thanks for coming on the podcast today.
00:03:29 - Jud Bowman
Hey Scott. Glad to be here.
00:03:32 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I always give you our time because when I first met you, you were like 18, 17, 16, somewhere in there you were like, in my mind you're always a high schooler. Obviously you're all grown up now. But, you know, it was helpful to me because I was always like one of the youngest entrepreneurs in the Triangle. And then to meet someone younger than me, that felt good to, you know, not be the youngest anymore. That I want to kind of pick on the cliche jokes of like, do you guys have beer Fridays and you can't drink and how do you rent a car? All those kind of fun, fun stories.
00:04:03 - Jud Bowman
Totally.
00:04:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. But let's jump into that. You are unique in that you got at this pretty early. But are you from North Carolina? Actually don't know the answer to this one.
00:04:12 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, I'm originally from North Carolina. I was born in Greenville, Eastern North Carolina.
00:04:16 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
00:04:16 - Jud Bowman
That's where my dad lives.
00:04:17 - Scot Wingo
Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. And then you found your way in this neck of the woods through the School of Science and Math, right? Yeah. So you're in Greenville. When did you know you were going to be one of the hip kids to do what we currently call stim?
00:04:33 - Jud Bowman
I'm not still trying to be hip, but I think so. My parents got divorced when I was like 5 years old, so moved with mom to Raleigh and kind of grew up in Raleigh and went to the Raleigh schools. Then I had the chance to get a science in math.
00:04:47 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. And is that a. At that point in time, was that something you had to kind of apply to or they kind of discovered you and asked you to apply? How does that work?
00:04:56 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, it's kind of crazy too. Recently it's been ranked like the best public high school in the Country. So I feel so lucky I got the chance to go there. But yeah, you had to apply. It was super competitive back then. I think it's probably even more competitive now.
00:05:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And just so people know, it's kind of like a magnet. These are my words. It's probably not the right words, but it's like a magnet for top certain percentage of folks in. In the sciences and maths. And there's two locations. Right. Isn't there one out west as well?
00:05:23 - Jud Bowman
That's right. They just opened a second campus in Morganton, which is. Which is really beautiful closer to the mountains. But I went to the one in Durham.
00:05:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Is it at the current location? It's always been there.
00:05:32 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. The old Watts Hospital.
00:05:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. It's always fun when they convert old hospitals into things. Amazon first headquarters was in this really creepy old hospital up on a hill. Just kind of. There's always stories about it being haunted and stuff.
00:05:44 - Jud Bowman
Right. The one that they just opened in Morganton too, is where the school for the deaf is.
00:05:49 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Yeah. Got to reuse those structures.
00:05:52 - Jud Bowman
Okay.
00:05:52 - Scot Wingo
So you go to this and suddenly you're surrounded by the, you know, the brightest folks from across the state. When did you decide to kind of go down both kind of the computer and. Or entrepreneurial path?
00:06:05 - Jud Bowman
So I was there from 97 to 99. So think back to what was going in that. It was the Internet. The Internet mania. The dot com boom was in full swing. So I think it was probably hard not to be caught up in that a little bit.
00:06:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So then you. Did they have classes on. I know today they have a really big. A lot of the alums and I know Joe Colopy is big on this. There's a big entrepreneurial push there back then. Did they have an entrepreneurial thing at all?
00:06:33 - Jud Bowman
Not at all.
00:06:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:06:34 - Jud Bowman
So, you know, this is a long time ago, but they didn't even have Internet on campus, believe it or not.
00:06:39 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. So then did you take a programming class or how did you get into program the computer side of things? Had you already picked that up?
00:06:51 - Jud Bowman
So the thing is, I don't actually know how to code. ChatGPT has been a lifesaver, so I'm probably more technical today than I ever was. I think what's cool about science and math is it brings in these amazing kids from all over the state. They take at least one from every county. It's like applying to college. And when I was after I'd gotten this entrepreneurial bug and was starting to work on this project, I Recruited a co founder from the school, Taylor Brockman. He was from Shelby, North Carolina.
00:07:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:07:16 - Jud Bowman
So he was the coding wizard. Yeah, I was more like the product guy.
00:07:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. So you had this idea, what was your. So you're at the School of Science and math, you're what, 16?
00:07:27 - Jud Bowman
16.
00:07:28 - Scot Wingo
Yep. And you have an idea, you're going to start a company. And what was the company? I.
00:07:33 - Jud Bowman
So I had gone to a camp up at MIT the summer before senior year and that's probably where it really hatched. And I came back for senior year, like I'm going to do an Internet startup. I have to do this. And the idea was pretty terrible. We were going to build a search engine. So it's kind of like today. What's the hottest thing? ChatGPT. AI. Back then, Google was a project just coming out of Stanford and so search was one of the hottest spaces. And so we had this idea. We're going to build a search engine.
00:07:59 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I'm counter programmed on that because I think sometimes Google proved this. Like sometimes when Google came out, everyone thought search was solved because we had Altavista and Dogpile and all these different things. Goto.com, which ultimately bought one of my companies. So there's like 10 search engines. Well understood. Ask Jeeves. Remember all this? And then everyone looked at Google and like search has been solved. These guys are crazy. And turns out there's always a way to make things better. So you came up with this idea and the name was.
00:08:34 - Jud Bowman
No one knows this part. The original name was wherethehell.com so that was our. No one knows that.
00:08:39 - Scot Wingo
Except Taylor, edgy teenager.
00:08:42 - Jud Bowman
We'd managed to register that domain and we thought we were super cool. I don't think we were initially thinking company too. This is just a project in the dorm room. And the thing that we were inspired from, you mentioned some of the names like goto.com was going pretty strong. We were totally aware of them. Dogpile. Do you remember MetaCrawler, which was owned by Gotonet? Gosh, I haven't thought of some of these names in years and years. But we were kind of inspired by MetaCrawler. So the original. Wherethehell.com was a MetaCrawler, we were indexing and sort of combining the results from half a dozen of the engines.
00:09:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So in our world of Internet, meta on top of something means it then goes and runs searches across other things, rolls them back up. The one that's really popular is Meta reviews. Is that right? Yeah, it still exists. And There's a couple of these meta. Meta things out there. A lot of the search, the travel engines, like Expedia is basically a meta and auction rover.
00:09:36 - Jud Bowman
One of your companies, right, was a meta crawler for auction results?
00:09:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, back in the day. Cool. And then when did you guys. So you're. You're starting where in the hell? Or where the hell? Where the hell? Where the hell?
00:09:47 - Jud Bowman
I don't have the domain name anymore.
00:09:49 - Scot Wingo
That would have been kind of fun. What did the logo look like? Was there like coming out of hell or something?
00:09:53 - Jud Bowman
Probably something like that. Some demon horns kind of. I don't know who had that.
00:09:57 - Scot Wingo
Super fun kind of. It's fun to look back on that stuff and be like, what was I thinking?
00:10:01 - Jud Bowman
What was I thinking? Yeah, well, but I think that, you know, along the way too, I had, I had gotten into stock investing as a young kid thanks to my grandmother. And so as you can probably imagine, you know, probably just like the kids that trade crypto these days, I was trading all these dot com companies and I got kind of entranced with this company called Ink. To me, I don't know if you even remember that one. It was like a company that also built a search engine and they had this idea of licensing it to other people. And so somewhere along the way of building the meta crawler and having this silly name wherethehell.com, and senior year, we're halfway through senior year and I thought, hey, maybe we could actually build a company. And so I think the one that really inspired us was Ink to me. And we're like, is there some twist on that that we could turn into a business?
00:10:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, so senior year in high school, did you graduate?
00:10:49 - Jud Bowman
I did graduate. Okay. Did the whole college, you know, process everything, you know? Yeah, I remember applying for college and.
00:10:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, so you apply for college and you've got this idea. Then what'd you decide to do? Did you decide where'd you get into school? And where'd you. What, what did you decide to do?
00:11:04 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, I applied to five schools. I applied to, let's see, Duke, mit, Princeton, Harvard and Stanford. And I got into mit, Duke and Stanford, but I got waitlisted at Harvard. And that actually might have been one of the most important things because I think I had always sort of put Harvard on a pedestal. I thought, I'm going to Harvard. And when I got wait listed, it was sort of like, maybe I'm going to screw. Forget college. Right. I think that's where that bug first got in my head. Even Though I think in reality Stanford might have been the best place, which is where I ended up choosing to go.
00:11:39 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, cool. So you sign up for Stanford. Did you move out to Palo Alto and everything?
00:11:45 - Jud Bowman
No, not initially. Eventually, yes, but not initially. So what time is this? It's about. You get your college letters in March. So kind of the same week I got wait listed at Harvard, but I got into Stanford. I had to decide. I even got a scholarship, I think at Stanford. So I chose Stanford and obviously being into the startup and dot com scene, it made a lot of sense. I was excited about that. But I think that's when I put the idea of turning this where the hell.com into a business a lot more seriously. And Taylor and I decided to continue the project into the summer.
00:12:19 - Scot Wingo
Got it. Okay. So you accepted your Stanford and then you decide, well, let's just do this thing over the summer.
00:12:24 - Jud Bowman
Let's just do this thing over the summer. We moved into an old farmhouse which is probably covered up by South Point Mall or some neighborhood now. It was over in that part of Durham.
00:12:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. And then you change the name. Thank goodness.
00:12:37 - Jud Bowman
To Intertect. Another surprise. I know you were waiting for pinpoints. Yes, I was.
00:12:43 - Scot Wingo
I know pinpoints in here somewhere.
00:12:45 - Jud Bowman
The original idea, we were like, okay, we got to grow up. And we were inspired by ink to me. And we came up with this, what I look back on as sort of a terrible name, Intertect. And I'm not saying Intertech. It was the combination of Internet and architecture, which I thought was great. And the dot com was available, but nobody could say it. So anytime we said it, they thought we were saying inner tech, which is awfully generic. But that was the name we went with.
00:13:09 - Scot Wingo
Important lesson to founders, if you have a company name, say it to someone and get them to spell it back to you. And if they can't do it after four tries, then it's a terrible name. You may want to.
00:13:17 - Jud Bowman
I'm actually really bad, I think, at coming up with company names.
00:13:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, branding is hard. Yeah. Okay. So the idea is you're going to build this search engine and then you're going to go have people rebrand, you're going to kind of private label it.
00:13:31 - Jud Bowman
We're going to private label. And the twist was like Inc to me, I think powered the search for Yahoo and a few of the other big portals at the time. And then there was Google, which had now started to turn into a company itself. But I think the thing that we thought we could do was be the search Engine for all the little sites that used to be called vertical sites. So we were thinking, you know, golf.com, something like that, and we would power these thousands of other sites with a search engine.
00:13:53 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:13:54 - Jud Bowman
And that idea, at least at the time seemed good enough that by the end of the summer we'd gotten a term sheet to raise some venture capital, which just blew us away. Here are these two 18 year old kids and we got, I think multiple term sheets from different investor and angel groups around here.
00:14:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. How did that happen? Did they find you or you guys went out looking for capital?
00:14:13 - Jud Bowman
I'm getting so old. I don't even remember entirely though. I think I had built a business plan. Back in the day. You had to build a 60 page business plan and there wasn't chatgpt to draft this thing. So I had drafted up a 60 page business plan with our intertech logo smack on the center of it. And actually, yeah, I think I downloaded a list of venture capital and angel firms and I would have mailed or FedExed this to all of them across the country.
00:14:38 - Scot Wingo
All right, so you sent out a FedEx to business plan. Wow. Old school.
00:14:41 - Jud Bowman
Old school.
00:14:42 - Scot Wingo
I remember the business plans. You'd realize you'd spent three days worrying about if it was 1999, you know, the 2004 revenue and you're like, wait a minute, like it's like so ridiculous.
00:14:56 - Jud Bowman
And like, you know, but nobody does that anymore. I mean, I don't think. When's the last time you saw a business plan? I, I don't even know the last time I saw a two page exec summary, which was like one of the things for a while there. It's all the 10 to 20 slide decks these days.
00:15:07 - Scot Wingo
It's a deck. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:08 - Jud Bowman
I still have though, your old AuctionRover.com business plan. I don't know how I got it. Someone gave me an original and I have it, you know, back at.
00:15:15 - Scot Wingo
Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:17 - Jud Bowman
So that would have been one of the ones I would have used for inspiration.
00:15:19 - Scot Wingo
You have to send a scan and we can, we can mock that relentlessly. The yeah in there. You would like get a little wild and be like, put your wildest aspirations like, you know, when we're a verb. You know, being a verb was big back then. We're like, I remember that was probably part of the plan. We're like, we're going to make this a verb.
00:15:35 - Jud Bowman
We're going to intertect that it doesn't work. See, my names are terrible.
00:15:41 - Scot Wingo
Ours was like, you Know, are you roving? So we were going to try to make Rovin like a, you know, googling kind of thing that did not end up that way. So you sent out all these things and you got some answers back. And were there firms outside the area or was it mostly local firms that were interested?
00:15:56 - Jud Bowman
I think I did hear from. There are two firms that I remember outside the area. It was a firm called Draper Atlantic. I don't know if you remember that.
00:16:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, they invested in Oxmur.
00:16:07 - Jud Bowman
Okay. That's probably where I got the business plan then, you know, So I would have met with those guys.
00:16:12 - Scot Wingo
Dan Rua.
00:16:12 - Jud Bowman
Dan Rua, that's right. Holy cow. And Nora Mosley Partners and Gray Ventures down in Atlanta.
00:16:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. But locally, still going strong.
00:16:23 - Jud Bowman
Bernie Gray. Exactly. Bernie and Alex. I also heard from at the time, the local ones here. I would have talked with like Aurora and Inner south, but I think we were too young, too early stage for all those guys, really, at least initially. And so. But we also were connected with an angel group. And I don't remember exactly who made the introduction, but it was Tri State Investment Group. Tig.
00:16:45 - Scot Wingo
Yep. Yeah. So you did Tig. I think it was a Triangle Investment group back in the day.
00:16:52 - Jud Bowman
Okay, I remember Tri State Investment Group, but I could be wrong.
00:16:55 - Scot Wingo
Maybe there's one. Did you go to First Flight, the old first flight, and have to go into like the weird, I call it the Ebola Auditorium.
00:17:02 - Jud Bowman
Totally. Yeah.
00:17:03 - Scot Wingo
It's like totally dirty.
00:17:04 - Jud Bowman
Huge conference room. I remember too, presenting in front of the Angel Group. I was so nervous. There's 60 angel investors around the table and you had to get up Taylor and I had to get up and present. Back then I would write out my words on a note card. Every word I was going to say. And I think I read off note cards our pitch. But as rough as it was, we managed to get them behind us. I think it was just shy of a million dollars.
00:17:30 - Scot Wingo
Wow.
00:17:31 - Jud Bowman
I think 800,000 or 850,000 is the number I have in my head.
00:17:35 - Scot Wingo
Wow, that's amazing.
00:17:36 - Jud Bowman
But here's an interesting story for you. Like an intersection point that we share that you also might not know is that we got the term sheet from them and they had to do tech due diligence. And so they came out to the farmhouse and the guy that they had recruited to come basically vet our code was none other than Dave Spitzer. So here comes Dave Spitz and he had just sold his company called Netsation to Nortel or Bay Networks, became Nortel. So he's this in our eyes, he still is this super successful older guy. And he comes over and he's driving this fancy black Corvette, I think probably a Porsche. Porsche.
00:18:18 - Scot Wingo
He's a German car.
00:18:19 - Jud Bowman
He might have been a Corvette. I don't want to ask.
00:18:20 - Scot Wingo
It could be. Yeah, Cool. And then he comes to the farmhouse and like, let's look at some code.
00:18:25 - Jud Bowman
Oh, yeah. And we totally pulled the wool over his eyes. I don't think we had anything, but. I'm sort of kidding. But we had built, you know, the search engine. And he sort of thought, yeah, he gave us two thumbs up and the rest is history, as they say.
00:18:37 - Scot Wingo
Interesting.
00:18:38 - Jud Bowman
We were off to the races.
00:18:40 - Scot Wingo
You made it through the Spitz due diligence.
00:18:41 - Jud Bowman
Made it through the Spitz due diligence, Yeah.
00:18:43 - Scot Wingo
I don't know if you would now.
00:18:44 - Jud Bowman
I should add that to my LinkedIn profile.
00:18:47 - Scot Wingo
The pitching the Tig was a rite of. It was before shark tanks. You didn't know what you were up against. And it was like such a motley group. It was kind of like the Moss Eisley of pitches. Right? So you'd go in there and half of them were like these older doctor type people. And if you were tech, they would just ignore you. It was almost like they were there for biotech and they would, like, read a paper or something. So it's like really disturbing because there's like half of the room was just purposely ignoring you. And then the other half was kind of engaged. And there would always be one that would be like the Simon Cowell that would, like, poke a hole in your idea out of left field. Mine. I had a guy, his name will pop to me as I talk. He had made all his money in cell phone towers. And I'm pitching Auction Rover. He's like, I'm from the cell tower industry. Explain this as if and help me understand it from a cell tower perspective. And I'm like, at that point, we didn't have mobile data, so I was like, I have nothing to. He's like, well, are you going to. What are you building? What are your assets? I'm like, it's software. There are none. He's like, well, you know, then there's really nothing there, right? And I'm like, well, Microsoft's like, I. You know, it was like such a left field thing. Like I'm arguing the value of software against a Sal Tower guy. Clyde, Clive, Cliff. Cliff, yeah.
00:19:59 - Jud Bowman
No, it sounds really familiar. I think I had similar conversations like that.
00:20:02 - Scot Wingo
Everyone that went through it was like, what was that? But then you would think I did so poorly. Half the audience was asleep. This one guy like drove the conversation to a weird place. But then like they would write checks. So it's like the weirdest outcome of all that. And you would meet really good people. Like, I think that's where I met Robbie and Ed Whitehorn. Did you meet him? Yes.
00:20:18 - Jud Bowman
Ed Whitehorn was one of the original ones on our board. Yeah, Robbie was an advisor. So.
00:20:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So there was like the, you know, this kind of goes to the, you know, quality.
00:20:28 - Jud Bowman
So.
00:20:29 - Scot Wingo
So if you, you know, if you go there and you feel like you did a bad pitch, if you just kind of, if your message resonates with one or two people and kind of get you over the hump for.
00:20:37 - Jud Bowman
So also Bruce Bohm, if you know, Bruce. Bruce was also one of the early Tig guys. And.
00:20:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Okay, so you, you go, you pitch, you made it through the Spitz filter and you get your 800k and then did you upgrade the farmhouse or did you stay there? What, what happened next?
00:20:57 - Jud Bowman
No, so we, I think this all closed in August of 99. So think back to the timing. And I was supposed to show up at Stanford like a week later, like Labor Day weekend. And I was like packing my bags. I think my flights were booked, you know, to go to Stanford and start. And so I had to make a pretty big decision, but it was an easy decision. This is like I was caught up in the dot com euphoria and I'm like, this is the dream. And luckily I had chosen Stanford. Stanford being in Silicon Valley, they had a pretty flexible deferral program. So they're like, yeah, just take a year off. Good luck with your startup. So that made the decision really easy.
00:21:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, very cool.
00:21:32 - Jud Bowman
And then we moved into an office on Meridian Parkway. So back then it was next to Constella Group, Don Holsworth. Yeah, I think we subleased space from them. But this is, you know, there was no American Underground. There wasn't. We work there wasn't Raleigh founded.
00:21:47 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And you had to sign like a, like a seven year lease probably.
00:21:51 - Jud Bowman
Hopefully not. But yeah, it was like a sublease that, you know, we always did.
00:21:54 - Scot Wingo
And I'm like, my business is three months old and I'm signing a seven year lease.
00:21:58 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:21:59 - Scot Wingo
I better get as small a space as possible because I'm going to be paying for this for life.
00:22:02 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, exactly.
00:22:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Meridian was nice though because they had that little cafeteria on the in building that was pretty good.
00:22:09 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:22:09 - Scot Wingo
I can't remember the name of it, but it was yummy.
00:22:11 - Jud Bowman
I totally remember that cafeteria right at the entrance. And then there was. I think the other thing too is like the hot companies, the hot startups all seem to be on Meridian Parkway too. Red Hat was directly across the street from the building that we subleased. Open site was like one building down. And those were very high profile startups, at least to me.
00:22:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Michael Brady.
00:22:33 - Jud Bowman
Michael Brady. Aaron Trone was on the advisory board for us, you know, which was really a neat experience.
00:22:40 - Scot Wingo
Cool. All right, so now you're, you're in the big leagues. Did you start hiring people and like, how did you scale this thing up?
00:22:45 - Jud Bowman
I don't know if we were in the big leagues, but at least we were, you know, going at it and we started hiring people probably hired way too fast thinking, you know, the dot com. We're going to be at 5 or 10 million in revenue tomorrow. We started signing up customers and we also came up with a new name too. Somewhere along the line I hired a really talented product and marketing guy named Dav Cohn. You mentioned OpenSight. That's what made me think of it. So we recruited Dav from OpenSight and I think I credit Dav with coming up with all the names of my companies. So he was like, this intertech thing, it's not going to work. I think that's my memory of it at least. We ended up going with Pinpoint. That seemed like a much better name for a search engine and somehow we were able to get the dot com for that too.
00:23:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that was a good one. You had a cool logo with like a little.
00:23:31 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, you remember that?
00:23:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah.
00:23:32 - Jud Bowman
People still sometimes like, send me swag. That we must have made the marketing team. And we hired another guy named Eric Harbour, who was one of Dave Spit's colleagues at that, at that startup Netsation that I mentioned.
00:23:43 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:23:44 - Jud Bowman
So Eric was like the EVP of marketing and we hired salespeople and Robert Dale is engineering and he started building a company.
00:23:52 - Scot Wingo
Cool. All right, so you're out there and your revenue model was software licensing, kind of like what we'd probably call SAS today. So you would license it for some recurring revenue for people that needed a search engine.
00:24:02 - Jud Bowman
Exactly. And sometimes though, you remember how the Internet deals were, sometimes you'd go into the deal and it's like it wasn't clear who was paying who. You know, we were doing a deal to be the search engine for the Olympics. NBC Olympics. I remember. And so we were discussing terms and they said, you Know, this could be a $500,000 deal. And I'm thinking, wow, this is going to be our first significant revenue contract. And when we sent over the deal terms, they said, no, you pay us 500,000 for the right to be the search engine. I think that's when I started to realize the Internet economics weren't really adding up. But the idea was that we were going to get paid per search. And that was a model that INC to me had come up with.
00:24:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:24:41 - Jud Bowman
And we signed up, I want to say like 50 vertical sites. So the biggest one was Lycos. Do you remember the name Lycos? Of course you do. But I've asked some of the younger entrepreneurs that. Who's Lycos? Don't remember that one. I remember visiting them up in Pittsburgh. That was probably the biggest one. We had the American Kennel Club, which is actually based here locally. We had Total sports. We had golf.com, soccer.com, so those kind of sites that we were powering.
00:25:07 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And for each of them, would you have to go change the code, like to only return soccer stuff or was it just the same search engine?
00:25:14 - Jud Bowman
That was at least the idea. The algorithms weren't nearly as good as they are today. I think we could actually probably pull this off better today.
00:25:21 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:25:21 - Jud Bowman
But it kind of worked. It kind of worked.
00:25:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Thank you. So you make it all right, and then somewhere in here, the dot com bubbles about to burst.
00:25:30 - Jud Bowman
Right?
00:25:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:25:31 - Jud Bowman
So right before that, you know, fast forward to the peak in my mind. March 2000. Right. Open site maybe had just gone. Gotten bought for hundreds of millions of dollars. Auction Rover had gotten acquired. Red Hat had gone public. And we at the top of that were able to raise a $5 million Series A. And that was Wakefield Group out of Charlotte.
00:25:53 - Scot Wingo
Yep.
00:25:54 - Jud Bowman
And Nora Mosley Partners down in Atlanta, which was one of the firms that I had shipped my, you know, FedExed my original business plan. They, they had a copy. They never looked at it. They said. But, but in any case, we were able to raise $5 million at the top of the market and.
00:26:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And at Wakefield you worked with Steve Nelson. Exactly. And then you haven't seen it yet, but the Chris Evans episode, he also raised money at a sipitor from Wakefield. Yes. And I think that was before Steve had joined. Who were. There's a family in there, I can't remember their name.
00:26:26 - Jud Bowman
The Spangler family.
00:26:27 - Scot Wingo
The Spanglers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:26:28 - Jud Bowman
That's Steve's brother in law.
00:26:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Two of the Spanglers, like actually did that deal. Cool. So you did a 5 million round which was pretty big for the triangle at the time.
00:26:37 - Jud Bowman
Pretty. Pretty huge.
00:26:38 - Scot Wingo
And your timing was either excellent or poor.
00:26:42 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, we presented what I survived.
00:26:44 - Scot Wingo
If you hadn't had that done.
00:26:45 - Jud Bowman
Totally. We would have absolutely gone out of business immediately. That that was. Gave us the Runway to sort of survive the crash. But we. I recall presenting at the Red Herring Venture Conference in Atlanta and I think that's where we sort of, you know, we maybe we were already talking with Wakefield Group and Nora Moseley Partners and a few other firms, but that's. We closed the deal there and it, you know, was funded in March.
00:27:08 - Scot Wingo
Was red herring. It wasn't Calcanas. Was it Arrington? Michael Arrington?
00:27:13 - Jud Bowman
I think it was Michael Arrington.
00:27:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:27:15 - Jud Bowman
Because it's way back. Yeah. Now I think of it as like the Venture. The Venture Conference in Atlanta is like the big thing. But back then it was this red herring event that they would do in Atlanta.
00:27:22 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And there's a magazine, the Red Herring magazine that you would like. You know that one and business 2.0. Business 2.0, yeah. Wired started covering all kind of this stuff. How close was it from closing that 5 million round to the. It was RIP good times that Sequoia put out. Right. That was like. And then it showed up on the A magazine around this time frame. Was that days after you closed or a couple months?
00:27:48 - Jud Bowman
I don't remember. It's a bit of a blur. I feel like things were good for a few months and then it quickly got bad.
00:27:54 - Scot Wingo
It was like instantaneous.
00:27:55 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:27:55 - Scot Wingo
It wasn't like a slow decay. It was like it's all. All done. Yeah. It's crazy. And then somewhere in there a sip that are sold to cmgi. Do you remember that one?
00:28:03 - Jud Bowman
Totally. Yeah. I had the chance to get to meet Chris a couple of times during that and we actually hired. Our first sales guy was someone who had been at Accipiter. So Chris was a reference and helped set that up. A guy named Doug Edwards.
00:28:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool.
00:28:17 - Jud Bowman
All right.
00:28:17 - Scot Wingo
So here you are at this point in the story. You're probably 18, 19, you've raised 5 million and then the bottom falls out. What did you guys do?
00:28:27 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. I think what's crazy is two terrible things happened at once. Not only did the bottom fall out and I mentioned that story where the NBC Olympics wanted us to pay them 500k, that started to happen and basically a lot of the customers started going out business or couldn't pay their bills. We had closed a big Internet deal in Europe. I remember it was our first major contract where we were getting paid and they stopped paying their bills. That was the writing on the wall. And the NASDAQ crashed the funding market. The sense was it dried up and you always see this stuff too late. But then there was another thing too, which is we were two 18 year old kids, and as part of the funding, the deal was we would bring in an adult CEO on a micro scale. The Google guys brought in Eric Schmidt. Right. Well, so we brought in initially a fantastic guy named Jim Strathmire, but he was almost more like an advisor. He was a member of tig. I think he's moved away. I've run into him every now and then at Duke Games, and he would have helped us get that $5 million funding round closed. But then we did a search, like a retained search, and brought in a CEO named Anthony Blake, Tony Blake. And it turns out he was like a total fraud.
00:29:44 - Scot Wingo
Whoa. Okay. And as in like, you know, stealing money kind of fraud or just like.
00:29:51 - Jud Bowman
Like the kitchen sink. It the whole. He wasn't who he said he was. He lied about his background. He had been hired based on his, you know, customer relationships and past successes and venture relationships. And by the way, the dot com thing was blowing up so quickly. I don't know that any CEO could have navigated that. But it's really bad when you have a fraud who's siphoning money and things like that. And Taylor and I are 18 years old, but we have raised 5 million of funding and there's institutional investors around the board. And Steve Nelson, I don't know if he was the chairman of the board yet, but he was by de facto serving in a chairman role. And it was Steve and I that uncovered this.
00:30:34 - Scot Wingo
What was like, let's pull the thread on that. So what made your Spidey sense tingle to kind of start digging into this?
00:30:40 - Jud Bowman
I mean, things just didn't add up. Like, we knew we needed to raise more funding. So this is probably later in that year, right. You know, and the market's crashing, but I remember like going out for a trip and it just didn't add up. I can't put my finger on it now. It's been so many years, but I remember Steve and I looking at each other like, is everything right? But you want to believe, you want to think he's right. That's how it always works with these things. And I think what eventually tipped me off is I heard from a past colleague of his that had heard of us as the company. And I'm sure there was an article in the TVJ or the News and Observer about hiring the CEO. And so someone saw that and reached out to me and said, you know, kind of a cryptic note, but, yeah.
00:31:19 - Scot Wingo
Keep an eye on this guy.
00:31:20 - Jud Bowman
Keep an eye on this guy. Do you know what you're doing? This isn't. You know, it's not all adding up. So we started to dig a little deeper.
00:31:25 - Scot Wingo
Was the kind of thing you went out to run, do meetings with him, and, like, suddenly a lot of them were canceled. And there's, like, a lot of excuses.
00:31:31 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that.
00:31:32 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I've been around people like that, and they're always taking weird phone calls at weird times and, like, you know, making it seem like a big deal or something. And you're like. But they won't tell you details. Yeah, right. Whenever there's, like, a lack of transparency, you're kind of like, yeah, this feels weird. So how did you guys deal with that? Did you have to just. Could you, like, summarily fire him, or did you have to, like, do a bit of an investigation and build a case?
00:31:54 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, a little bit of that. But it was. It was. It was kind of condensed. And I remember distinctly, we figured it out, and Steve met him at the airport because he was living on the West Coast. That was part of it, too. So he would come in for a week or two and go back, and Steve met him at the airport and told him, get back on the flight. This was back when Midway Airlines was doing that direct flight back and forth. And I never saw him again or heard from him again. But it plunged the company into crisis, because by the time we figured that out, I think we were down to two weeks of cash. I mean, we were down to our last payroll, the proverbial last payroll.
00:32:32 - Scot Wingo
Wow.
00:32:32 - Jud Bowman
And frankly, the company probably should have just folded at that point in time. But I think no one wanted to give up, and no one wanted that sort of failure in front of us. And it was a moment for me. I think I'm probably 19 now, where I really grew up. I realized, okay, I got to figure this out. The dot com is so over. If we're going to build a business, we got to really hunker down.
00:32:56 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So then how did you survive having just two weeks left?
00:33:00 - Jud Bowman
So, yeah, the first thing is I called Taylor on a weekend. I remember sitting at the table in the old conference room on Meridian Parkway. Yeah. We basically laid off most of the team. We figured out the names, and then we Laid off most of the team and skinnied down. And then I went to the board and the investors and I said, look, there's sort of two options. We could shut this thing down now. I'll go back to Stanford and you guys will write down 6 million of capital between TIG and Wakefield and Nora Mosley. Or that's when I learned what a bridge round was. Probably got that from Bruce. I was like, or we can do a bridge of a million dollars. And I've skinnied it down. And let's try to navigate this.
00:33:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, okay.
00:33:45 - Jud Bowman
They chose option two. So we were able to get sort of roughly another million dollars. And with the, the much, much smaller burn rate, which if I'd gone back, I probably would have made it even skinnier. It's always that, right?
00:33:56 - Scot Wingo
But it's hard. It's too late, not enough.
00:33:58 - Jud Bowman
But these are really tough lessons to learn as a 19 year old. I mean, it was like, wow, I couldn't have gotten this at Stanford or a business school. Right. So it was like the school of hard knocks. Now it's not the euphoria of 99 anymore. It's like late 2000, early 2001.
00:34:12 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. It's different when you're reading a case study about. And then Dell reduced headcount by 30%. Next paragraph. You're having to go, you know, these people, you hired them, you're, you know, you know, they have kids, you know this, you know, there's no jobs right now because we're in the middle of a crazy, you know, recession kind of thing.
00:34:29 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:34:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So that's tough. Yeah, I, I feel your pain on that. Had to do it many times, but that's what, you know, that's the downside of this founder thing. This is the eating glass part of the, and staring into the nebula. So you guys skinny down. The other thing it took me a while to learn is when you have institutional investors, they have reserves and you can tap into those. They're like literally dollars set aside for you. Which is kind of. I tell a lot of first time founders that, that like, well, you know, go talk about a bridge round. They're going to have money in there. You just need to figure out how to unlock it.
00:35:03 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:35:03 - Scot Wingo
So another good lesson for first time founders watching us here.
00:35:06 - Jud Bowman
But I also think like, it's that it's not for everybody. They reserve for everybody, but it's not like a guarantee you're going to get it. Like in theory, the fund wants to keep the reserve for the best companies. Or the ones that show promise to.
00:35:18 - Scot Wingo
Give it to you that you're going to become one of the best companies again. That that's all you'll need to. Yeah, they don't want to. They also don't want to. They call it a peer, like a bridge to nowhere. Everyone's used that one on me.
00:35:27 - Jud Bowman
So think about it, like, not only had the dot com boom crashed and we had to lay off like probably three fourths of the staff, and we had a fraudulent CEO that we had to fire who had siphoned off a lot of cash. We're now on a bridge loan. But then all of our customers went out of business, like pretty much all of them. I mean, the American Kennel Club didn't go out of business, but, you know, all the dot coms went out of business, which was like 90% of the customer base.
00:35:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So another good founder lesson is diversify your revenue streams.
00:35:56 - Jud Bowman
Diversify your revenue streams.
00:35:58 - Scot Wingo
Okay, well, you skinnied down, so you'd made the hard decision. So you got your million dollar bridge. How did that play out?
00:36:04 - Jud Bowman
So around that time, I had gotten a phone. I can't even remember the model of it, but it happened to be the first phone that could access an early version of the Internet. And it was called the neopoint. That's what it was, the neopoint. I think Taylor got one too. And there was this thing called WAP and HDML and kind of stick figure of black and white Internet. It's such a far cry from where we are today. Right. But that was one of those eureka moments that I was like, okay, this is going to be huge.
00:36:34 - Scot Wingo
Huge.
00:36:35 - Jud Bowman
You know, just like, you know, the first time you tried out ChatGPT recently, it's like, you know, that's, it's that kind of euphoria or the first time, you know, you searched on Google, seeing that phone was like, this is going to be crazy. This is, you know, we're going to have these in our pockets and be able to access the Internet. So, you know, our customers have gone out of business. We built a search engine. The tech was, you know, at least good enough to pass the Dave Spitz filter. But, you know, I think we said, how about we, you know, we made a pivot? Let's pivot to be a wireless search engine. No one had done that. And I think it's a fair claim to say that we were the first wireless search engine, if not one of the first in the US and you.
00:37:13 - Scot Wingo
Needed that because at this point, Google was ascendant you couldn't just go to Google on your phone because it would return all these sites that weren't mobile friendly. So it was totally useless. So you needed someone to apply a filter that said I'm only going to return to you phone to either transcode the site so it could be mobile friendly or filter by. Is this site mobile friendly?
00:37:37 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, there was all this transcoding going on. There wasn't much content. But we indexed it. I think we'd gotten up to like 5 million websites that we had indexed somehow. So it was like a little index. But you know, it was big for the time.
00:37:49 - Scot Wingo
But you're no longer meta, you're building your own index.
00:37:51 - Jud Bowman
We started building our own index, getting pretty serious. So it helped that Google had actually published some white papers on how to do this too. So we didn't have chatgpt to instant code a crawler and everything for us. So we built out the first wireless search engine and we had been talking to some customers by coincidence for the original product. But it kind of was a way to get an entree point to the phone market. So Lycos was one of them. They were really interested in having us. They had no really wireless team and Lycos at the time, no one knows who they are now, but they were like the number two product portal after Yahoo. So we were talking to Excite, Lycos, Gotonet, Infoseek, all these huge portals. We even had meetings with Yahoo, but they had their own thing. And we struck a deal. Aol. We had meetings with aol. I think we did a small deal with aol, but Lycos was the big one and we powered their wireless search engine. But the thing is, it was starting to be clear that even these big portals weren't going to make it. And we also were talking to what became Verizon. It was like gte, I think when we did the deal it was Newco Wireless partnerships. It was like the precursor to Verizon. And we got a deal to power Verizon and then shortly thereafter British Telecom and Rogers up in Canada and to sort of be the search engine for those phone companies for this new WAP world.
00:39:13 - Scot Wingo
Which is nice because you're just like installed. It's like basically being installed on the computer, you're installed on the phone, you are the default.
00:39:19 - Jud Bowman
And unlike these dot coms, Verizon could pay their bills. And so we got a deal that was like we got paid per search a penny or something and maybe a fraction of a penny. And there wasn't much volume initially, but it started to increase. And so I think that's around the time we had hit bottom. At this point, we started hiring again very, very slowly. And the revenue was still super nascent, I want to say probably less than a million dollars, but in that ballpark. But we were able to show a hockey stick. We were able to show searches on Verizon phones going up into the right. And with that momentum, we decided, okay, let's go raise a Series B. Now it's probably 2001, 2002. The bottom was there and we thought, okay, there's a real business here.
00:40:07 - Scot Wingo
And the Internet had cratered, but there was this other wave which was mobile, kind of like now forming on the other side. So. Yeah.
00:40:13 - Jud Bowman
And so. And I'd learned a lot at this point. You know, I'm the CEO. I think it was the interim for a while. And then they named me CEO and I went out on a fundraising trail and I got intros. I knew that you can't just cold call an investor anymore, but the folks that were on that founding board, folks like Bruce Bohm, Steve Nelson, they made intros to Tier one and Tier two venture firms all over the country. And I started going to those pitch meetings. But I faced a wall of rejection. Like no after. No after. No. I think things were still really tough. It was still a tough fundraising environment.
00:40:51 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Did the history of Pinpoint. Was that kind of an anchor part of it too? They didn't like the story or you didn't get good feedback. It's just a solid.
00:40:58 - Jud Bowman
No, I mean, it probably wasn't a very good story. I mean, look at all the craziness that we'd gone through. I think every startup goes through that and you can only sort of talk as openly about it when it's like 20 years in the rearview mirror. Right. And there ended up being a happy ending with this. Right. But it was really brutal and it was so bad that we got 50 no's. I still have a list of them probably somewhere on my laptop because I had a pipeline. I was sort of tracking all these meetings from big, well known VCs to. I remember going to a venture firm in Kentucky, got no from them as well. And at that point it gets worse. Stanford called me because it's like the summer of 2001 probably.
00:41:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:41:43 - Jud Bowman
And Stanford said the dot com boom ended and we're going to stop the deferrals. So if you don't matriculate by September, whatever date, you're going to lose your spot. And Your scholarship at Stanford.
00:41:59 - Scot Wingo
What'd you do?
00:42:02 - Jud Bowman
It was a tough decision, and both my parents are teachers, so you can probably guess what they said to do. I went to my grandmother. She had been an angel investor along with Tig, so she was an amazing grandma, but she's like, stanford's a great school. And I think one of the deciding things actually is one of the partners at Wakefield Group called me, sort of off the record. He had gone to Princeton and he was like, you're crazy if you don't go to Stanford. Like, you gotta go. So I went. I booked a flight and went to Stanford.
00:42:36 - Scot Wingo
Cool. Did you. Were you gonna CEO and be a student at the same time? Was that the plan?
00:42:41 - Jud Bowman
I don't think I had a plan figured out. I just knew. I just was like, I can't give up my future. The company's down to its last cash. We're on the fundraising trail. I've just gotten 50 no's and I remember I moved into my dorm room in Robley. It was like a quad going through orientation, which is, I think, a two week process at Stanford. And I was flying back and forth, still doing fundraising meetings. I still had a few more meetings on the calendar. And somewhere in that time period, I presented at the CED Venture Summit, too. And I think to make a long story short, we got up to 58 no's, but the 59th investor said yes, which was Massey Birch Capital.
00:43:29 - Scot Wingo
And where are they?
00:43:29 - Jud Bowman
Out of Nashville, Tennessee. They're not around anymore. But they were famous for being the original investor in the colonel back in 1969, who had a secret recipe, so. Kentucky Fried Chicken. So that shows you, though, how far I was casting the net to find investors.
00:43:47 - Scot Wingo
You went all the way down to the chicken guys?
00:43:48 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, an incredible guy named Bill Earthman.
00:43:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. But it almost sounds like a little bit of a family office. Sometimes family offices can be helpful because they're less lemmings with some of the VC's kind of thing.
00:44:02 - Jud Bowman
They had also backed AOL super early on, too, though. A guy named Ted Leonsis, that founded Redgate, which merged into aol.
00:44:09 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Cool. And then so they did a Series B. Did they wash out the A or they just went on to the. They kind of. They didn't do a cram down or anything.
00:44:18 - Jud Bowman
You know, they were gentlemanly about it. I do remember it being a bit of a down round, but not a cram down.
00:44:23 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, good. Okay. How much did you raise in this kind of serious B?
00:44:26 - Jud Bowman
So by memory, they put in 6 million. So it's just, you know, just barely more than we had raised in the A. But. But what was amazing is like once I got one yes, I got a few more yeses. That was like the deciding point. So we did a first close, but we left the round open and we ended up raising. And I think the valuation might have changed along the way too, but we ended up bringing in a fantastic firm called nea. And NEA became a co lead along with Massey Birch Capital and Intel Capital invested as well. Mark Rostick, I see him at my.
00:45:00 - Scot Wingo
Gym on the ceremony.
00:45:01 - Jud Bowman
Yes.
00:45:02 - Scot Wingo
Shout out to Mark. I have to mention they used to watch this. Who at NEA was your partner?
00:45:08 - Jud Bowman
Suzanne King.
00:45:09 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
00:45:10 - Jud Bowman
But before Suzanne, there was actually a partner named Fezzle Begg. And so he sort of sourced the deal and. And then Suzanne became the board member.
00:45:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And they're up in Baltimore, so.
00:45:22 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Chevy Chase.
00:45:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. They let our be a Channel Advisor.
00:45:28 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:45:29 - Scot Wingo
Which would have been what time were we in? 05 ish. 02.
00:45:34 - Jud Bowman
Yes.
00:45:35 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. This was way after you. Okay, well, this is even worse in a way though, because now you're committed to Stanford and you've just raised a bunch of money.
00:45:42 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:45:42 - Scot Wingo
Did they know you were going to Stanford? Was like that part of the pitch or did you like maybe not mention that?
00:45:47 - Jud Bowman
I think I kept that part secret. Yeah. Kip Johnson's been our attorney the whole time. He's probably groaning. He's probably like, was this in the schedule of exceptions? I don't know. But the way it played out is it might surprise you. I don't know about you, but I'm actually an extremely risk averse entrepreneur, which is kind of paradoxical to being an entrepreneur in the first place. Entrepreneurs take a lot of risks, but I always like to think of it as a hedge. So knowing I could go back to Stanford at any point was a huge hedge on my future. And having this not. Not having the ability to go back to college if the company failed was scary. And they weren't going to let me defer. Like I tried everything to defer, but I was able to sort of find a loophole, which is if I enrolled and attended class, the registrar's office was willing to give me a leave of absence. Like a dropout, basically.
00:46:44 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
00:46:44 - Jud Bowman
So I was no longer deferring. I attended Stanford very briefly.
00:46:48 - Scot Wingo
So you did more like a few weeks.
00:46:49 - Jud Bowman
You withdrew and then I withdrew.
00:46:51 - Scot Wingo
But that gave you enough of a hook to kind of like kick it another year.
00:46:54 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, they were like, you don't have to. You don't have to apply. I was able to kick it another year. I, I don't know if it was fully defined. I'm sure I can't go back now, you know, as a, as a 43 year old dad. I'm back live in the freshman dorm.
00:47:05 - Scot Wingo
It'd be fun. There's a movie, Old school.
00:47:07 - Jud Bowman
Yeah.
00:47:08 - Scot Wingo
Could join the fraternities.
00:47:09 - Jud Bowman
I love movies like that.
00:47:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay so that was. So you're in and out. So now you're back over on Pinpoint. You've raised north of 10 million.
00:47:19 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, I think 14 million maybe.
00:47:21 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I remember it being really big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you went from like 58 no's to 59, kind of lighting up a six, a 15.14 million dollar round. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, that, you know, stick to it. It is about grinding it out sometimes and getting to the, you know, every no is a path to a yes.
00:47:38 - Jud Bowman
Ultimately perseverance.
00:47:40 - Scot Wingo
Sometimes it's like how do I get through all these no's to get to the yes? It's in there somewhere. And then. So part of your business plan was. So it's kind of like pinpoint 2.0. We're going to really lean in on this mobile thing. We're going to be the mobile search engine.
00:47:53 - Jud Bowman
You're going to be the mobile search engine.
00:47:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So you took that fresh capital and you didn't hire a bunch of people this time because you learned your lesson.
00:48:02 - Jud Bowman
We still hired a lot of people though. Yeah, but I think more judicious. Yeah, way more judicious. And I think at least at this phase in the companies trajectory, but it wasn't all roses and sunshine yet either. So we signed up a few more phone companies. But sometimes you can be too early. If we were the first wireless search engine, there still weren't that many Internet capable phones in the market. So we were getting paid per search. It was a nice business model, but it wasn't enough revenue to build a trip. Plus there wasn't that much content. This was black and white screens still there wasn't much interesting stuff to search. And also Google was quickly awakening to this wireless Internet too. So they launched a Google wireless search engine which arguably was better than ours probably, certainly. So all those pressures, but they weren't necessarily licensing it to the carrier. So we still had this play where we would say okay, you can still do a deal with Google but you want your Verizon search engine. So that was kind of the pitch. But basically we were running into some struggles where it wasn't working. Exactly. And so we basically began what was sort of pivot number three. And that's like the most important pivot for the company. And we were basically trying to find a way to get more content for the indexer. You could have a crawler, but there wasn't this hyperlink structure with all these transcoded content. So it wasn't like in today's Internet where it's easy to crawl around. I mean, you couldn't. So we actually had like, we would hire kids out of UNC and they would, you know, kind of look for content. We would throw it into the. To the indexing. And so anyway, one of the ways we did that was looking at what people were searching for. So if someone's searching for some website, we're like, okay, they probably exist. Let's look for that, let's index it. Right. And people started searching for something called a ringtone, which we'd never heard of.
00:49:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:49:56 - Jud Bowman
And it quickly became like the number one thing people were searching for. It was like 98% of the searches were for ringtones. And then it was after that was games and then websites that we were indexing.
00:50:08 - Scot Wingo
There's an important founder lesson here, which is look at your data every day.
00:50:11 - Jud Bowman
Look at your data.
00:50:11 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And it is the guide a. You can never predict consumer behavior, so don't even try. I've learned that lesson a thousand times. We think we have our taste and we're going to like, we know how people are. You can never guess. Just put it up and then get the data and iterate.
00:50:25 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:50:25 - Scot Wingo
So you saw this data, everyone's looking for this thing called a ringtone. And. And then you would probably like say, well, let's go find ringtones. And there probably weren't a lot.
00:50:32 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, there probably weren't a lot. But it was even worse than that. We didn't even know what a ringtone was. So like, you know, first we did a ton of research and we, we learned about this, this company called NTT DoCoMo, which is the, the Verizon of Japan. And they had invented something called Imode, which was like the world's first app store.
00:50:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:50:51 - Jud Bowman
And there was some similar ones in some of the places in Europe. And so we basically got really smart really fast. And we started having conversations with these carriers that we were working with. Verizon, British Telecom, Rogers, et cetera. Hey, we have this search engine deal, but we think there's this huge opportunity with ringtones, maybe games. You know, we're building a Platform people buy wallpaper. Back in the day, basically, it was kind of vaporware. Yeah. Wallpapers as well. Wallpapers were big, but it was a little bit vaporware. So we had PowerPoint slides, and we had a new name, a product name called Fuel, which we thought was really cool. So Pinpoint's Fuel platform for ringtones and games. And we hadn't yet built it, but the engineering team is sort of here in Durham in Meridian Parkway building this platform. Meanwhile, we're going around talking to all these phone companies saying, hey, look at this NTT DoCoMo thing. They're making, like, billions of dollars off ringtones. There's an opportunity here. The phones need to catch up, but we've got the platform. Let's do this.
00:51:49 - Scot Wingo
Yep.
00:51:50 - Jud Bowman
And it was another one of those cases where you're like, probably a little bit early.
00:51:53 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. But, you know, being early can be good, too, because then when the wave hit you, you saw the wave. So I don't. I would argue if people are searching for it, they wanted them already. Maybe you were ahead of the phones, but you weren't ahead of the consumer.
00:52:06 - Jud Bowman
Right.
00:52:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:52:06 - Jud Bowman
But, like, think about it. We're on our third company name. We're now in our third business idea. It's only been three years, so it's a little, you know. But we had the backing of some great investors, fantastic investors. And I don't want to say they lost confidence, but I think they started to get a little worried because we were starting to burn through that 14 million. There was still plenty of cash in the bank, but we were burning a couple hundred thousand dollars a month, which doesn't seem like a terrible burn rate, but at the time, that was a pretty big burn rate. And 911 happened. So we're post.com, but it's also now post 9 11. So the world is very somber, and our revenue is stuck at a million dollars. So I think that the investors started to think, okay, is this going to work? Are we too early? Are these ringtones? Maybe they're not going to be a thing in the US Market. Those were the kind of questions we were talking about.
00:52:58 - Scot Wingo
And do these entrepreneurs have add? They keep changing their.
00:53:01 - Jud Bowman
And now I'm. What am I, 20 years old? And we actually became a finalist. So I think the market was maturing. And Verizon and Singular, the two biggest phone companies in the US Were doing like, an rfp. We kind of convinced them of this opportunity, and, okay, we need to do this thing, and we're going to build a Ringtone store. And so we were able to get in the mix as this 40 person startup in Durham. And we were, as best I can remember, we were competing against an IBM, some sort of custom but enterprise grade built custom thing for Verizon and Singular. But we got in the mix and I remember we were named finalists at both the Verizon and Singular ringtone store opportunity.
00:53:41 - Scot Wingo
Cool.
00:53:41 - Jud Bowman
But revenue was stuck at a million. We're burning cash. And what I, what I remember, it may not be completely fair, but I remember being in a board meeting and Charlie Mosley of Nora Mosley Partners was like, you know, I'm just not 100% sure, you know, like, where are we going to be if we lose both of those deals? You know, we might be right about the idea in the market, but like, is this 40 person, you know, are we really going to be able to pull this off?
00:54:07 - Scot Wingo
And unlike searches where you got paid in the future, these were, presumably they were going to pay you a big upfront to go build this thing. Like hundreds of thousands of dollars, I'd imagine 500k or something.
00:54:17 - Jud Bowman
Yes and no. Maybe that was some of the initial conversations. But one of the things that we pivoted to in the negotiations was like, hey, we perceived the competition was going to be charging millions of dollars for this custom solution. So we said, we really believe this is going to be huge, so we'll do it for $50,000 plus a royalty on every ring tag.
00:54:39 - Scot Wingo
So you bet on the future.
00:54:41 - Jud Bowman
We bet on the future. But I'm going into a board meeting sort of pointing to what's happening in Japan. I had some Japanese phones which I was using as my props, going around to the phone companies and showing my investors and saying, look at these, this is going to happen here. But meanwhile, people pull out their ancient Motorola and they're like, it's hard to really think that that's going to actually happen. So, so in it, where I'm leading up with all this is as a board, we basically were risk averse. And we said, you know, we need to hedge our bets. Because the sense was we were going to lose those deals.
00:55:14 - Scot Wingo
Yep.
00:55:15 - Jud Bowman
And we ended up doing. One of our investors was affiliated or had invested in a company in Nashville. So it was orchestrated by our Nashville investors, a company called Power By Hand that was founded by a super ambitious entrepreneur named Ryan Worch. And Ryan had built kind of an app store business for Palm Pilots. And I think at this point in the market, it wasn't as clear and obvious that the Palm Pilots and blackberries were going to die off. But he had built arguably the first or second largest app store for these PDAs. Is that what they were called?
00:55:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:55:55 - Jud Bowman
This is pre smartphone. Right. But he had something on the order of magnitude of like 10 million in revenue. And. And we had a million in revenue.
00:56:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:56:05 - Jud Bowman
And the long and the short of it is we ended up doing a 5050 merger.
00:56:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:56:11 - Jud Bowman
Is. And at least from like the pinpoint board, there was an element of. It's like a hedge. And I think. I don't want to speak for Ryan, but like as I look back and kind of think about it, I think Ryan was running out of funding and wasn't able to raise new funding because he's Palm Pilots. So he saw that we still had a chunk of that 14 million in the bank. So it was like a funding event and sort of a hedge on both sides.
00:56:33 - Scot Wingo
And also it was a multi platform. It made the company multi platform versus single point of failure on Palm. Yeah. So there's a lot of. Kind of makes sense in a way.
00:56:41 - Jud Bowman
So we did a 5050 merger of power by hand and pinpoint. Ryan was named CEO. I'm named president. I think there were four people that could sort of think of themselves as co founders. Right. And we renamed the company to Motricity, which is another. That's a name that DAV came up with. DAV Kohn.
00:57:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem like it would work, but it passes the test of you could tell someone about it and they would be able to spell it.
00:57:07 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. We got a lot of Motor City maybe. But generally it worked. And it was a word that no one owned. And it's a real word. It's like a medical term that meant something like the. I think the. I should remember this. Like the movement of muscles maybe.
00:57:19 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:57:20 - Jud Bowman
So it had kind of a pot. Okay. That's kind of cool. Movement, action, energy. And it had mobile Motricity. So we like that. Mobile and electricity.
00:57:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And where you're kind of like a North Carolina authentic founder. You're not shy, but you're not like wildly self promotional. Ryan Wersch is like. He's like cranking it up to 12. I've had several interactions with him. And you know, he's a sales guy. A sales guy. Son of a preacher. He would always. He had like this very. I'm sure you heard the spiel a thousand times. I've probably heard it 5. So that was kind of an interesting change for the company from the outside to. It was Like a new CEO that was just so totally different from you. It was a very different vibe.
00:58:02 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. I remember some of the angel investors that he had described him as. So much energy and he'd be going around you so fast, you couldn't even really see.
00:58:12 - Scot Wingo
It was like a proton.
00:58:14 - Jud Bowman
And so it was kind of like a marriage of convenience, honestly, these two. And then, you know, you're dealing with like the culture and how do you integrate the teams and like, are we going to base the company in Nashville or are we going to base it Franklin, Tennessee? It was just outside of Nashville. Are we going to base the company in Durham? You know, all those kind of cultural.
00:58:32 - Scot Wingo
Today that would be a real decision. Back then, national had nothing going on. We were way. We're still ahead of them, but they were like. And they're really known for health tech and biotech. Weighed in lots of hospital systems.
00:58:46 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. But, you know, it wasn't. It was not an obvious decision. And I think, you know, huge kudos to Ryan and his wife, Chantel and his co founder Nathan Gooden on having. Making that decision. I mean, because, you know, they had children, they like uproot their families. Come here.
00:59:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:59:00 - Jud Bowman
You know, Ryan ultimately made that decision and I think that was a pretty important one.
00:59:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. She's a Miss America winner.
00:59:06 - Jud Bowman
Chantel. That's right.
00:59:07 - Scot Wingo
That would also come up in a lot of the pitches. There's like a whole thing. Cool. So then they moved down here. So you said you guys were at a million and they were at 2 or 3.
00:59:17 - Jud Bowman
10. 10.
00:59:18 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
00:59:19 - Jud Bowman
So we did a 50, 50 deal. And I think, you know, well, now we own 50% of an $11 million company.
00:59:24 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
00:59:25 - Jud Bowman
Multi platform. We still got cash in the bank, a stronger team. Yeah. You know, so like. Yeah, yeah.
00:59:32 - Scot Wingo
So then things somewhere in here are gonna really take off.
00:59:35 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. I mean, then there's this lucky moment, like in any company's history and we had effect of this merger, you know, sort of betting against ourselves. Right. I mean, we were basically making the probability adjusted decision that we were going to lose those deals with the phone companies to the Ringtone store. But it. But it turns out we did lose the Verizon deal, at least initially. It came back many years later. But like, but we. We ended up winning the deal to be Singular's Ringtone store down in Atlanta. And it happened, as I remember, three or four months after we merged the companies together. So it was pretty close to it. And Ryan gets credit too, for he joined the sales team and he's spinning around all the AT&T singular executives. But it happened. We closed the deal.
01:00:25 - Scot Wingo
Did you go to the board and say, told you guys?
01:00:27 - Jud Bowman
No, because now it's like, well, wow, this is even better. Right? And it was like one of these moments like when we turned, when we finally, you know, remember this? We had sold a bit of a vision, a bit of vaporware, but we had to catch up to it and we finally built it. And they had a commercial once about something like this where the servers get overloaded. But the day we launched on Cingular, we flipped the switch to turn on this Ringtone store. It crashed all of our servers, which by the way, usually success is obvious. That's what you want. That's the moments you live for. Yeah, it's a high tech problem. Finally it crashed it so bad that I thought we were going to lose the contract. We were able to negotiate with Cingular to like get a second chance. Hey guys, we had no idea we got this.
01:01:11 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. At this point in time, there was no cloud, so you couldn't just turn up more servers. We had to host everything. And it was very expensive.
01:01:18 - Jud Bowman
What was that coming? Data Flux and hosted solutions. Rich Lee, you know, that was kind of what we were. Where we were doing this and it was expensive. Very expensive.
01:01:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I need 200 Dell servers.
01:01:31 - Jud Bowman
Right.
01:01:31 - Scot Wingo
That's going to be $800,000 and it'll take six months to ship them to you.
01:01:35 - Jud Bowman
Right.
01:01:36 - Scot Wingo
My site's down right now, so I.
01:01:40 - Jud Bowman
Mean, huge kudos to Jeff Kramer and David Lux and Josh Bakowski and Taylor Brockman. Names like that that would have, you know, this whole team rallied and when we turned the ringtone store back on the first day of revenue was a million dollars.
01:01:55 - Scot Wingo
Woo, nice.
01:01:56 - Jud Bowman
So it got really interesting fast.
01:01:58 - Scot Wingo
By my math, that's about a 400 million a year run rate when you extrapolate.
01:02:02 - Jud Bowman
So it kind of began the beginning of this pretty amazing experience. Ryan and I went out and raised a lot of funding. We crisscrossed the country and raised capital from some incredible family offices, funds like tcv. That's where we met Chris Chuang and he ended up joining the team. After leading the investment from tcv, Carl Icahn and his son Brett ended up investing. So it was sort of the whole gamut of investors that you could have behind the company, which fueled the expansion. The sales team closed deals with dozens of phone companies. And at the peak, which would have been the year the Motorola RAZR came out, we did a billion dollars in ringtone sales in a single Year. And that would have included those wallpapers you mentioned.
01:02:51 - Scot Wingo
So you went from being out of cash 58 nos to talking to Carl Icahn in what, three years?
01:03:00 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. That's pretty wild. It is. It was like 2006, 2007.
01:03:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. So then tell us what happened to motricity. Let's tell the end of the motricity story.
01:03:11 - Jud Bowman
So, I mean, the end of the motricity story probably began when the iPhone launched.
01:03:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:03:18 - Jud Bowman
I still remember we had at this point a large team whose whole job was to test all the new phones. So it was sort of this exciting. Nathan Mapes was on that team. Chris Matherly, Alex Bloom. They would have had a room full of these phones. And it was always an exciting day when we get a FedEx from AT&T or Verizon because it would have the latest model. And we were one of the first people to see the iPhone. So we saw before the big. Yeah, way before everybody knew about it. So we saw this iPhone and we're thinking this is going to be the next catalyst to take us to the top. But the iPhone locked it down and we didn't know it until a little bit later. But like, that was the beginning of the end. They closed the ecosystem.
01:03:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Because they wanted to make the billion dollars off the wallpaper apps.
01:04:02 - Jud Bowman
You know, one of the most successful things ever, right?
01:04:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So at that point, you guys either filed to go public or went public.
01:04:09 - Jud Bowman
Filed to go public.
01:04:10 - Scot Wingo
Okay. Yeah.
01:04:14 - Jud Bowman
And Ryan gets like full credit for the ipo.
01:04:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:04:19 - Jud Bowman
You know, we did the, you know, the Bake Off. We were talking to all the investment bankers, ended up getting Goldman and JP Morgan. Ryan was able to get it public before.
01:04:31 - Scot Wingo
Those are the best. They rarely work together. And that's like the. That's the marquee too, to get. Yeah.
01:04:36 - Jud Bowman
And you know it. The company revenue had scaled up fairly large as well. We grew through acquisitions. I mentioned Chris Chuang. He joined us from TCV and led the nascent corporate development effort which ended up growing to take over seven or eight companies, which also brought some entrepreneurs to the region too. So I think that played a huge role. And the billion a year of ringtones we were getting. Think back to that original business model where we cut these deals where we basically didn't ask for much money up front, royalty on every one. So the net revenue that we kept, which would have be the equivalent of high margin SaaS revenue was like over 100 million a year. Nowadays I think you have to have over 200 million a year to go public, probably. But back then, 100 was the mark, and we got to 100 million squarely there, and we're able to go public. But the market conditions started to get bad again. 0809. So I feel like the company limped into the public market, and it's frankly a miracle that it got out. Kudos to Ryan and many other people on the team. It got out. It was like a $50 million IPO at a $400 million valuation. So we actually did, like, a slight down round, but we got out.
01:05:51 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. The other thing you guys did to support the area is the Goodman family renovated this American Underground area, and you guys were one of the big anchor tenants in the American Underground kind of redevelopment. That's my memory.
01:06:05 - Jud Bowman
No, you're totally right. It's now the Burt's Bees building.
01:06:09 - Scot Wingo
Yes. Like the big anchor tenant at the back where the waterfall flows down.
01:06:12 - Jud Bowman
Right. That waterfall used to say Motricity. That office was something else. I had the chance to go in there not too long ago for a fundraiser, so it was kind of crazy to walk the hall, see our old offices, and a lot of memories in that building. But the world was different then. You had to build these headquarters. I think you can do a startup a little bit more efficiently now, but that was a signature thing, and we were one of the first big tenants in downtown Durham.
01:06:37 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah, that was cool. And okay, so you limp into the public markets. You're. You're. You're still chugging away. Hopefully you got to take a little bit off the table somewhere in here.
01:06:47 - Jud Bowman
Yes.
01:06:48 - Scot Wingo
Okay, good. Because, you know, you've been working hard at this thing since you were basically 16. So we got to. Got to get you your due. And then, you know, so the iPhone is kind of, like, causing a lot of problems for you guys. And then, you know, how did you navigate that? And then what was the ultimate end of Motricity?
01:07:08 - Jud Bowman
So I mentioned that Motricity started to grow through an M and A machine, which is pretty. Pretty much the playbook, too. When you go public, you can start to do strategic deals, and one of the biggest deals that the company did was buy a division of a company called Infospace. And you probably remember that name because it was one of the early Internet companies, but they had a pretty large division doing similar stuff like ringtones and portal services.
01:07:30 - Scot Wingo
So something Jane J.
01:07:32 - Jud Bowman
A I. Naveen Jain.
01:07:34 - Scot Wingo
Naveen Jain.
01:07:35 - Jud Bowman
Yes. Wow. And that was kind of satisfying for me because, like, super early on in Pinpoint's life We nearly got acquired by Infospace and Naveen Jain. You know, I remember he sent me this email and I'd had the chance to meet with Naveen a couple of times and Naveen was this larger than life guy and still is, and his son too. But Naveen sent me like, he's like, we want to acquire your wireless search engine and make it part of the Infospace suite. Which is like super exciting. But he sent me a multiple choice question because I said, you guys make me an offer. He said, no, you tell me how much. And then he sent me a multiple choice question. It was like $0, $1 was choice B, a million dollars or 10 million? And he basically wanted to buy us for nothing. I'm flubbing the story, but it was like sort of almost offense games where.
01:08:23 - Scot Wingo
He would fly people down and then not meet with you. And so you like, like he would. He was constantly playing these games. Yeah.
01:08:29 - Jud Bowman
So we didn't get acquired by Infospace. So it was kind of a nice thing when we were able to sort of come in and buy, you know, a division of their company for 175 million, you know, much later. But, but there's a significant part. The reason I'm saying all this is that as part of that deal, ultimately Ryan and the team made the decision to relocate the headquarters of the combined, you know, company from Durham to Seattle, Bellevue, Bellevue, Washington. So as part of that transition, I decided to stay here in North Carolina. So I spun out a small team and some assets from Motricity and started my startup adventure number two.
01:09:10 - Scot Wingo
Cool. What's that called?
01:09:11 - Jud Bowman
So that was called at the time Pocket Gear.
01:09:14 - Scot Wingo
Okay. Yeah, I remember this. Yeah. Is that going to turn into Sift or.
01:09:18 - Jud Bowman
No?
01:09:18 - Scot Wingo
No.
01:09:18 - Jud Bowman
So, yeah, I've done three Tonys. This is. Yeah, this is what turned into Appia.
01:09:22 - Scot Wingo
Oh, yeah, Appiah. Yeah. We're butting up against time, but we've got a lot of. I want to definitely get the good, the good pinpoint to Motricity story in there. Give us kind of the high level of, you know, so. So you've spun out, you're no longer president of Motricity or any of that kind of stuff. You've had your exit, which is good. And now you start, you know, Pocket.
01:09:45 - Jud Bowman
Pocket Gear.
01:09:46 - Scot Wingo
Pocket Gear.
01:09:47 - Jud Bowman
Another terrible name. Not the best name.
01:09:50 - Scot Wingo
Pocket Gear. What was the idea of Pocket Gear?
01:09:52 - Jud Bowman
So the idea was we were going to, you know, the iPhone is a big thing. We're going to build an app store for all the other platforms. Okay. And sell it to the Phone companies.
01:10:02 - Scot Wingo
At this point, Android wasn't really Ascendant. Or was it?
01:10:05 - Jud Bowman
It wasn't really Ascendant. Yeah.
01:10:07 - Scot Wingo
Okay.
01:10:07 - Jud Bowman
But it started to be pretty shortly thereafter. And did you meet that dude?
01:10:11 - Scot Wingo
He was here in Chapel Hill building Android. Did you know that?
01:10:13 - Jud Bowman
Andy Rubin. Yeah, well, Andy. Oh, I'm forgetting the name, but there's a. Yeah, I did.
01:10:20 - Scot Wingo
There's another guy.
01:10:21 - Jud Bowman
They did Danger.
01:10:22 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. The Danger team is ultimately. What was the colonel for? Android was in Chapel Hill, right?
01:10:27 - Jud Bowman
Yeah.
01:10:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. How did they. How did they get here? Was it to you guys? Was this one of the people you guys bought to?
01:10:34 - Jud Bowman
No, no, I don't remember exactly. But, you know, obviously the Danger thing happened, and then Android was bought by Google for 50 million, and the rest is history.
01:10:41 - Scot Wingo
So, yeah, I'll have to explore, like, spelunk, the history of the Triangle there. Yep. I also met these really early crypto people. Like, they were off Rosemary street in Chapel Hill in, like, this retail location, and they were super squirrely, and they all had, like, crazy beards and stuff.
01:11:01 - Jud Bowman
I mean, I think that's the magic that makes the Triangle, Right? It's Unc, Duke, and State, ultimately.
01:11:06 - Scot Wingo
And I was like, what are you working on? They're like, we're working on cryptography. And I'm like, what's that? And they were like, working on email. You know, what would later become that email standard for. Anyway. But I always wonder, like, if they were involved in what ultimately became Bitcoin. Okay, so you're gonna do your own app store. Give us kind of the. So pocket gear. How did that then proceed? Did you raise capital? How did that get into Appian? What's the.
01:11:32 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, we raised. We raised some initial capital from some of the same firms. So Wakefield Group, Nora Moseley Partners. Steve Nelson has been involved with every one of my three companies from day one. He's my mentor, even though he's not here in North Carolina anymore. But we ended up raising a Series B too, where we brought in BlackBerry's venture arm, Trident Capital, which was a great firm in Palo Alto. And Eric Schmidt, personally from Google, invested too. So the idea was we were going to build the independent App store for all the carriers. But to make a super, super. Long story short, that idea didn't work. I mean, we actually became, I think, the third or fourth largest app store by volume of installs. We were powering the App store for probably 30 phone companies. Vodafone and Airtel in India, Opera's browser app Store across the world. So we were Doing tons and tons of installs. But two things went wrong. First, we thought people were going to pay for apps the way they had paid for ringtones, a couple of dollars each. And we spent a lot of time building the store and integrations for billing. And the market for apps went to this freemium model. So it's totally different. But then the bigger problem was, frankly, we might have been number three or number four, but it didn't matter. Apple's App store, which was closed and we couldn't play there, and Android Market, which became Google Play, was number two. And it was like a lion's difference between us. So it was another hard pivot. Yeah, we had raised a lot of capital. Actually, it's a little easier the second time around.
01:13:00 - Scot Wingo
About how much? Like 20 million.
01:13:02 - Jud Bowman
I want to say 20 million? Maybe. Maybe 30 million. And we had Vinrock came in as well. Trident plus the investors from Motricity. And we basically saw the writing on the wall. And I remember we had a board meeting where it was like, we should shut the company down. One of the investors was like, we're shutting it down. Call to vote.
01:13:19 - Scot Wingo
Wow.
01:13:20 - Jud Bowman
And they fired me.
01:13:21 - Scot Wingo
Holy cow. Okay. I didn't know this part of the.
01:13:23 - Jud Bowman
Story, but I took it on the chin and I'd sort of been through worse. So I basically said, and you decided.
01:13:30 - Scot Wingo
To go back to Stanford?
01:13:31 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. No, I didn't. I think I just said, look, good luck getting some. I mean, we're basically. It's a restart. So like. And if you don't want to distribute the capital, I said, look, give me six months, you don't have to pay me. Give me six months and I think we can save this thing. And we laid off a bunch of people. Again, it was sort of the same movie, but we basically brainstormed two ideas. We split the team into two teams. So we probably had 75 people. I skinnied down to 40 people and split it into two 20 person teams. And we chased our two best ideas. And first idea was subscriptions. We had kind of seen this happen with ringtones. So we thought, well, maybe people aren't going to buy the apps. We can pull a subscription, a catalog of apps together, like almost like a Spotify for $9.99 a month. That was the idea. And then the second idea was an ad network. And what's crazy is like when you have that hyper focus and a gun to your head because the board basically came around and said, okay, you have six months and if you don't, it's over. We're shutting it down. This is how much you can burn. But basically, both ideas worked, but one idea worked a lot better than the other. And so we ended up just going all in on that, and that sort of. The rest is history.
01:14:36 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that's the ad network, and that.
01:14:37 - Jud Bowman
Was the ad network.
01:14:38 - Scot Wingo
You created a mobile ad network.
01:14:39 - Jud Bowman
So we were. Yeah, we were probably one of the first ad networks for what's called now in the industry, cost per install advertising, sort of app install advertising. We did this probably a year before Facebook started doing it. Of course, it's a huge market now, but the idea was we had some traffic. We had all these app stores so we could start auctioning off the slots. Very similar to goto.com that we talked about earlier. That was the idea.
01:15:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Interesting. Pay to play. And then you figured that out. And then an ad network can run on other people's app stores. So now you've gotten yourself out of the little distant third thing, and now you can be on Android. And to some extent.
01:15:19 - Jud Bowman
Right.
01:15:19 - Scot Wingo
It would work on the Apple apps.
01:15:20 - Jud Bowman
Yeah. And by the way, that wasn't, like, abundantly obvious to us. We started out trying to sell ads for Java games. Well, that's not where the market is. Then quickly focused on Android. And then we said, well, what's holding us back from Apple? Let's expand Apple. And then it really took off. And, you know, we went from zero to a $5 million run rate by the end of the six months. So that's how we got the reprieve. Venrock was like, okay, let's keep. Let's keep going. Let's see where this is headed, maybe onto something. And then three months after that, we were at a $10 million run rate, and a year later, we were at a $50 million run rate, and we made the Inc. 500. It was around that time that one of the partners we were talking to about the ad network was a company, a small public company called Digital Turbine.
01:16:05 - Scot Wingo
Cool. And then you decided to.
01:16:08 - Jud Bowman
So they actually approached us from the first meeting and said, we want to buy you.
01:16:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:16:14 - Jud Bowman
And I think there's a lesson here, too. Like, I look back and I realize how significant it was. I said, let's slow down. But partly, it's like the revenue was ramping up. So I wanted to see where this was going, but I said, why don't we walk before we run? Let's do a partnership. You guys want to sell some ads, you have some deals. Let's see if this is a thing. I didn't fully believe their model, to be honest. They had some technology to like preload the apps on iPhone or on Android phones.
01:16:34 - Scot Wingo
Yes. They would go to the carrier and.
01:16:35 - Jud Bowman
Preload, which of course I understood from our motricity experience.
01:16:39 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:16:39 - Jud Bowman
But I also, because I was maybe too close to the forest for the trees, wasn't 100% sure it was going to work. I thought maybe just the broader ad network play was the one, but. But it worked spectacularly. I mean, Bill Stone and the DT team were so right about it that the revenue from that partnership started to accelerate. And by the time it had grown to be like 25% of our revenue, they came back to the table and they said, no, we're serious, we want to acquire you. And this time it wasn't just him calling me. They sent in a formal written offer to bias to the board.
01:17:06 - Scot Wingo
Oh, wow. Go at a.
01:17:08 - Jud Bowman
At a higher price.
01:17:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Were they revenue wise? You're like at 50 million and they were similar or they were like a good bit ahead.
01:17:15 - Jud Bowman
I should know that number. I think it was. They were a public company, but very small. But they had like a $250 million market cap. You know, they had just gotten onto like the nasdaq. Yeah, they were, I think one of those like OTC companies is before spacs, but it's effectively like a spac. Right. And they bought a few things. I feel like they might have been similar in revenue, but they had the currency of a stock and they made us $100 million offer to buy us, which for a $250 million company is huge. Which is huge. I think the part that, that's the part that people don't know about this story, like the untold story of the Appia deal is that we merged with a public company. We got, you know, and the deal was 15 million of cash, 85 million of stock. And this is, I think, all public, if you dig into the SEC filing. So the stock portion, the 85 million was the key. We basically owned a third of a public company. I was suddenly the second largest shareholder of a public company with reporting requirements.
01:18:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that can either work out really well for you or really bad.
01:18:17 - Jud Bowman
And I think what's crazy too is investors, we obviously signed a lockup. There was a six month lockup and then it really depended on when you sold your stock. And the stock was trading super wildly.
01:18:28 - Scot Wingo
But, well, fundamentally you take a, you know, let's say their business was their, you know, effectively the value should double because you now, you know, bolted on another 50 million of revenue. They're both growing very quickly. So.
01:18:39 - Jud Bowman
But what's interesting is sort of, you know, the ad tech got very hot, the trade desk, things like that. And so. And they bought a series of other companies too, which was somewhat dilutionary, too, but like Digital Turbine hit $100 a share. Like, they hit a $10 billion market cap.
01:18:57 - Scot Wingo
Holy cow.
01:18:59 - Jud Bowman
I think one of the metrics for entrepreneurs, too, is you want to succeed. But how many millionaires were created by the companies you started? And there were a handful from matricity, obviously, with an ipo, that one. But if you do the math, the high point of the stock, it was a $1.8 billion deal. So there were over 20 that I can think of just off the top of my head. But it all depended on when you sell your stock.
01:19:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. Timing's everything. And then, you know, getting in these lockups can be very painful because Murphy's Law is like month five of a six month lockup, suddenly the stock starts to. There's nothing you can do. Yeah, I don't know if that happened to you or not, but I've seen that happen. Cool. So then when did you exit that and start Sift?
01:19:45 - Jud Bowman
On day one. So when we closed the deal and announced the transaction, I guess was promoted to a board member. So I joined the board of Digital Turbine. Bill Stone was the CEO of the combined company. Matt Terbergen, Jim Harvey, who's now at Pindo, some of the original hobby team sort of ran the office here in Durham. Digital Turbine at the time was headquartered in California, but is now headquartered in Austin, Texas.
01:20:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, they're still chugging along. And then when did the idea for Sift come up?
01:20:18 - Jud Bowman
So the idea for Sift was actually an idea that we incubated inside of Appia about the last year of the Appia venture, as we were trying to figure out how we go from 50 to 100 million. It was one of the sort of skunkworks projects that we had just started. Very nascent. But when we got acquired by Digital Turbine, it was a very specific thing. They wanted the ad network to marry with their single tap technology. And that little project was basically put on the shelf and nothing was done with it. And so as I remember, Bill approached me and said, look, we're doing nothing with this and you're on the board, but you're probably looking for your next startup. Do you want to take this and run with it? And I was like, this sounds awesome.
01:20:57 - Scot Wingo
Cool. And when was this in the time.
01:20:59 - Jud Bowman
Frame this would have been in 2015. So we closed the acquisition in March of 2015 and we ended up closing the spin out with some funding the very last day of the year in 2015. So we kind of got started in 2016.
01:21:12 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So you've been working on this for about eight years. Give us kind of the what is what Sift do and give us kind of a quick update of where you guys are.
01:21:20 - Jud Bowman
So Sift I co founded with Slavic Pruchnik and Jesper Rasmussen and they what's unique is in Aaron Schwager and. But Jesper and Slavic and I have now worked together over 20 years. So they have been two of the key technical members of Motricity, Appiah and Theft. So then with me, pretty much my whole entrepreneurial career, you know, you started this conversation saying like, so when did I learn to code? I never learned to code.
01:21:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:21:44 - Jud Bowman
But I have Slavic and Jesper, you know, that have been the linchpins.
01:21:49 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Being a good product person, you need if you have like a support team like that, that kind of trust your intuition and build. You get into this, you know someone well enough, you're like, hey, could you go build this? And it like comes back perfect. Like how you envision it. Like you've got this symbiotic relationship almost after a relationship like that.
01:22:05 - Jud Bowman
So Sift is still the company name. We've been at this nine years, believe it or not. I mean look at the time. 2015, 2016 to today. And of all my startups, it's the only one that didn't that sort of out the gate. The idea worked. Like the original idea ramped up faster than any startup I've ever been part of. So we went zero to $50 million run rate in like two years. Wow. We made the inc 500 like number 173, I think, something like that. And we've stayed sort of under the radar. Like I think our peak headcount was like 21 people.
01:22:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:22:39 - Jud Bowman
But the idea was that we were going to build, we built a profile of every person on the planet. So we had a big massive redis database full of everyone. You were in my database, Scott, and we were tracking every app you visited and a lot of other information. We had like 2 billion, so I guess not everybody on the planet, but we had 2 billion people. Certainly everybody in the U.S. yeah, in our database. And we were using that with machine learning to hyper target ads. Yeah.
01:23:06 - Scot Wingo
Really good targeting there.
01:23:07 - Jud Bowman
And it worked.
01:23:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.
01:23:09 - Jud Bowman
Until privacy became the thing.
01:23:11 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. The ATT and all the, you know, the Death of first party cookies or third party cookies. Yeah, seems like that would. That would hurt. Something like that.
01:23:22 - Jud Bowman
So we went 0 to 50. Back to 0.
01:23:25 - Scot Wingo
Holy cow. Why do you always pick these stories that have roller coasters in them? Why can't you just be slow and steady?
01:23:31 - Jud Bowman
My next company is going to be a hot sauce company. I just want something slow and steady. I'm too old to go back to Stanford now.
01:23:38 - Scot Wingo
Well, I think you pick ideas that are big and this is part of shooting at something big.
01:23:43 - Jud Bowman
I do. Like you're on a roller coaster. That comes from my mentor, Steve. I swear, every time I would call Steve, he'd say, you got to think bigger. Think billion. Think billion dollars. And look, I mean, Motricity hit a billion dollar market cap, maybe with an asterisk. Digital turbine, the Appia deal arguably hit over a billion dollars, like 1.8 billion at the very, very high day, but obviously with an asterisk. But sift, we're aiming for the moon. And we had an idea. We thought we had a tiger by the tail getting to 50 million run rate that fast, but it crashed down and we had to completely reset. And it was another one of those moments where the board said, should we just wind this down? I think I said it. We'd actually accumulated 10 million of retained earnings. So we're like, should we just wind down and distribute? We'd only raised 4 million of capital, I think. So it would have been a lowercase win. And we seriously considered doing that. And if we knew how bad it was going to get, that would have been the right decision. But it's always hard when you're still in the middle of it.
01:24:37 - Scot Wingo
But a lot of the big guys I know Facebook has faced similar problems. And so Snapchat and some of the bigger ad networks and they are on the other side of it through using AI and using a lot of more, you know, because you can't get that detailed personalization, they can at least start to see patterns and then, you know, do predictive analytics, what the broader family of AI kind of things to figure out machine learning, predictive analytics to figure out targeting again. Have you guys been able to kind of get on the other side of that?
01:25:07 - Jud Bowman
It's hard, yeah.
01:25:09 - Scot Wingo
Working on it still.
01:25:09 - Jud Bowman
We're working on it still. It's. We have climbed back. We're back to about a $5 million run rate. So, like, okay, there's something here, but it's really, really hard. And you're right, we're spending most of our time on the algorithms, ML and AI have come so far since we started this company and hoping we can get back.
01:25:35 - Scot Wingo
Well, two out of three. I think the odds are in your favor. I know. Well, we're an investor, teeny, tiny investor. But regardless, always cheering for your success. Yeah, you've. You've stayed remarkably humble having had a lot of success, so I appreciate that.
01:25:50 - Jud Bowman
I'm from eastern North Carolina.
01:25:53 - Scot Wingo
Go, go out there, eat some peanuts and go.
01:25:55 - Jud Bowman
Pirates. Yeah.
01:25:58 - Scot Wingo
Cool. Well, thanks for coming on the pod. It was good to hear all these stories. Hopefully, you know, other founders that listen to this realize some of these stories get painted as up and to the right, and they're hardly ever that way. So you've had a lot of really interesting adventures. Thanks for sharing those stories.
01:26:11 - Jud Bowman
Yeah, thanks, Scott. Great to see you.
01:26:13 - Scot Wingo
Thanks, Eugene. Bye.
01:26:20 - Jud Bowman
For more Tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener time substack@tweener.substack.com. for more tweener content, check out tweenertime. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle Tweenertalks.
