Re: [FRIAM] Introduction- Montgomery- Kyield
Mark, Welcome aboard!! What rich experience! For me, it was hard to appreciate Santa Fe's possibilities until I realized how SMALL it is. Much smaller, for instance, than Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Once I factored in its size, I came to realize how extraordinary is its energy. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://cusf.viviti.com - Original Message - From: Mark Montgomery To: Friam Friam;topics & issues Sent: 5/26/2009 10:49:15 AM Subject: [FRIAM] Introduction- Montgomery- Kyield Hi folks, I may have met some of you in person-- sorry for any redundancy. This may be more information than you seek in an introduction, but it's the minimum I can share I am a very experienced entrepreneur, consultant, and founder of Kyield - www.kyield.com . My wife and I moved to Santa Fe from Half Moon Bay, CA early this year. We enjoy living here- mountain and high desert lovers, but I am less optimistic about the business climate in my interests- primarily due to culture. Originally from Seattle area, I was engaged with my own business in the very early 1980s when I became deeply involved with the 'team Washington' strategy and ensuing effort, which was a very successful private/public sector effort. Seattle was still fairly depressed after the Boeing bust in the 70s just to get hammered by the deep recession of 1980. It was a dynamic time and place- at the time quite a small market- that resulted in quite a few global successes. I was directly involved with a couple and indirectly involved with most in that it was a small community. I learned a great deal, including that quite a number of essential ingredients need to come together in order to compete with the entrenched in the global economy, without which it rarely occurs. By compete I mean building globally competitive companies. My consulting firm/work took me to the SW near the peak of the S&L crisis. I performed marketing audits on most communities in the SW for investors, bankruptcies, turn around plans, acquisitions, etc. We were ready for a change and decided to move to Scottsdale and then a couple years later up to a mini ranch near Prescott. We were publishing self guided management systems for remote small businesses as part of our consulting firm when the commercialization of the Internet occurred. We were toying with software at the time- business planning, execution, etc. - a few years before they became common, so I decided to experiment on the Web. Virtual Franchise was our first effort- highly evolutionary, the effort quickly turned into I think the first personalized small business network- offering learning, applications, social networking, consulting, and e-commerce sales. The subscription service was among the most successful in the 1995/96 time frame. Our growth rate was huge- the quality of members outstanding- some business modeling issues were still challenging- for example fraud was still a big problem then for online vendors, but so too were the costs to grow, so I started searching for venture capital. I found no one in the SW in VC working at our level, and most in SV who were would be considered competitors- if not already, they soon would be - the pattern then for e-commerce was to copy globally and fund locally. Still is to some degree. One of our biggest challenges was with local vendors at the time- they weren't nearly flexible enough for the demands of the medium, or fast enough to adapt-or honest enough to work with me, so I decided to jump in totally myself, bringing all of the technical services in-house, training in networking and programming myself. The result was one of the first in-house e-commerce incubators, although we didn't use the name incubator- and it shouldn't be confused with most that use the name. Our effort was more like a small idealab, or an internal incubator for a corporation. We worked with some clients on a virtual basis, but we weren't in the real estate business. So for several years we worked (mainly me and one other partner with remote teams of contractors) very hard on the many issues facing viable and sustainable Web businesses, with every increasing technical sophistication. We produced the first shop the web campaign and portal, and a global learning network for thought leaders- all top universities- agencies- corps were members, attracting a very strong membership- probably the world leading effort, with multiple firsts in software applications. Our Kyield effort has roots in the latter. I was a pioneer of sorts in e-commerce, also KM and Semantic Web, although frankly both terms have been abused in the minds of many enterprise customers, and so I tend to be the messenger of bad news lately, delivering tough love if anything. At the ti
[FRIAM] Introduction- Montgomery- Kyield
Hi folks, I may have met some of you in person-- sorry for any redundancy. This may be more information than you seek in an introduction, but it's the minimum I can share I am a very experienced entrepreneur, consultant, and founder of Kyield - www.kyield.com . My wife and I moved to Santa Fe from Half Moon Bay, CA early this year. We enjoy living here- mountain and high desert lovers, but I am less optimistic about the business climate in my interests- primarily due to culture. Originally from Seattle area, I was engaged with my own business in the very early 1980s when I became deeply involved with the 'team Washington' strategy and ensuing effort, which was a very successful private/public sector effort. Seattle was still fairly depressed after the Boeing bust in the 70s just to get hammered by the deep recession of 1980. It was a dynamic time and place- at the time quite a small market- that resulted in quite a few global successes. I was directly involved with a couple and indirectly involved with most in that it was a small community. I learned a great deal, including that quite a number of essential ingredients need to come together in order to compete with the entrenched in the global economy, without which it rarely occurs. By compete I mean building globally competitive companies. My consulting firm/work took me to the SW near the peak of the S&L crisis. I performed marketing audits on most communities in the SW for investors, bankruptcies, turn around plans, acquisitions, etc. We were ready for a change and decided to move to Scottsdale and then a couple years later up to a mini ranch near Prescott. We were publishing self guided management systems for remote small businesses as part of our consulting firm when the commercialization of the Internet occurred. We were toying with software at the time- business planning, execution, etc. - a few years before they became common, so I decided to experiment on the Web. Virtual Franchise was our first effort- highly evolutionary, the effort quickly turned into I think the first personalized small business network- offering learning, applications, social networking, consulting, and e-commerce sales. The subscription service was among the most successful in the 1995/96 time frame. Our growth rate was huge- the quality of members outstanding- some business modeling issues were still challenging- for example fraud was still a big problem then for online vendors, but so too were the costs to grow, so I started searching for venture capital. I found no one in the SW in VC working at our level, and most in SV who were would be considered competitors- if not already, they soon would be - the pattern then for e-commerce was to copy globally and fund locally. Still is to some degree. One of our biggest challenges was with local vendors at the time- they weren't nearly flexible enough for the demands of the medium, or fast enough to adapt-or honest enough to work with me, so I decided to jump in totally myself, bringing all of the technical services in-house, training in networking and programming myself. The result was one of the first in-house e-commerce incubators, although we didn't use the name incubator- and it shouldn't be confused with most that use the name. Our effort was more like a small idealab, or an internal incubator for a corporation. We worked with some clients on a virtual basis, but we weren't in the real estate business. So for several years we worked (mainly me and one other partner with remote teams of contractors) very hard on the many issues facing viable and sustainable Web businesses, with every increasing technical sophistication. We produced the first shop the web campaign and portal, and a global learning network for thought leaders- all top universities- agencies- corps were members, attracting a very strong membership- probably the world leading effort, with multiple firsts in software applications. Our Kyield effort has roots in the latter. I was a pioneer of sorts in e-commerce, also KM and Semantic Web, although frankly both terms have been abused in the minds of many enterprise customers, and so I tend to be the messenger of bad news lately, delivering tough love if anything. At the time Google was being hatched, for example, I was deeply involved in the science of search engines- looking at several to license- tested several, finding Google to be best- before the angel round and long before the VC round, which probably occurred in part due to my communications with the investors. It had modeling problems, not technical. We had multiple offers to relocate the incubator, one to take it public on relocation to the east coast, but for a variety of reasons- ethics (look at what happened to incubators after IPOs) & preference of team members on where they would live, we declined. We never did receive a viable financing offer from the SW. We did receive multiple insti
