The past year has been full of changes. At the start of the year I was still co-owner of CustomerVision Inc., an enterprise social networking software company. Early in 2008 I sold my ownership stake in CustomerVision and started a new publishing company called PlainTales Inc.
In some respects this seemed like a big change because most of my past experience had been in the software world. My dad had a technology business that he started in the 80s that sold products and services for Unix minicomputers. This was my introduction to the technology business and after I graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 1989 I moved to Seattle, where I worked for Microsoft when it was still a smallish company.
I left Microsoft in 1993 and worked for a couple of startups, including a company called Spry that launched the first dial-up Internet product in the world called "Internet In A Box". "Internet In A Box" was wildly successful and led to the sale of the company to CompuServe (which then became part of AOL Time-Warner).
After Spry was sold I decided to take a job in Silicon Valley with a small software company that was sold shortly after I got there and became the Internet software division of Attachmate. After the acquisition I decided to launch my first startup with a bunch of friends from Attachmate.
The company was called Cerebe Inc. and we were focused on service management software for broadband communications companies. We built version 1.0 of the software, landed a handful of customers and received a term sheet from a well known venture capitalist but the company never got enough momentum so I finally had to move on and consider it a learning experience.
After I sold my stake in Cerebe I moved back to Seattle and worked as a product manager for a software company for about five years, before founding CustomerVision. CustomerVision was one of the first companies to explore how social networking technology could be utilized in a corporate environment.
We had some great success stories, at companies such as Wells Fargo and CDS Global, but it was always a bit of a challenge to explain how bottoms up, collaborative technology could fit into the more structured corporate world.
After deciding to sell my stake in CustomerVision I decided to go in a brand new direction in starting PlainTales. PlainTales is a publisher of audio CDs and digital audiobooks. Our first titles are audiobooks for kids 3 to 12 and include classic stories, retold traditional stories and nature tales. Since I have kids aged 3 and 9 that are active listeners of audiobooks that was genre that I was very familiar with and the opportunity to work with the kids in launching the company was an added incentive.
In many respects PlainTales Inc. is a traditional publishing company, but one of our long term goals is to build a community of parents and kids that are interested in playing an active role in the stories that play a formative part in their lives. Some of that community building will undoubtedly take place online and will include new social networking technology such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And even though audiobooks on CD will be with us for a long time, digital downloads and ebooks will become an increasingly important way for people to access our stories.
This is our founding idea:
"Great lives begin with great stories. That's why PlainTales creates high-quality audio stories for children and their families. We believe that masterful tellings of classic fairy tales, fables, and original children's stories do more than entertain. They inspire, educate, and encourage creative thinking. And yes, sometimes tickle your funny bone. When families listen to PlainTales together, they learn together. That's a story worth sharing."
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