I just ran through the Lala.com site, as well as reading about the remote Sonos/iPhone capabilities. I have to reminisce about a company a friend and I started some time ago.
It was called Bounce Networks. It was so far out there that all we got were looks of confusion from nearly EVERYONE we talked to. Particularly the folks on Sand Hill Rd.
Think about a company with personal mp3 player devices like ipods – but they sync over wifi. And a central server like a tivo, but it connects to a service like Lala for cloud-based storage of your music. It’s got the ability to play the same thing or different things in every room of your house just like Sonos… and, here’s the kicker… it automatically syncs with your car when you’re at home so you can take your entire library with you on the road. For icing, you can use an iPhone-like general purpose device to control it all. (in this case it was an iPaq with a wifi card)
It still sounds like a thing of the future, but we actually built it in 2001. Seven years ago. The whole system actually worked – at least in prototype form. I must have had the world’s first digitally enabled Audi TT.
Part of me is nostalgic for the great team and the excitement of the vision. Another part of me is kicking myself for not following through on the DRM, Wifi and subscription-based business patent applications. We’d own Apple by now.
Most of all, though, as I see the announcements today that are getting significant excitement and buzz, I am feeling a little smug. Along the lines of “Yep, we thought of that…”
There’s also a lesson here. We started the company in the fallout of the first nuclear (tech) market meltdown. My business partner Mike Rubin and I were confident entrepreneurs, priding ourselves in “doing the hard thing.” e.g. creating a truly visionary company in a down market. We met with Geoffrey Moore and the team at Mohr Davidow and eagerly soaked up the feedback. (But no money to soak up…)
So, what’s the lesson? As I have heard Ev of Twitter say – “be small.”
We had a monster plan with bells, whistles and a cherry on top. Impossible to fund and even more impossible to get to market without a thousand moving parts. I can still feel the sting of our pitch to Selby Ventures when we got 30 seconds into the pitch and a partner shouted out “Not another plan to change the world! I am out of here!” and he got up and walked out.
If I had it to do over, I would have picked a single slice of the vision that was believable, credible and didn’t scare the pants off of the money-folks.
I would also have worked to flesh out a Winterization plan that would allow us to keep the vision alive through adverse funding times. Maybe with that the team would have been able to give Apple and iTunes a worthy competitor. We certainly had the plans and the talent.
Mike Rubin, Rick Weisman, Craig Hagopian, Reed Meseck, Steve Suttles, Rob Teegarden, David Ting and the rest of the crew… we were swinging for the fences. Going for broke…. and ultimately going broke. Even so, it was awesome. Huge.
When the doors flew off, the team dissipated into corporate jobs with Intel, HP, Yahoo, Broadcom and the likes. I went on to run Search at AOL. Not bad gigs at all. But I know we all still want to see it happen.
So, with a quick tip of my hat to the old Bounce Networks crew, here are all of the documents – all that’s left of Bounce and its grand vision.
Would somebody PLEASE build this thing and bring us in to advise and invest? 
Illustration and design by Kurt Aspland
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October 29, 2008 at 1:51 am
[...] luckyrobot.com added an interesting post on The music service of the futureHere’s a small teaserI just ran through the ...
October 29, 2008 at 4:11 pm
[...] Campbell recently made a post about Bounce Networks a company he and Mike Rubin started. There was a group [...]