About John Reed:
Knowing a little of my background may shed some light on things.
The family history is relatively unremarkable except that my great-grandfather started the crash of 1929. This may be an exaggeration. However, a prized personal possession is a 1929 ten-dollar bill somehow issued by the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Gilmer (Texas) and signed by H.J. Childress, the relative in question. Apparently Doc Childress was minting money in Gilmer, a practice which was soon put to a halt for good reason. I grew up in Dallas, except for a brief stint outside of Philadelphia when my dad left T.I. to work for Univac. He later was an early employee at Docutel, one of the first ATM manufacturers.
At a recent dinner, the party question was “What was your lowest paying/worst/most interesting job growing up?”
- Lowest paying job was probably Baskin-Robbins at age 15, which paid $1.15 per hour and had four hour shifts, yielding about $3.60 per shift after tax. It took all summer to buy an Electro-Voice EV-1082 stereo which is still in our garage somewhere. On the plus side most of my buddies worked there, and you could lock girls in the freezer.
- Worst job was probably a summer job as “Actuarial Assistant”, where I somehow convinced management I could write code (never true) in the days of time sharing and punch cards. The end result of my efforts was a program stuck in a very long loop that ran all night, generating a huge timeshare bill and about a three foot stack of paper that looked a lot like what Jack Nicholson wrote in “the Shining”. The rest of the summer was spent in a remote interior cube collating things.
- The Mardi Gras T-Shirt business with my friend Scott Bedford worked out quite a bit better. We figured out how to buy T-shirts from the mafia and sell them in the French quarter without a carnival permit. The life lessons learned as a Canal Street Mardi Gras T-shirt vendor at 2AM are outside of the scope of this forum.
I initially thought to follow Dr. Childress in the combined practice of rural medicine and high finance, enrolling as a Physics major at Tulane. However, sophomore year while living in splendor above the Nature’s Way health food shop on Magazine Street, my roommate Al and I discovered how close Florida was to New Orleans, and med school dropped off the to-do list. Al and I both returned to our respective state schools; I graduated from UT Austin in 1979 with a major in Marketing plus three cars and a Honda 350 (aka ‘Big Red’). In a series of events that define the phrase “rapid succession”:
- I sold my prized 1966 F-150 for eighty-five bucks in a deal I got the better end of,
- the 442 caught on fire,
- and my deathtrap 1967 Austin Healey 3000 acquired a bent frame, leaving me with
- ‘Big Red’ for transportation to SMU for an MBA the next year.
In 1980’s Texas, newly minted MBA’s wanted to go into Oil & Gas or commercial real estate. I had the good fortune of working for the Trammel Crow Company leasing and developing office space. The partner who hired me, Jack Griffin is doing some new interesting things and is a good example of combining passion and expertise.
In 1986 I started a commercial real estate brokerage shop, and we had great offices in the Crescent for about $8.00 per foot (those were the days!) We started raising money for our office leasing clients, because in that environment the Texas banks were in a freefall and cash was very tight. Scott brought me a deal Tim Peters was putting together, and I arranged the seed round and joined the board, later stepping out of real estate completely. That company became Source Media, which we took public in 1995, and where we worked for ten years in the technology and new media space. As president of Source I worked at the intersection of new ventures, capital raising, and deals:
- The Interactive Channel, which launched in Colorado Springs in 1996 (the link really takes you back in time )
- The Virtual Modem, the Cableshare technology behind the Channel, later sold to Liberate:
- The IT Network, a pioneering local ad-driven electronic directory.
The 90’s were an incredible period for combining technology and media. We saw the disintermediation of content, and I even got to ride in Tracy Swedlow’s Art Car.
The founders exited Source in 1999, and in 1999 the world was a very interesting place. I became a co-founder and CEO of LifeCast, which aggregated private country club sites. It was an aggressive growth, advertising driven, communities model and I got to team up with good friends and co-workers from Source, Aaron Ye and Patrick Peters, along with Mark Aguirre who had been working on a web-based sports concept for some time. We went from 0 to 100 employees in about nine months, bringing in ClubCorp as a lead strategic investor. ClubCorp bought control in the summer of 2000, and I stepped out to look for ‘next’.
“Next” became the acquisition of assets from two public companies to form Bluestreak Network, where I was Chairman and CEO, with Tom Peters, John McCalla, and Yves D’Aoust. Bluestreak is based in Montreal, and its MachBlue platform fixes the problem of awful navigation for mobile TV and embedded devices. Earlier this year we brought on Paul Forostowsky, a sector expert in mobile media, as Bluestreak CEO, completing a C round last summer, and I stepped out to look for the next new thing.
For twenty years, I’ve been involved in raising and deploying capital to grow Texas-based technology companies. Today I see a new class of interesting growth company opportunities in Texas, and this forum, if successful, will be a good place for the introduction and discussion of related ideas, companies and people.
-John J. Reed
