Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

As part of my continuing series of interviews showcasing the Canadian tech scene I asked my friend Russell Samuels, the founder of Ventis Media to share a bit about his story in building a succesfull software company as a stay at home dad

Russell worked with me at Zero-Knowledge Systems, and then again at Synomos (a failed spin out of Zero-Knowledge Systems). We went through a lot together at ZKS and he has since moved on to becoming an entrepreneur.

For the last couple of years Russell has been building Ventis Media. They are among the many hidden in plain site Canadian companies achieving great things without a lot of local awareness. He is one of the many Zero-Knowledge alumni who have gone on to found their own companies.

Russell’s and his team are the developers of MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey is the 2nd most popular MP3 music manager with 1.8 million downloads on Download.com.

CNet gives MediaMonkey a 5 star rating and here is what their editors say about the software.

Despite a glut of free player/encoders, it’s tough to find one that meets our expectations. Formerly known as Sound DB, MediaMonkey has excellent library-management tools that keep the largest digital music collections well organized. Stir that up with integrated CD and DVD burning, a stellar interface, a full-featured encoder, and the ability to sync with portable audio devices such as the iPod, and you have a pretty compelling product.

and…

Considering the overall polish of this application, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything you don’t like.

So first all congratulations on the success of your MediaMonkey product, why don’t you tell me a bit about the project?

MediaMonkey is a music organizer for serious music collectors who are looking for an organizer that gives them more control than other players out there. It’s a labour of love, having grown out of a hobby project by my partner and my belief several years ago that we could do better than RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.

You are based in Montreal, can you tell me about your team and where they are based?

We’re a completely virtual company to the extent that I’ve never met anyone else in the company face to face. Other full-time team members are in Serbia, the Czech Republic, and we have consultants in France, Italy, Portugal, etc. To bridge the distance we use a variety of intranet applications, instant messaging, and skype–we could not exist without the internet.

How have your funded your business, and do you have any thoughts on early stage technology in Canada – was it easy for you to get your project going? Any advice for small teams looking to finance software projects out of Canada based on your experience?

MediaMonkey was self-funded. For the first year of the project only 2 people worked on it (slaved on it would be more accurate), gradually growing to the 6 full time members that we have today. In retrospect, it might have been wiser to seek funding early on, however, the advantage is that we were and are fully in control of our destiny. I’ve seen friends seek funding, only to lose interest in their businesses since with funding comes VCs who have certain expectations about how the business should be run. Funding is a double-edged sword: it can open new possibilities, but it can also bring a certain amount of baggage depending on where the funding comes from.

Competing against iTunes and Windows Media Player seems crazy to most, but Media Monkey seems to have developed a strong following, how do you deal with competing against entrenched players like Microsoft & Apple.

Apple and Microsoft have to build their products to support the needs of the average user, but very often, this means not including some functionality that is critical for more serious collectors. The key for us has been to focus on a specific niche of customers that want more than is available via iTunes or Windows Media Player and tailoring MM to meet their needs.

A big part of this has been involving our customers in the development process. Although MM isn’t open source, we have a very open development process that has encouraged the development of a large community of users and contributors. Users submit critiques and feature ideas which form the basis of future product versions.

The product is also engineered to facilitate user contributions. It has open APIs that encourage users to contribute new functionality on top of the platform, open specs for skinning and translation, and a forum within which users can exchange their ideas.

To illustrate, MM is available in 13 languages almost all of which have been contributed by our community. Our community is part of what makes MM viable in the face of such large competitors, and also what makes it so enjoyable.

What is exciting for you as part of being an entrepreneur?

Doing what I want when I want, and reaping the rewards and facing the consequences. It’s a lot of work, though: I can come up for lunch and play with my infant daughter, but I’m also often at my computer at 10pm and take my PC with me when I’m on vacation.

What is next for Media Monkey and Ventis Media?

Until now, most of our revenue has been upgrade-driven. Moving forward, we hope to capitalize on our user base by becoming a platform through which users can purchase music online.

A few of our former co-workers at Zero-Knowledge have gone on to start their own companies like yourself, any words of wisdom for entrepreneurs thinking of making the jump from working for the man, to being the man?

The time I spent working in other companies was invaluable–it’s given me so many learning experiences. But when you start feeling that you could do it better, it may be time to make that jump. Just choose something you enjoy–having an idea, ability, knowledge and connections isn’t enough–you need drive and passion to get through the hurdles that you’ll invariably face.

I’m not sure how we went from me being man, to me asking the man about leaving working for me (as the man) to become the man himself - but these are crazy times. Kind of makes it hard to figure out who to stick it to when you want to stick it to the man.

On Wed 21 Feb 2007.