FounderBuzz

Transcript by Speechpad:

Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Olson with Founder Buzz. I'm here today with John Giobbi of Proxense. Thanks for being with us, John.

John: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Scott: Well, I'd love to hear a little bit about yourself and your company.

John: I'm the founder and CEO of Proxense here in beautiful Bend, Oregon. Proxense has developed an ultra secure, wireless automation technology, which we call TruProx, and a secure scalable platform that it's built on.

The goal of the technology and the platform itself is really to automate proximity-based tasks while simultaneously, dramatically improving the security of them. In other words, we don't make a tradeoff between security and ease of use or benefits of it.

One example, just to give you a sense, is our ProxAccess module. It's a piece of software that is installed in hospitals that allows the user to walk up to a work station with one of our devices on them and be automatically detected and authenticated and then have their software launched and logged into for them. So by doing nothing more than walking up to a machine, they're automatically logged in to their software without having to do anything, and yet it's extremely secure.

Scott: Is this technology used in places where they share resources quite a bit? Is that kind of one of the main applications, like a hospital where you certainly have a lot of computers where there are multiple people coming in and out and using those as opposed to I've got my laptop?

John: This is definitely part of it, but it's also used in places that you have a lot of logging in and logging out going on, and a hospital is a perfect example of that. Because of HIPAA, doctors and nurses and PAs have told us just endless number of times that they're logging in a hundred, sometimes as many as 200 times a day.

Scott: Wow.

John: Of course, logging out is important too in that situation. Up until our system, there has been no automated way to do that, they end up having to time out and log out automatically, which means that they're constantly being logged out when they don't want to be.

Scott: Where did you get the inspiration for the company? What's your background?

John: Well, my background is software. I've been in software my entire career. But the real inspiration came back in the days of Napster, when the idea of allowing individuals to potentially link their digital media to a wireless device which then had to be in the area when they wanted to play back that digital media was an idea that I thought might have the potential to stop their rampant illegal downloading that was going on back in the early 2000s.

I didn't pursue that directly, but the concept of it in general opened my eyes to the potential of such technology and especially if you built a little extra capabilities into it, which is what we've done. That then led to the idea of building a platform base with a network on top of the technology, in other words, enabling it to be used in many, many different uses or services.

Scott: Right. You certainly have evolved your technology from your initial idea based upon your interactions and feedback from the early customers. Is that right?

John: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it changed a lot. Again, we had the original idea, but then as I really got into it and began to ask questions and looked into the different opportunities that existed before I realized there were fantastic opportunities. But they did require a lot of homework and effort to get down to and determine which ones they were.

Scott: Right. Well, one of the things we love to do is share insights from founders that would help other entrepreneurs. Is there anything that you can think of in particular that you've learned through this process and kind of evolving your company that you think would really benefit somebody else looking to start their own company?

John: Yeah, definitely. This is my third startup, by the way, too. Even with that being my third one, I still have found a lot of things to learn in this process that are even more important in this particular company, mainly because of the complexity of our products and the markets and the technology in general. I think one of the biggest things to do, in our case this is critical, pick your target. Pick where to start. A lot of times, you have ideas and you can see a thousand different uses.

In our case, that was exactly the problem. It was one of the biggest problems we had. Our technology is able to be used for almost endless numbers of things. So where do you start? I think, in our case, out of all the effort that was given to determining where to start, two basic things came up for us.

One of them was to do this as a platform, not just a technology. Really to think of it as a platform because then it allowed us to leverage our technology's broad applicability while not really locking us in or forcing us, I should say, to do a lot of different things up front. It allowed us to build something that we could then build on later on. But we still had to pick one particular use for it after the technology itself was built, and for us that was healthcare. It already made sense at the time and really right now even because of the economy and many other factors, but for us that made sense.

Picking the target is critical, and I think to do that you have to do your homework. You have to spend a lot of time and be willing to study what the real marketing opportunities are, who is the competition, what strengths and weaknesses do you have as a company, just many, many factors that go into it. But if you don't do this . . .

Scott: Sounds like the cornerstone, from what you said, is also just getting in front of the customer.

John: It is. It is. In fact, even once we narrowed it down in our case to wanting to do healthcare, we then spent probably close to a year traveling the country and talking with every CIO, CTO, doctor, nurse, whatever that we could get our hands on or face in front of, at least.

We really asked a lot of deep questions and didn't try to lead them in any direction as to what applications they should or shouldn't look at or whatever, just try to understand just generally where could we really be the best help. It was hugely beneficial, because doing that we came up with a handful of capabilities or services that were really needed that came up over and over and over, and it made the decision very simple at that point.

Scott: I think that's great advice, and I certainly appreciate you taking the time today.

John: Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. I hope we can help others avoid some of the mistakes we made.

Scott: Thanks a lot.

John: Thank you.