His story is an inspiration and it is our pleasure to connect you with Mike Dunn on ReadWriteWeb.

What is your background?

I'm an emerging media technologist. I've spent the latter half of my career as a chief technology officer for companies in media or technology.

I've always been an early adopter. I enjoy finding ways to adapt emerging media, trends, methodologies and technologies into a company. I've been attracted to change agent roles and opportunities.

I like the complexity of environments in the midst of change, where the need to implement innovation is necessary to grow or turn around anything from an entire company to an individual product opportunity.

I tend to be responsible for the technical assessment of Venture and M&A opportunities. I'm asked to manage strategic partnerships with technology companies, service providers and academic institutions.

I'm a director for a bank and an online ecommerce site, an advisor to a media marketplace startup, a b2b operating company, a major technology trade publication and an insurance industry information portal startup.

My portal glemak.com contains pointers to my bio and online activities.

You've been CTO of Dell Online, Time Warner and now Hearst. How did you evolve through these experiences?

My roles in each have been very different. My Dell role occurred just as ecommerce was striving for adoption, Time Warner occurred right in the middle of the bubble, and Hearst is occurring while the web is dynamically changing as it moves to massive online communities and the long tail of media.

Dell Online was an internal start-up championed by Michael Dell to lead the way for the entire enterprise, not only to build the online capability, but also to spread its adoption and utilization. We pointed the way for transitioning a company via ecommerce.

I was part of an excellent team tasked with designing and building a high availability transactional environment, and one which did it all with nascent ecommerce development tools.

I spent a great deal of time briefing customers and partners on the value of our approach to building the infrastructure and platform that represented the revolutionary change to selling securely via the web. This was early days of ecommerce and prior to the 'all-in, spare no expense' bubble. Employees and customers needed to be convinced Dell's online efforts were safe and provided value.

When Time Warner approached me to become the CTO, I accepted since the reason I was hired at Dell had been satisfied. The site and team were built and stable, and the ecommerce transition had started to happen.

At Dell I learned how to plan and build for scale, how to partner with diverse technology units driven by multiple motivating factors, how to lead via influence, and how to educate and socialize the value of a complex paradigm shifting technological change for a company.

Time Warner was a huge role and opportunity. I'd spent time earlier working in technology management for Hanna-Barbera and Turner. Both became Time Warner properties after I'd left Turner in the early '90s.

My role involved overseeing corporate technology assets and services such as the global WAN connecting diverse businesses, our messaging environment and corporate applications. I managed an IT team responsible for these functions, but that was only 20% of my job. The other 80% was strategic, seeking opportunities to leverage traditional and emerging technology initiatives across over 660 businesses.

I relied on virtual teams, groups of diverse experts loaned part-time from individual units so that Time Warner could leverage internal resources and expertise. We used consultants of course, but our SMEs were the leaders and guides.

Mid tenure the AOL acquisition occurred, causing us to realign our initiatives to deal with this massive merger event.

I learned a lot about strategic guidance via influence. It is better to spend time convincing folks about something you'd like to see change so that they adopt the idea as their own.

A valuable lesson I learned at Time Warner was never to get overwhelmed with the scope of responsibility an initiative or role entails.

My current role with Hearst is also about leading via influence. As emerging media technologist, I advise and work directly with the various divisions. I also oversee relationships with technology partners and academic institutes.

I provide technical due diligence for our enterprise level investments and acquisitions, and I provide guidance and oversight for our portfolio companies, and am responsible for the technology aspects of wholly owned entities.

At Hearst I've had to evolve my methods to align with a larger entity changing to meet a rapidly shifting media landscape.

How has the media landscape changed in the past 5 years?

Dramatically. I started at Hearst 5 years ago, so I've seen the changes inside my company and from the media landscape at large.

Five years ago blogging, social media / networking, user-generated content and ubiquitous online consumption of rich media were not pervasive, and were not leveraged in any substantial way by the traditional media industry.

Yes there were those of us blogging, utilizing RSS and generating media online who were both inside and outside the traditional media industry. These will continue to grow dramatically.

Today most media entities are exploring or immersed in emerging media capabilities, especially publishing online and direct community engagement. The connected aspect of the communities has been a constant evolution. Instead of talking 'at' their audience, they need to become an active peer participant in the conversation.

The desire to access media has changed dramatically. Traditional methods of producing and distributing media have been extended in dramatic ways via technologies such as flash video, mobile access and Podcasting.

What are the economics of the print v. online world for media companies?

Traditional and online media production and distribution are of equal importance in today's rapidly changing media landscape. It's all about transitional focus.

I'd broaden the question to: What are the economics of all forms of traditional media v. online?

Today the same product that is produced for traditional distribution needs also to be leveraged in as many other media as possible, and as many times as possible. For example, the concept for an article is published traditionally, yet there are numerous ways to extend the reach and life of that content online: by publishing an extended version to the web, syndicating it to other sites, maybe posting a Podcast of the original interviews. The original article can now be leveraged for a longer time and in many more venues.

What tangible revenue models do you see for online media today and on the horizon?

The revenue models for online are much the same as those available via traditional means: (e)commerce, affiliation, subscription, advertising, sponsorship (donation), pay to play, and product placement.

The biggest difference is in scale. Traditional media is larger yet narrower and today provides a greater percentage of revenue than the smaller yet much broader online revenue landscape. The barriers to entry into traditional media are costly and complex, while online they are much less expensive and simpler for new entrants.

Tangible revenue models being focused on today are advertising via CPM and PPC, with some seeing success via PPL and PPS.

What strategic changes are you implementing at Hearst to prepare for the future?

We're pursuing strategic investments and acquisitions in emerging and innovative media, and we're aggressively scaling or creating integrated digital media groups inside our business units.

On the enterprise technology side my group has been implementing program management and enterprise governance processes. Both are important structural changes.

On the strategic relationship side, I'm coordinating our relationship with the MIT Media Lab. The MIT sponsorship is a key research and development mechanism, from a 'what will media look like 3 to 10 years out' perspective.

You've been writing about technical due diligence on your blog. What are the top 5 things that must be in place?

1) The primary things I look for are a thorough understanding of a company's current technology state and a roadmap of their future. I then fill in the building blocks to paint a picture of the company and its structure via the next 4 areas.

2) Staffing: The company should have a proper ratio of dedicated to outsourced staff. The focus for in-house staff should be on owning and extending the company's value-add. The focus of the outsourced staff / service should be on areas where technology is available at a reasonable price.

3) Infrastructure and Architectural: I look for alignment between the infrastructure in place and their roadmap. I try to understand their architecture, i.e., have they designed something that will be stable, yet scale and grow as their business requires? Have they over or under built, are their investments proper for current state and extensible as their growth requires?

4) Workflow and Processes: This is usually the hardest part of my interviews with startups because while most have ways they do things, they often aren't comfortable expressing them. They also aren't normally done in a way that's repeatable to the point where they could be called a workflow. This is OK. As they mature, standardized workflows and processes will be established, normally out of a necessity to ensure they're providing a stable environment that doesn't get negatively affected as they introduce change.

5) Costs: This is the spreadsheet part of the conversations. What has been spent to get them to the point they're at, what do they need to spend near term, possibly with funding from my company, and what do they envision they'll need to spend? I look for a grounded approach to spending.

What is your secret for balancing personal and business life?

You work to live, not live to work. I've always had a passion for my career, but I've also made sure I spend priority time with my family. We spend time together snowboarding each winter in Vermont, and mountain biking the other months, along with our dogs.

Both my boys are athletes, so I make as many of their games as possible. I work hard and travel a lot, but I'm home for important family events.

What is one insight, business or technical that you want to share with our readers?

Try and develop the art of listening. Too often folks spend so much time trying to think about and express their own opinions that they miss the details of the conversation occurring around them.

Most of the successful folks I've been around in my career are excellent listeners.

What is the meaning of life according to Mike Dunn?

My geek answer is the same as Brad Feld's meaning of life = 42. But the serious one is that life is all about learning.

If you can learn something useful at every stage of your life and use that knowledge to improve your life as well as to teach it to others, whether its your kids or someone you mentor, then your life should be rewarding.

The venture investing process used to be largely a mystery. Young entrepreneurs were not sure how to value their companies, nor were they sure what to make of the term sheets offered to them - largely because the mechanics of venture math weren't open to them. But recently the rules of the game have changed. The venture process is now much more open, in no small part because of Brad Feld.

Feld is also responsible for building what is today a thriving tech community in Colorado. When he moved to Boulder 15 years ago with his wife Amy, there was little to no tech presence. Today Boulder is a boom town, buzzing with some of the sharpest brains in tech. Companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and Gnip, as well as a whole pack of TechStars (which Feld started with Dave Cohen) alumni headquartered in Boulder.

Besides making a huge impact as a VC, Feld is one of the most inspirational people I've met. It is my pleasure to connect our readers with him via this interview.

What is your background?

I grew up in Dallas. I got an Apple II computer for my bar mitzvah and quickly became a reasonably well adjusted teenage computer nerd way before it was cool. I went to MIT, got a few degrees from there, and started my first successful company (Feld Technologies) when I was a sophomore. With a partner, we grew Feld Technologies into a decent sized (20 person) software consulting firm before selling it in 1993 to a public company (AmeriData Technologies). I worked for a few years at AmeriData while making angel investments with some of the money that I made (companies like Net.Genesis, Thinkfish, Harmonix, and Critical Path).

My wife Amy and I randomly moved to Boulder, Colorado from Boston in 1995 (Boston wasn't home for us) and have never looked back. In 1995 I started working with the Softbank making investments with them and in 1996 teamed up with three of the other guys working there to start Softbank Venture Capital (which turned into Mobius Venture Capital). I've been actively investing as a VC since 1996 in a wide range of software and Internet companies around the US. Last year (2007) I started a new firm with four of my friends from Mobius and we launched our new fund (Foundry Group - www.foundrygroup.com) in the fall of 2007.

How did you get interested in the Venture Capital business?

While Feld Technologies never took in any investment (we only raised $10 to start the company) a number of our customers were Venture Capital firms. We wrote back office software for the VCs to help them manage their portfolio accounting and reporting which - prior to us coming along - was a nasty spreadsheet exercise. I got to know some VCs and after we sold Feld Technologies did some consulting work for a few of them as I was investing as an angel investor. My connection with Softbank was random but timely, as Softbank was making an aggressive push to invest in Internet companies in the US (which directly overlapped with my angel investing). I woke up one day and had co-founded what became Mobius Venture Capital.

What are the top 3 things that you look in a company before you invest? Is there any one thing that always kills the deal for you?

I am a thematic investor. I like to pick a few themes - either deep technological protocols or what I anticipate to be broad market changes in the adoption and use of technology - and invest in the themes over a 10+ year period. Historical themes including email and RSS; current themes include these along with the Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and something we call Glue.

So - thing #1 is "does it fit a current theme?" If no, we pass unless it is an entrepreneur that we know or have worked with before (we aren't a slave to our themes, but the bar for looking at something outside a current theme is usually having an existing relationship.) The next thing we look at are the people. Are these people we want to work with? Do we think we'll have fun creating a company together? Do we trust each other and believe we can have an open conversation regardless of the circumstances? Will we be able to kick ass together? If we get past these two gates, then we go deep.

What was your best/worst investment ever?

Best: Based on combined financial metrics and realized absolute dollar returned, probably Service Metrics. Worst: In terms of heartbreak, probably Interliant. I co-founded it, it maxed out at a $2.5b public market valuation in 2000, and was bankrupt in 2002. I've had plenty of bad investments that didn't ever get off the ground; the toughest ones for me have been the ones that had huge value at some point and then got decimated when the Internet bubble burst.

What are the top technologies that you want to invest in over the next 3 years?

Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and Glue.

How did you become a marathon runner?

I was a cross country runner in high school and always loved running. When I hit age 35 (around 2001) I was a blimp, way out of shape, and physically worn out because of how intense work had become. I decided I needed a big goal that would force me to spend time away from work that would benefit me. Marathon running was a logical one since I had always loved to run. I decided that I would run a marathon in every state in the US by the time I turned 50. I've knocked down 10 of them (the 11th is happening on June 21).

Which business leaders, past or present, do you admire the most and why?

Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, and my grandfather.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

What is the meaning of life according to Brad Feld?

When it's over, they dig a hole in the ground, put you in it (or spread your ashes somewhere), print your picture in the newspaper and write some nice things about you, and then life goes on for everyone else but you. Live every minute that you have.

Welcome to the second installment of our new People in Tech series. In this post we interview Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck. It's a mobile web startup built on the premise that "you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email." The second big idea of Skydeck is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records. Read on for more insights...

Almost a decade ago, Devitt and Joerg recognized the power behind the idea of a hand held computer that users carried around with them wherever they went. The duo went on to build Vindigo city guide - one of the first successful consumer applications for mobile devices. The software automatically loaded local information onto Palm Pilots and allowed people to find reviews of local businesses and restaurants. It was downloaded by over 2 million users and won numerous awards.

Five years later, Vindigo was acquired by For-Side.com - one of the largest mobile media companies in the world. And Devitt is back with Skydeck, which brings the social dimension to your phone in a whole new way. Before reading this interview with someone we found to be a very insightful and visionary entrepreneur, we recommend that you get a feel for what sort of person Jason Devitt is by watching his testimony before the US Congress.

Note: Skydeck is still in private beta, but if you mention ReadWriteWeb during sign up, you will get an invite straight away.

What is your background?

I grew up in Ireland, studied electronic engineering and law (long story), and then spent four years working for an extremely successful hedge fund called D. E. Shaw, in London and New York. That was like getting paid to do an MBA, but more importantly the company moved me to New York in the middle of the dotcom boom and I finally discovered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: start companies.

Tell us about your first startup - Vindigo.

Vindigo was one of the first companies in the US to sell content and applications for mobile devices. We published about twenty different titles for BREW, Java, Palm, and Windows devices. We powered apps for MapQuest, the New York Times, MadLibs, and Plaxo, we managed the mobile web portal for a tier 1 US carrier, but we also developed our own content and we were best known for our first app, the Vindigo city guide. We started that company in my apartment, built it up to $10 million in revenue, and sold it in 2004. Vindigo is still in business and still profitable as far as I know, but I left in 2005.

How did you come up with the idea for Skydeck?

My co-founder Mike Wells and I were working on a completely different business idea, and our research for that led us to take a close look at cell phone bills. We realized that there's a lot of useful information locked up in your bill in a useless format. For example, if you live in the US, there's a complete record of all your calls each month - both incoming and outgoing. We asked ourselves why is this data so hard to get at? Some carriers let you download a CSV file, some smartphones let you export a file, but the vast majority of carriers and phones don't offer either and there are no standards for the rest.

You may think it's a good idea that all this data disappears into the ether. But it doesn't. Your carrier uses it to market new services to you. Your employer can get at it if you have a business plan. The police can get it if they have a warrant, and the NSA can get it without a warrant. So why can't you? That was the starting point.

What is the main idea behind Skydeck?

There are actually two big ideas. The first is that you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email.

Imagine if Outlook or Apple Mail or Thunderbird only showed you the last ten emails that you had sent or received. What would you do? You'd try to make notes about emails that were important. You'd send someone an IM instead of an email just to make sure you had a record of the message. You'd try to guess the last time you sent an email to a customer. But most of the time you'd just forget about a message as soon as something else grabbed your attention. You'd get by - you may remember life without email at all - but it would be broken. Yet that's how our cell phones work today. We plan to fix this. We start with the data in your phone bill, marry it to your address book, and turn the list of numbers into a history of all your conversations so that you can search and sort and filter it just like your email archives. We're working towards real-time data.

The second big idea is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records.

Your true network is not the list of people that you 'friend' on Facebook or LinkedIn; it's the people that you call and text and email and IM every day. Those friends are not created equal. The ones you speak to most often are important, and the guy that you exchanged one email with in 2001 is not, even if he tags you on every new social site online. Skydeck maps your true social network using your cell phone data. Straight away you can see who you call most often, who you need to call, and who never calls you back. If you make a lot of phone calls, this can change your behavior. Over time we'll help you use the data to manage and prioritize all your communications, including activity on other networks. And as of last week we let you share some of the data - with everyone opting in - so that Skydeck members can see not only which other Skydeck members have connected to you, but which of them really know you well.

What influenced your choice to build a browser extension?

We need you to trust us with some very sensitive information. We decided that one way to earn that trust was to avoid asking for the username and password to your cell phone account. So we wrote an extension that stores those in your browser, retrieves your bills on your behalf, and uploads them to Skydeck.

We've had mixed reactions to this approach. Some people see any download as a security risk in itself; others share a computer and don't want to store passwords in the browser. And some people would sooner give up their social security number, home address, and medical records than spend 30 seconds installing a toolbar. On the other hand, some people appreciate the effort we made and others love the toolbar because we included a gauge showing how many minutes and text messages you have left on your account each day. In the future, we'll offer people a choice.

What are the most complex technical challenges facing Skydeck?

Your true social graph is much richer than a list of connections, because each connection has some measure of strength associated it with. The challenge is that this graph is directed and asymmetric, unlike most networks you create online. This means, for example, that each person has a unique, personal view of the network.

We've just started giving users the ability to browse and explore this network. Adding better ways to navigate it, keeping it up-to-date as the data flows in, and scaling the whole thing are some of the technical challenges we're excited about.

What are your goals for 2008 and beyond?

We just talk about the next iteration. And the next iteration is data that updates every day, not just once a month.

How did the mobile landscape change between your first and second coming?

When we started Vindigo in 1999, a smartphone was the Neopoint 1000. In 2000 I bought the first phone in the world with a color screen, the Sony Ericsson T68. There was no mobile web, there was only WAP, and WAP was so awful that we built our first app for PDAs. Just a year ago people claimed that the iPhone would never be a mass market product because it was too expensive. Now it's $199. Five years from now, a phone with the feature set the iPhone had at launch will be free from Tracfone, without a contract.

But the biggest and most important change is the move towards open platforms. Mobile 1.0 companies like Vindigo couldn't do anything without the permission of carriers, and some of our best ideas died on the vine. That's why I was happy to testify to Congress and the FCC in support of the open access provisions for the 700 MHz auctions.

Today most phones have a credible web browser and more than 10% of new phones have an open OS. (Not open source, just open to installing a third-party application; the bar is low in mobile.) That means there are a lot more services that companies like Skydeck can take directly to the consumer. This is the only way the mobile market will ever realize its potential, unless the carriers get religion and embrace innovation. And thanks Alex, but my 'second coming' won't do that.

Which business leaders, past or present, do you admire the most and why?

In our culture we place too much emphasis on leaders and not enough on teams.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

The implicit graph will be to social software what PageRank was to search.

The implicit social graph is the true social network that I mentioned previously, the network deduced from your communication history: automatic, dynamic, weighted, and not necessarily symmetric. Social software refers to any application where people interact, from Facebook to eBay to email.

A problem common to all social apps is that the more successful they get, the harder it gets to pluck the signal from the noise. Yogi Berra may as well have been talking about MySpace when he said "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Starting out on eBay, my reputation should not be zero, it should be based on the reputation of the people who know me well. I should be able to give out a public email address, but block messages from everyone except my true 1st and 2nd degree. On Twitter I should be able to follow the 25 people who are most important to me at any given time. And I should be able to do all this without having to make and maintain a list of who those people are, and without having to fill out forms, check boxes, and assign people to groups every time I meet someone new.

I'm not claiming that we've got it all worked out and that Skydeck will be the next Google. I know of at least six startups exploring different aspects of this. There are also people working on it at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, and readers should take a look at MIT's work on reality mining.

My 'insight' is that someone is going to build a billion-dollar company around the implicit social graph. And I'm betting on Skydeck.

Wrap Up

Please post any additional questions for Jason and also, let us know who else you'd like to see interviewed in our "People in Tech" series via the comments below.

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