Adaptive Medias Inc (fka ADTM)

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Kasian Franks email reply [IN FULL]

I've worked in Silicon Valley for the last 20 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasian_Franks) and also at Genentech where Joe Seiwert III mentored me in the area of pattern recognition applied to pharmaceutical data. Since 1996, I also spent a lot of time developing many algorithms for analyzing stock market data, finding patterns in the Market, see: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=12546 I also went into the bioinformatics industry working along side Raf Podowski where we produced a search and discovery system for human genes that was bought by NEC in Japan for a cool million. After that I was invited to work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) under Saira Mian and Mina Bissell to focus on Search and Discovery/Recommendation applied to human genomics for the purpose of extending human life span. You wouldn't believe some of the things we were able to do, it was simply astonishing. We had a chance to write a few published papers such as this one: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/250/ I'll certainly be starting another company in the future that will have a great focus on this.

At Berkeley Labs, we were able to establish a single and powerful patent related finding hidden connections and Search. The technology would mimic the way the human brain might engage in searching and discovering hidden connections, some of which was based on the book by Steven Pinker titled "How the Mind Works".

I decided to seek funding, $7.5 million, to found a start-up called SeeqPod with the help of Shekhar Lodha. We worked with an extraordinary and platinum-level technology transfer team at Berkeley Lab to exclusively license the patent for the purpose of building the world's best specialized search and recommendation engine for what we called "Playable Search Results", basically, for anything that had a "play" button on the Internet. This happened in 2005 and it was a spin-off from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which also took a 5% stake in the company.

Eventually, we were able to attract a user base of 50 million monthly active users and 250 million monthly searches and, in the worst economic times in U.S. history. See: http://goo.gl/eqGQI

Around late 2007 this also attracted the attention of Steve Jobs, who viewed us a threat to his iTunes empire. He met with worlds top music labels for many reasons but also to come up with a list of companies that were viewed as a threat to iTunes, the platform that would soon spawn the multi-billion dollar mobile app industry we see today. We were also the first to release an original app with Apple in 2007: http://www.lbl.gov/today/2007/Jul/27-Fri/7-27-07.html

I got a call from Austin Norohna, head of Sony M&A. He told me they missed the boat in terms of their competition with the iPod vs. the Walkman and that they wanted to work with SeeqPod to take on iTunes. Excellent, we were ready to go to war.

One morning in January of 2008 as I was sitting in a taxi in New York on my way to meet a few rainmaker attorneys to discuss brokering a $100 million acquisition of SeeqPod, I looked down at my iPhone to check the news and saw this headline in the New York Post "Warner Music Group Sues SeeqPod". This was just a few minutes before our M&A meeting. When we made it to attorney's offices, they said "We saw the headline, looks like you guys have finally arrived!" Um, yes, we had, on a battlefield soon to be based on the worst economic times in U.S. history.

Warner sued us because you could search and find just about any piece of music on our engine. At the time, Viacom was also preparing to sue Google/YouTube for the same thing.

EMI sued SeeqPod about a year after, they EMI sued me personally for billions: http://www.beet.tv/2009/02/seeqpod-gets-hit-with-multibillion-dollar-lawsuits.html - They believed each search on our engine was a copyright infringement a fine worth up to $120,000 per search. We had 250 million searches happening per month. Needless to say, I, along with our great legal team, Duane Morris, fought hard and got it kicked out of court.

Again, all of this was happening during the worst economic conditions the U.S. had seen since 1929. We were still battling it out with Warner and EMI on a corporate level. Eventually, our lead investor left as he was overexposed on the Indian BSE as it was down by about 80%. Sony, along with our other suitors, walked to the sidelines to wait like vultures. As valuation along with thousands of other private and public companies continued to drop, I decided to wind down SeeqPod and allow the assets to be acquired.

I took a quick breather and then decided to found another start-up, Mimvi, but in the worst of economic times. Sometimes there is a lot of opportunity in doing this, sort of a "blood in the streets" for start-upville. Having a good amount of the knowledge related to the Markets, I knew one thing: Most public companies would have a chance to recover their valuations, while most private companies would have turn to dust based on Venture Capital principles.

Mimvi was unique because it was essentially a public start-up via an alternative IPO on the OTC and we had our stakes in the ground in one of the most valuable spaces a company could be, in the mobile app ecosystem tied to our knowledge of Search and Discovery along with the revenue generating power Google had proved for search engines. Having a good understanding of how the Markets work in terms of my experience with developing algorithms for market data, I knew one of the most important things was to maintain a reasonably low float, 5 million. As time went on, I took on a few bad partners/funders who made promises but never came through. It was like taking off from the runway and having someone say I'll meet at 20,000 feet with the fuel you need. This never happened, they were never there and my team was at 20,000 feet in the air on fumes with no fuel. I knew from my SeeqPod days how to tough it out. It takes a great team.

While the economy was repairing itself, I did all I could to keep the company afloat and it was difficult as it was my first public company. I took on a few more team members as stop-gap measures and the DNA of the company began to change. In exchange for a few other deals, I had to remove myself from the chain of command while changing out some of the management layer.

We established a relationship with Microsoft and had Samsung in the pipeline as well as others. We could have never predicted many of those we were dealing with at Microsoft had plans on jumping ship. This made things move glacially slow and it continues to this day.

Having the right unified team is essential. Having the right float is essential.

Today, NFLX has a 49 million share float while MIMV has a 65 million share float. This needs to be fixed and their is a plan in place to do this and I'm not talking about a standard 10000000000000000000 to 1 reverse split. I'm confident Mimvi management will continue to travel down a path toward this primary focus of repairing the float with the goal of listing on Nasdaq.

I expect my family of companies to do well if they continue to follow many of the principles I've learned on the battlefields in the past. Recently, I've added Pimovi, a private company owned by a public company, CHAG, which has a new team with different DNA, algorithms, technology and more experience than ever. See: http://pimovi.com along with https://docs.google.com/a/pimovi.com/file/d/0B9u1VXKP-h46ZFFZMHFsTDN2SkE/edit?usp=drive_web

And this is just the start!

Feel free to send me any other questions.

Onward!