Turn By Turn

Do you remember what was going on in the world when you graduated or when your first child was born? I, too, relate major milestones in my life to things going on in the world, and as a founder, things going on in business at Networks In Motion.

Looking back, I can map various business milestones to personal ones. Our first angel round of investment happened around the time of my most important merger: my wedding to my fellow co-founder! Our first institutional round of investment came upon my first child’s birth (i.e., picture receiving the final executed term sheet from your hospital bed). The birth of our second child followed some major changes at NIM, including a second round of venture capital and reorganization to support what became the biggest growth NIM ever experienced, both in size and deployments of our recently released VZ Navigator. And now this month I celebrate the birth of my third child (hooray!), which happens to coincide with the launch of NIM’s self-branded navigator, Gokivo Navigator, on Blackberry App World.

There’s an old Spanish saying that goes “el bebe con la palanqueta bajo del brazo,”, which translates to “a baby with a baguette under his arm.”. I found it confusing at first when my mother first said it to me, but it basically means that a baby brings with it prosperity. I dare say in the past this has proven true, and by the looks of Gokivo’s stellar reviews, including a win of Microsoft’s Mobile Incubation Week award, we’re off to a great start.

As for the happy occasion of my third child’s birth, one might think the hard part’s over. But, as with the birth of a company, that’s really the easy part. It’s raising it up to be everything you dreamed and hoped for it that is the real challenge - and the real joy - of being both a parent and an entrepreneur. So let the fun begin!

Networks In Motion’s path began eight years ago with a vision my husband and I had as we drove around in L.A. traffic one weekday afternoon. The time was early fall of 2000. My husband, Michael, and I had been working together for years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA facility run by CalTech, in the Satellite Communications R & D group. We worked on cool stuff like wireless communication, video imaging, ASIC programming, RF hardware design, digital encoding/decoding software and more.

We loved our jobs but knew that we wanted to do more, to control our own destiny – and, given that we were prone to working 80+ hour weeks anyways, we thought it’s now or never to start something new. Although we were told we were crazy to both leave our jobs, we set off to make a new life for ourselves.

Believe it or not, when we left, we had no idea what our new business would be. The first month was spent brainstorming, networking, feeling out business approaches. Around this time the FCC had released the E911 mandate, which required that all cell phone operators be able to locate cell phones when dialing 911. That was clue #1.

Then we learned that the GPS Selective Availability (SA) filter, which, for security measures, reduced the accuracy of GPS available to the general public, was recently turned off, thereby allowing for more accurate GPS location capability. That was clue #2.We added the assumption that cell phones would become cheaper and smaller and that everyone would end up owning at least one eventually. We also added the assumption that GPS chips would become cheaper and smaller and lower power, and that cell phone makers would see this path intersect with the E911 mandate and end up making and selling GPS-enabled cell phones. That was big clue #3. So, to borrow a Blue’s Clues token, we sat in our thinking chairs to think, think, think. And what we came up with was that someone needed to make GPS a benefit to everyone’s lives – and it was there we found our calling.

So as we drove through L.A. traffic one hot afternoon, we looked around at all the drivers on the highway in their cars, maybe not knowing where they were going, how they were getting there or when, or what was ahead of them. We thought, wouldn’t it be great to know all these things? If not for finding a better way to get to their destination or being prepared, at least they could have peace of mind. And wouldn’t people be willing to pay for this?

We were convinced absolutely. We thought, if we could help create or drive this non-existent industry that was to become LBS, we would leave our mark in history. We pictured our vision of success: every driver on the road with a location-enabled phone, a location-enabled computer at their desk or home and a location-enabled car, all synchronized to a person’s life, knowing their next appointment, notifying them when they have to leave, telling them how to get there, seamlessly transferring this knowledge from computer to cell phone to car, and having this constantly available personalized assistant conveniently in the palm of your hand.

What we envisioned that day eight years ago has yet to be fully realized, but we are getting closer, and the world has changed so much, I don’t doubt that we’ll meet that day soon. And I fully suspect that NIM will be at the center of that journey.