Much has been documented on the features of Glympse, so I wanted to chat a bit deeper with Bryan Trussel, Co-founder and CEO, and talk some about where we are going in terms of location technologies. It was an very interesting conversation and below is a full transcript of the interview.
Location is not a game, it’s a utility. Elaborate on that statement…
You speak in terms of forward thinking, it is interesting… the elements in our initial meetings and slide decks were hilarious, it was stuff like ‘we think smart phones were going to become more prevalent, we think social networks up and coming’… if you look at the time when we were doing that, there weren’t many smartphones out in the market… people questioned our assumptions.
The thing is people have been sharing location – 90’s and today – just not digitally.. analog. People share text or phone call. That happens 10’s of millions of times a day. Now with location today, you use location in games and searches, etc… but the “hey, where are you?” question happens quite often each day. And that’s where we saw the real opportunity. Hey If we can make it easier to share location, more rich, more dynamic, make it simple without privacy concerns… almost a reflex in peoples lives, that’s where we want to be. we are 10% there but happy with where we are today.
We make the claim, like meeting with you today, I could text or call a few times to let you know where I am currently… or I could just share a Glympse at the beginning and then not worry about and you can see for yourself. We will be really happy when people everywhere are sending Glympses everyday like a normal action, like a text.
Why is location important?
Take from the beginning of time, from the caveman going out and slaughtering the mammoth (family members wondering where they are), from the ship going out on the horizon and people on the shore wondering “where’s the ship” to the pony express riding the horse, to the telegraph, to now a telephone, now everything is real-time… so if you fast forward accounting for advances in technology… you see a pattern of something people have done since the beginning of time – wondering about someone’s location and whereabouts. And we will have this need 50 years in the future, If you can take that and make it easier, more rich and simple… we think it’s a good place to be.
Now that’s not to say there aren’t going to be a lot of other ways to use location in lives, but there was this thought around that there was only one or two player in location space, no… hundreds and thousands of ways with many different things associated with it.
So you would view it as a splintering of the category?
Yes, just like the Internet. What’s the power of the Internet, There’s thousands of categories… ecommerce, social, information. When the Internet came along, borders were broken down the big thing was connecting someone here with someone in Belarus. Location was irrelevant. But I think when we were doing that we forgot, it’s more relevant right here. Your daily life is in the real world. The people you shake hands with, the kids you come home to… now we can take all the things where location matters.
Now we are seeing the emergence of local, hyper local… The power now seems to be “on this block”
Yeah, it’s like the opposite as before. take search as an example…. when the Internet was in it’s infancy. I can search movies in Tokyo, but is that really relevant to me? But now, geez, there is so much information.. now things like twitter, flash mobs, social networks, coupons, things I can touch right now. That’s just starting to take off.
Where do you see this space going? There is an open path for sure.
So it’s kind of foggy. But here’s where i think it’s going… I make the analogy to the .com era… it was new and nascent, but now the Internet is part of every company, everyone has a .com… it’s just part of the company. So will location, it will be infused in everything. Now where you look up a movie theater app, restaurant reviews, coupon, interact with people.. they all have it, it will transcend most things. You will have this class of things location will just sit on top of.
Do you think there will be one major player providing location?
Stuff will move up the stack.. two years ago you could have had a company could have had cool GPS chips, then you had companies build up location databases, then you had an API for developers to find location information, now you have companies providing automatic geofencing, you now have I think we’ll just have innovation higher and higher… it’s so easy to do now. If I can get that, what service can I lay on top of that. The innovation will just be higher and higher up the stack.
Outside of the “I’m late for the meeting” scenario, walk me through your dream use case.
That might be peoples entry point, then they start to use it more and more deeply in their life. Probably one of the most common scenarios has gone from “I’m late” to I’m on my way”. We just put out a new releases where you can put a little icon on your home screen, you can make one like “going home” and you just touch it and then go. That replaces the annoying questions such as “have you left yet? Have you left yet? Yes I almost have, no I am stuck in traffic” People use it when they caravan the kids to soccer. Where we see it going, where we will be happy, is where people use it in all the scenarios where they could use it.
Take a look at text messaging. Go back to your text messages, probably 10% involve your location… We see it going from “i’m late to “I’m on my way” so people just do it for fun, I’m going on a run, going out shopping. Some guy sent one out last week where he was moving out over a field, then he goes over a river, then he starts running in circles… turns out he was hang gliding! He sent a Glympse out for people to watch his hang gliding.
If we can succeed in our vision, where people use it all the time, making if you fast forward a few years this premise of people being confused with where people are goes out the window.
Privacy, where do you sit on that issue?
It kind of goes in waves. 80% of the people just want to know that they are in control. We do several things, A) you never share your location until you say go, B) you set the timeline so it stops when you want it to, automatically, C) we put ‘stop broadcasting’ very prominently in the UI, and you can delete any Glympse at any time, it disappears from your phone as well as off our servers.
In fact, we have a policy to delete any from our servers after 48 hours anyway. So, I think people will ease into it, just like e-commerce. Remember back in 1996, no one wanted to place their credit cards online.. over time eBay, Amazon and others developed a positive reputation for security. And people warmed up to putting their card online. We want to be this brand, “this is a Glympse enabled app” so people will trust it.
You can share as broadly or as narrow as you want.. to Facebook, twitter, or just one person.
In terms of privacy, we believe in baking it into the product, very obvious and user controlled. Rather than making people read 50 page privacy statements. It’s all right there.
We built an much more complex location platform initially, it was too complicated, so we actually threw the majority of that away and focused on the utility of it. The simple action of sharing your location with someone.
So do people have to have the app to receive a Glympse
Nope, people can view any Glympse through a mobile web interface. What we really want is someone sending a Glympse to anyone in the world, that someone receiving it, “oh, that’s cool” and then they look further.. and put it on their phone and then start using it. We don’t have a marketing budget… it’s how we have accrued million users through that viral technique. It’s worked pretty well for us.
16 Years at Microsoft, describe your journey and what pulled you away?
I was at Microsoft in the mid 90’s, it was very fun, challenging, great time to grow up in the software business. I started in the windows department, then went into games and X-box for a while. But I always wanted to go and try my own thing and I was really interested in the consumer side. Even then, I always had the “itch”… it’s one thing to succeed at Microsoft, it’s another to be successful on your own, without millions of dollars and the big name behind you. I called up some friends in the same situation, we were excited about mobile, about location, and we determined to go do something in the consumer space.
It’s a shame, everybody can’t jump into the entrepreneurial world even for a year or two.. Even if you fail, you will learn so much more.. I am more effective, more driven. You can’t study from the sidelines..
Do you feel some just don’t have the itch
Yes, i do…. everybody likes and wants a challenge, the adrenaline rush… even in a big company… with that said, you have to put everything into it to succeed and some might not want to do that in their life. If you are not driven to go make it happen, you are probably not an entrepreneur…
What is the most important characteristic of a successful CEO
THE? Probably the ability to rally people around a vision. Which means, A) you have a vision, B) you believe in it, C) it has to be a vision a bit off kilter, because if 5,000 others have the same vision you will get beat. So it has to be enough off mainstream that you have an advantage, one that makes sense… high risk, high reward.
What advice would you give young entrepreneurs out there who are just starting out.
If you can jump in to the entrepreneurial space early in life, do it. If you can surround yourself with the people who have done it, do it. I can’t image a scenario where even if you don’t succeed, whatever it is you do, that experience will be beneficial. I wish I would have done it earlier.
Internally, the Microsoft experience was an advantage since we knew how to build and roll out a software. But externally, when talking to investors, it was a liability would look and say “oh, how long were you at Microsoft?” They would question if we really were entrepreneurs.
Initially, we had to bootstrap our company, prototype our product and show we could get traction. Then we were able to show that we could built what we say we can build. Then we took that to some angels, got some money, then took the product to VC’s. It was a lot easier once we got something in the market.
So you plan on expanding the team?
Yes, that is the main reason for the latest funding round, we will be expanding the development team. We got a lot of opportunities in front of us.. That is the cool thing about this area, Seattle, there is a lot of smart, entrepreneurial minded technical people here. It’s a great place for us to draw upon for talent.
It’s times like these I grab my copy of Founders At Work, a book which has helped me through similar challenging times. As a collection of startup and early day stories of some of the more well known technology companies from the past 25 years, it is my entrepreneurial medicine. It gives inside perspectives on the founding of various companies starting with Lotus, Apple all the way to Flickr and Craigslist, almost like you are there with them. You can feel their pain and experience their triamph all the while secretly wishing/hoping you will one day grace similar pages. Through reading incredible stories like overcoming insurmountable challenges , founder disagreements, backstabbing, near bankruptcy, exploding revenue, and going public you realize every entrepreneur faces an uphill battle and your situation, although unique, is not impossible.
I’m amazed at how quickly people will stand up and defend not just the status quo but the inevitability of it. We’ve been taught since forever that the world needs joiners and followers, not just leaders. We’ve been taught that fitting in is far better than standing out, and that good enough is good enough.
So Entrepreneurial 
