/n London Business School John Bates Tim Rea London Business School REF: LBS-CS-17-025 Date: 2017 Decision time at WT Mobile Abstract As Tim Rea, CEO of WT Mobile, sat down with James and Mark Rodell, founders of the business, he knew they had some important decisions to make. Rea and his partners were in the process of funding their mobile communications company. Over previous few months, they had presented the business to an array of professional and Angel investors. Their response had taken them by surprise: all the investors were keen to invest. Now they had to make some decisions. Which investors would be best for the business? How many shares should they allocate to different investors? How much money should they raise? To answer these questions they would need to take into account several different, and related considerations: the future profile and growth expectations of the business; the likely value of the company; the contribution that each of the investors would be able to make to the business, now and in the future; and of course, the investors' own needs. And overshadowing the fundraising was the attitude of the Rodell's; they were, Rea was increasingly aware, leaning towards a smaller investment round. Their biggest concern seemed to be dilution, as they did not want their shareholding to fall below 50%. Rea's own instinct was to take whatever money was on the table, and he felt that they would need a much more substantial funding round sooner rather than later. One way or another, Rea and his partners would need to balance these diverse perspectives and needs and make the best decision for the company. The Case was prepared by Tim Rea with the assistance of Fergal Byrne under the direction of John Bates, Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. This case has been prepared as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either the effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Copyright © 2017 London Business School. All rights reserved. No part of this case study may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission of London Business school. London Business School Riches in Sunderland? When Tim Rea first travelled with Alex Gordon to Sunderland to meet some local entrepreneurs in April 2006 he felt that he might be on a wild goose chase. Sunderland was not exactly known as a technology hotspot and it did not have a strong culture of entrepreneurship. Tim had agreed to come on the request of Alex, a colleague who was part of ETS Ventures, a new, £30m VC co-investment fund supported by government and EU funds. Alex had worked with Tim on several projects in the past and was hoping that Tim could provide some validation and perhaps some support for one or more local companies. Alex was quite excited by a couple of recent propositions and was particularly keen to introduce Tim to the Rodells, a father/son team that had developed a range of mobile communication applications. "I'm sure you will find this interesting," Alex had told him as they arrived at the Rodell's house. “These guys live in the home of the future and everything is controlled via mobile phone. There's got to be something here to build a business around..." If anyone would be able to give Alex advice on the viability of the project it was Rea. A former research technologist, MBA, and experienced technology entrepreneur, Rea had spent many years working in the mobile industry and more recently financing technology companies working with leading VC companies globally. Tim's mobile industry knowledge and contacts were second to none. As they travelled up Tim tried to dampen Alex's enthusiasm for the technical prowess of the team they were heading to meet. "My general view is that it is difficult to differentiate a mobile proposition on the basis of technology when the really difficult issues are associated with delivery and general commercial execution." As they approached the Rodell's home, the gates to the drive opened automatically and James Rodell came out to greet them. He was in his late 40's and, as he escorted Tim and Alex into the sitting room, he explained his background: "My background is in mechanical engineering and I have been working at Sunderland University for quite a few years, at the same time as building up a niche consulting business over 10 years measuring stress in difficult mechanical environments. My clients include BMW, Rolls Royce, Siemens..." James had recently resigned from the university to concentrate on developing the business further with Mark his son. Mark, who was 21, was nearing the conclusion of his electronic and electrical engineering degree course at Sunderland University. James was keen to establish his son's credentials: Copyright 2017 London Business School 2 London Business School "Mark became the technical director of our business at the age of eight and very quickly developed a reputation for innovative software developments. For example, all of the UK frigates and submarines are running software that was developed by Mark when he was 14. He also won many awards including first prize for the Young Electronics Designer Awards for five consecutive years, Young Engineer of the Year award and several others..." Mark was quieter about his accomplishments, but picked up the story to explain some of their recent activities: "My father's business requires an ability to collect and analyse data and many of the installations are abroad, so we started developing mobile applications that would allow us to retrieve data. This then led us to develop quite a few other things that make use of mobile data capabilities." James presented several projects, including an alarm system that Mark had recently developed. An add-on to existing fire alarm systems, it allowed people to use their mobile phones like walkie-talkies in order to deal with the alarm situation. Although Tim felt the actual alarm application was not extraordinary, he was interested in the way the messaging system worked with different mobile operating operators. On the way back from the meeting, he gave his view: "These guys are definitely strong on the technical side and appear to have a decent understanding of mobile technology. My feeling is that they could potentially develop an operator-independent messaging platform, but I'll have to think it through." Market Context Tim's project portfolio was split between VC-related and corporate work. On the corporate side, Tim was an advisor to an Asian mobile supplier of equipment and handsets and also regularly worked with mobile operators. On the VC side, Tim had spent a couple of years doing ad hoc work for several firms, but recently begun working exclusively as a venture partner with a leading global fund, STech Ventures. This enabled him to be involved in the full lifecycle of sourcing, executing and managing investments and maintain involvement in other projects. Tim was particularly interested in Instant Messaging (IM) and, to a lesser degree, Push-to- Talk systems (which provided walkie-talkie like function for mobile phones). Although these services seemed a natural fit for mobile handsets, there were no decent offerings by mobile operators. Tim felt was that this was because mobile operators' wanted to preserve SMS revenues. But he believed that the recent trend for mobile operators to reduce data charges and open their networks to third party service providers could create an opportunity for an independent service provider to emerge. Copyright 2017 London Business School 3 London Business School "The mobile messaging market is so massive despite the fact that SMS is such a poor medium. If WT Mobile can define a proposition that is easily accessible by the mass market, this could be interesting," he later explained to Alex. Rea's interest piqued, he decided he needed to get a better understanding of the status of the emerging push-to-talk services that were proving popular in the US, but were basically non-existent elsewhere. Details of the market, general context and some data regarding mobile messaging and IM are included in Exhibit 1; details of recent comments regarding the Push-to-Talk market are outlined in Exhibit 2. Tim also called a close contact within Orange to learn more about their recent attempts to launch a push-to-talk service in the UK. The project, he discovered, had been effectively abandoned despite some reasonable marketing efforts. Tim felt this was not related to the proposition itself, but to the way it was packaged by Orange. In particular, because it was based on one particular handset, required a special tariff and the only worked between users of that handset that have subscribed to the right tariff. Tim's thinking on the mobile messaging service was particularly influenced by the recent success of Skype, where he felt some were some clear parallels. Defining the Proposition Alex arranged for Tim to be paid for a few days work with Mark and James to advise them on how to establish a business that could attract funding. At a follow-up meeting a few days later, Tim outlined his ideas to Alex to get some indication as to whether or not Alex would invest in such a proposition. As a starting point, Tim proposed creating a messaging service that would enable groups of mobile users to communicate by voice or text on a many-to-many basis in real time via an IM-like interface across all networks. Tim proposed that a client application could be available as a free download and customers would get a basic service using the standard client for free (i.e. user only pays the associated data charges to the mobile operator). Beyond a defined level, users would pay for specific events, but the bulk of revenues were expected to come from users paying a modest subscription to use a premium client that could offer a number of features that are necessary for active users. Following several email exchanges with Mark, Tim proposed that the key characteristics of the proposed service would be as follows: A user can define a new channel and invite contacts to join that channel. Once connected, all members of a channel remain connected and any member of the group can speak to all of the other members in real time by pressing a button (e.g. the menu key) and speaking into the microphone. Copyright 2017 London Business School 4 London Business School - A user may be connected to the service via a compatible mobile device on any operator network or via an internet connected PC. The service will provide an effective bridge between PC connected users and mobile users. The application supports text-based messages in cases where text is preferred. Users will be able to send pictures to all the members of a particular channel on a one-to-many basis along with a voice message. Group interaction is facilitated by a server-side system which collects input, holds messages in the correct order and re-transmits the messages in the correct order to prevent the over-talking that would be encountered in a normal simplex radio system. Users can define channels on the basis of proximity so that, for example, a user can pre-define a channel to consist of all contacts that are within a certain range. This function is enabled by a positioning function that is contained within our application. Users can elect to have discussions on their subscribed channels held on the central server for subsequent play-back. The application will interface to the most popular IM systems so that users of those existing IM systems will be able to work with their existing buddy lists and can use our client to communicate with users that connected via the dedicated MSN/AOL/Yahoo clients. This approach helps to get around the initial lack of a community using our client only. Users will be able to manage multiple channels so that it is possible to be connected to several channels simultaneously. A graphical representation of the service is outlined in the diagram below. Copyright 2017 London Business School 5