Jim Carol’s PacketVideo Giving a New Look to Wireless Communications
Well into his third year of running a high-tech start-up, Jim Carol sits in a new building with views of the Interstate 5-805 split and contemplates the notion of risk.
“You know, a risk is driving your car at 90 mph without a seat belt on, on a crowded road,” says the 43-year-old executive. What he’s doing now, he insists, is not a risk.
“This is an adventure. This is one of life’s great experiences.”
Carol is the CEO and co-founder of PacketVideo Corp.
The company, located near University Towne Centre, makes software letting people with laptop or handheld computers receive streaming video in the same way a person might get a call on a cell phone.
PacketVideo software uses wireless networks to deliver video. A person might use it to view a “nanny cam,” to make sure all’s well at home. They might tap into a service showing real-time traffic at the 5-805 junction. Or they might go to a Web site showing movie trailers at nearby theaters, then use their computer to buy tickets to the matinee show.
The self-effacing Carol says his founding partner, Jim Brailean, is the important part of the duo, the “cornerstone” of the company. Brailean is PacketVideo’s president and chief technology officer. Both were executives at Motorola , Carol in Orange County, Brailean in suburban Chicago , when they met in 1996.
Locking Up Ideas
“I told Jim if he ever had a great idea, to put it in a little treasure chest, lock it up and bring it to me, and I’d go find the money to start it,” Carol recalls. The caveat was that it had to be something he had never worked on at Motorola.
So a little more than three years ago, on a ski lift in Steamboat, Colo., Brailean told Carol he saw a need for wireless video software to complement a new generation of processors, not to mention emerging market demand.
By the time they reached the top of the lift, the story goes, both had decided to tell their wives they were quitting Motorola.
“People called it a risk, but to give up a salaried job is a risk? I just don’t see that,” Carol says. “I followed my intuition and it didn’t feel like a risk at all.”
By now, the company’s investor roster contains big names in both the wireless and communications industries. PacketVideo has raised $42.5 million from entities including Intel Capital, Siemens Mustang Ventures and Royal Philips Electronics as well as Time Warner and Sony Corp. of America.
Both Qualcomm Inc. (another investor) and Ericsson Wireless Communications Inc. have thought well enough of PacketVideo’s products to feature them in recent demonstrations of their offerings of CDMA, which stands for code division multiple access.
IPO Backs Up
PacketVideo was poised for an initial public offering last spring. Executives thought better of their timing when tech stocks fell, and PacketVideo is still privately held.
For Carol, the route to small-screen video included stints selling hefty computers.
He was born in Cleveland, grew up in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in Pittsburgh. He admits he was not a standout student. Attracted by its sports complex, he went through West Virginia Wesleyan College on a baseball scholarship.
The Marine Corps took Carol through officer candidate school and the judge advocate program. He came to California to go to law school, but deferred admission and worked.
“I had a clear vision that I wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer,” Carol says.
A friend’s success in selling computers both spurred his competitive spirit and inspired him to do the same, he recalls.
“I started my career with eight-bit CPUs that were word processors, and it was my goal to sell mainframes when I was 21 years old,” Carol says. In time he was working for Digital Equipment Corp., selling their biggest machines.
“They were called DECsystem-10s, and 9700s, and they cost about $4 million a computer,” he says. One of his customers was Copley Newspapers.
A Turning Point
In all, Carol was at Digital for nine years, holding sales and management jobs, watching new products roll out, watching the Internet evolve, and witnessing a turning point in company history.
Digital lost money in the early 1990s, and the fate of founder Ken Olsen made an impression on Carol.
Olsen went from being “a visionary who could do no wrong, to being crucified in the press as the technology world and business models changed around him,” Carol recalls.
“Mr. Olsen is a great man, he created a great company, and a fertile workplace for thousands of people,” Carol says. “It made me realize the importance of building a flexible organization that can adapt to rapidly morphing markets.”
After Digital, Carol went to Motorola, where he was vice president for a new business selling communications components to original equipment manufacturers. Sales went from nothing to $84 million in 18 months.
He also founded an entrepreneurial business inside Motorola. Its focus was sending voice and video via Internet protocol over wired networks.
Project Partners
It was around that time that Carol met up with Brailean, an electrical engineering Ph.D. who had worked for years on an error resilience committee for an open, wireless multimedia standard called MPEG-4.
Then a corporate researcher at Motorola, Brailean set to work on Carol’s voice and video project.
Soon Carol and Brailean were talking about striking out on their own. The Motorola project had problems.
“It wasn’t getting the freedom it needed to succeed,” Carol says. “And Motorola realized that.”
PIMCO Advisors CEO Bill Cvengros, whom Carol describes as “the most successful businessman I know,” also got involved. The three put together roughly $1 million of their own money, Carol recalls, and started PacketVideo, building it around the MPEG-4 standard. Cvengros is now chairman.
PacketVideo’s 29 months of existence have brought a few challenges to its founders.
First, they started the company “before wireless was cool,” Carol says.
Savvy Population
What’s more, company officials have had to spend a lot of time overseas, where wireless networks are advanced and the population is “wireless savvy.”
“In Europe and in Asia they say to us, ‘When can I get it? When can I get it?'” Carol says of his product. “Here in the U.S. they say, ‘What will I do with it?'”
PacketVideo has had to arrange for content for the infant technology.
Today the company has 300 employees and multiple offices in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United States. Though the company had offers to locate its headquarters in Chicago and Los Angeles, the company picked San Diego.
Carol commutes to work from the Orange County community of Laguna Niguel, where he lives with his wife, Cynthia, and their children. They have two sons, ages 11 and 5, and adopted an infant daughter in August.
P.G. Wilder, an Orange County real estate agent, has children about the same age as the Carols’. The families go to the beach together. Wilder characterizes Jim Carol as the first adult to hit the water with the kids.
Part-Time Coach
Carol also coaches youth baseball. Wilder recalls Carol helping one player, who was not a gifted athlete, get to the point where he could successfully field a ball to make an out.
Carol estimates he has coached four youth baseball teams in the past few years. Those include the Beach City Bulls, whose members play on scholarships provided by Jim Carol. (The team will go to Cooperstown, N.Y., this summer. Instead of fund-raising, Carol asks the players to do community service, Wilder said.)
Carol has an ability to bring people together, and to find people’s talents then enhance them, Wilder says.
He is also compassionate, “very funny” and a “high-powered guy,” Wilder says.
Just what motivates Carol? For a minute Carol is speechless.
“I guess pride,” he says.
The people at PacketVideo have created something “really special,” Carol says.
“I don’t sit and look back behind me,” he says. “I’m looking forward and saying, ‘OK, here we are right now. Now how do we raise the level of the game?'”
