|
|
 |
 |
February 2004 Collaboration:
|
|
|
by Chris McGarry, MBA '00
In 2001, GSB classmate Shamal Ranasinghe and I started an audio technology company called SoundIron. Last summer, we completed the last leg of the unlikely entrepreneurial journey that followed. On August 23, I loaded one week's worth of food, water, and sunscreen into a rented RV and drove seven hours to meet Shamal in the heart of the Black Rock Desert, a 25-by-15-mile expanse of federal land 340 miles northeast of San Francisco and one of the largest tracts of flat land on the planet. It is also the home of an annual arts festival called Burning Man and, not coincidentally, the place where we were about to debut a project called Sol System.
Sol System was a sprawling, carnivalesque audio-visual spectacle designed by more than 50 audio, electrical, mechanical, and civil engineers, sculptors, animators, programmers, painters, laser artists, welders, and contractors, and using more than 20 tons of audio gear, metal, wood, and other materials. The functional and technical centerpiece was one of the largest, most sophisticated sound systems ever assembled: an experimental 60-kilowatt, multichannel system powered by proprietary software and controls.
In 2001, Shamal and I set out to build a groundbreaking audio technology company. Two years later, we broke ground—literally—on a parched patch of Nevada earth 5,000 feet above sea level. Somewhere in between, a commercial venture aspiring to Sand Hill financing, mainstream brand recognition, and market leadership became a weeklong, not-for-profit exhibition at a sandswept, countercultural bacchanal.
As students at the GSB, we learned that entrepreneurs walk a path of almost constant change that challenges them, but it is also their lifeblood. The most effective entrepreneurs—Andy Grove, Phil Knight, Oprah Winfrey—displayed a superior ability to provoke, process, and profit from changes in their environment.
When we wrote our business plan a year after graduating from the GSB, we anticipated that market forces and input from investors, partners, and employees would take our company in unexpected directions. We resolved to embrace change—to treat the process as an adventure whose outcome we could not entirely control or predict. In short, we braced for a wild ride.
Only we wildly underestimated it.
In SoundIron's first nine months, we scored several victories. We closed a modest round of seed financing, recruited key technical hires, and assembled a blue-chip advisory board of digital audio thought leaders. We landed strategic partnerships with industry powerhouses Dolby and Digidesign and secured the creative endorsement of high-profile recording artists.
Over the next nine months, the ride turned rocky. We pursued a single, critical deal, which we ultimately lost to a late-emerging competitor. When we could not quickly identify an alternative deal, we forfeited financing that was contingent upon the deal's close. Within months SoundIron was insolvent.
In early 2003, Shamal and I met with the other members of the SoundIron team to assess our situation. We had built a formidable network of multichannel audio experts and were developing software that we believed would enhance the live music experience. We wanted to showcase our applications and domain knowledge—to convert our time and energy into something tangible and to make a statement about the future of music. For our swan song, we decided to produce a one-off multichannel music exhibition.
We approached several Bay Area venues, but each presented prohibitive acoustical and financial obstacles. Then we contacted the Burning Man organization, which granted us their real estate and flexibility. In deference to their noncommercial strictures, we renamed the project Sol System.
 |
We then turned our attention to financing a large sound stage off the grid in the Black Rock Desert. With eight months until Burning Man, we slated fundraising events starting with a 150-person cocktail party in a private loft space featuring live music and DJs. It generated several thousand dollars and an unexpected benefit: 18 of the attendees expressed an interest in participating in the project. Artist Amit Kapadiya asked if we would be willing to incorporate a sculpture. We gladly assented, and our audio installation became an audio-visual installation.
With each subsequent benefit event, our numbers and vision similarly expanded. By spring, the blueprint for Sol System included, besides the sound system, the aforementioned four-story metal sculpture, two 30-foot geodesic domes, a massive aerial trapeze rig, a 32-by-16-foot stage, five ornate pyramids, a 20-foot-tall, 34-foot-wide white octagonal observation deck adorned with Olympian columns, a battery of high-powered lasers, and a 1,000-foot, light-pulsing runway designed by Pixar animators and programmers to strobe musical beats at the speed of sound.
If Sol System was growing, then so was its budget. Redoubling and diversifying our fundraising efforts, the prospering project's bank account dwarfed those of its founders but still needed to grow. We planned a final, late summer fundraising foray into virgin territory—New York.
It was increasingly apparent that growth was straining our organization as dozens joined the project team. Although Sol System's ranks included employees of companies like Musicmatch, Pixar, Electronic Arts, and Dolby, Sol System itself more closely resembled an unruly bohemian guild than any of those respected organizations. Efforts to implement processes or to define roles and responsibilities met with good-natured but firm resistance. Sol System appealed to many participants because it afforded them a creative and social outlet that did not impose the structure and accountability they encountered in their day jobs. Most team members cheerily disregarded deadlines, and as the summer progressed, guarantees and good times became increasingly fungible. Critical tasks were eventually completed, but Shamal and I worried that the project was doomed to cave under the weight of its growing complexity and Sol System's casual culture.
Regardless, we forged on to our New York fundraiser—Ignition—and in July a small troupe of performers and I traveled east. The ambitious program included original film screenings, choreographed dance and live music performances, and even an aerial trapeze show accommodated by the outsized dimensions of the brick-walled Brooklyn waterfront theater we rented.
Our staffing plan called for 24 volunteers. Thirty minutes before showtime, we had confirmed eight. We doubled shift lengths and pressed several early arriving attendees into service. At 1 a.m., the venue's security staff informed me that they suspected someone of selling counterfeit tickets.
The security team and I intercepted the alleged scalper on a corner two blocks away, in the shadows of the prewar warehouses crowding the street. The chiseled, 6-foot-2-inch head of the security detail confronted the suspect. After a brief argument in which the suspect declaimed his innocence, the bouncer plucked a polished 6-inch blade from a concealed sheath, pressed the flat of the knife against the man's temple, and ordered the scalper to empty his pockets. The scalper immediately produced a stack of unsold tickets and $800 in wadded cash.
When we returned to the venue, I told the head of the security team—in delicate, respectful terms—that his handling of the situation was totally inappropriate and unacceptable. He only seemed confused by my criticism.
 |
Back in San Francisco for the final month of preparations we shifted our focus to construction. By August, our team had ballooned to more than 150 participants. We gathered on weekends to assemble and test components at four sites in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and the East Bay. The week before Burning Man, we disassembled the installation and loaded it into four 24-foot trucks.
On Sunday morning, August 24, the last of the four trucks arrived at our campsite. Six-inch red flags placed by Burning Man's surveyors demarcated the boundaries of our alkaline canvas.
Breaking into teams, we unloaded the sound system and plotted the position of the speakers. One crew manned trenchers to dig deep furrows where miles of cable would lie undisturbed by the 30,000 attendees.
By 10 a.m. the temperature topped 90 degrees. We paused frequently to rehydrate and to wash the dusty heat from our mouths. Short, scouring sandstorms punctuated periods of productivity and sent us to our tents and RVs for cover. As the day wore on, the desert swelter, high altitude, and hard labor tested our resolve, but anticipation, camaraderie, and a sense of urgency motivated us to persevere.
By nightfall Sunday we had finished a sort of menacing mechanical Stonehenge: eight towering speaker pilings precisely placed in a circle with a diameter of 120 feet. Forearm-thick black cables descended from the speaker stacks into the soil like oily roots searching for power from the amplification racks housed behind the stage.
The visual effect was striking, but the circular array offered another advantage. Coupled with proprietary software and mixing tools, the configuration enabled musicians to manipulate the location of sounds in the circle—to create the illusion that a sound emanated from a specific point within the circle or was swooping along a path behind, over, or around the listener. Similar experiments had been conducted in research facilities and other places, but Sol System was employing state-of-the-art tools and methods to achieve more dramatic sonic effects on a larger, unprecedented scale.
Finally, on Thursday night, Shamal and I stood on a corner of the stage and surveyed the results of our team's eight-month collaboration. Several hundred feet to our left, the four-story aluminum Chakra sculpture bounded one side of the installation. The circular sculpture was ablaze; tubing concealed within its welded frame fed propane to its fiery outer ring.
In front of us lay the "Sonic Runway," which was actually more of a triangular tunnel. The tunnel's white ribs of PVC tubing stretched over 1,000 feet into the desert like the beached, bleached skeleton of some prehistoric creature. Rays of light synchronized with music from the sound system pulsed down the runway's spine at the speed of sound. In the tunnel, people paused to ponder the fact that regardless of their position, the musical beats and light rays emanating from the stage reached their ears and eyes at exactly the same instant.
A trapeze rig staked to 15,000 square feet of ground flanked the right side of the installation. The tethered apparatus tapered to slender spires spiking 60 feet into the air as aerial acrobats illuminated by powerful red and orange spotlights cut arcs against the night sky.
Behind the stage, a rainbow-hued pyramid sprayed an emerald canopy of laser light over the crowd from an all-seeing eye carved into its façade.
Encircled by these pieces and enveloped by sound, thousands filled the floor in front of the stage—the jumping, twisting, twirling, clapping, laughing, heaving heart of the installation. On a chest-high plywood platform anchored to the middle of the floor, artist Greg Kalamar captured the scene in acrylic paint on a 3-by-5-foot canvas.
Throughout the week, the stage featured over 60 musical and dance acts, from emcee Shahid Buttar to Bay Area jam band The Flying Other Brothers, to self-described "Ethno-Techno-Tribal-Trance-Dance-Chants Band" Lost at Last, to the pyrotechnic dance troupe Future Trybe, to famed international DJs.
 |
In the end, each day proved to be a microcosm of the entire journey that began with SoundIron: None of the days or nights unfolded as planned, but we coped, adapted, and took both lessons and satisfaction from the process. That the final stretch of our journey occurred in the extreme, quasi-anarchistic social and creative laboratory known as Burning Man made it that much more memorable.
As GSB students, Shamal and I studied entrepreneurs who turned their passions into successful businesses: people like Chip Conley, Dan Gordon, and Dean Biersch. With SoundIron, we failed to convert our love of music into a livelihood. Although we did not build shareholder value, we ultimately found a way to generate a different kind of value. With the help of many talented and generous individuals, we created the value that follows from exercising one's imagination, from committing to an inclusive process, from bringing something extraordinary into being, from sharing that gift with others, and from accepting the impermanence of that creation.
And we thoroughly enjoyed the wild ride along the way.
Consumers
Don't Always Know What They Want
Economic
Incentives Inspire New Products
Leadership:
The Art of Rustproofing a Household Icon
Strategy:
Rescuing a Part of American History
Collaboration:
An Entrepreneurial Journey into the Desert
Chris McGarry is a media and technology analyst at EGM Capital, an
investment management firm based in San Francisco. The following GSB students
and alumni contributed to Sol System: Lani Fritts, '00, Matt Goldberg, '00,
Nicole Lorenzo, '01, Ezra Perlman, '00, Katie Rollins, '00, Drew Sanocki, '00,
Todd Shaiman, '04, Helen Song, '02, Madhu Tadikonda, '00, Rebecca Tadikonda,
'00, LaVonda Williams, '04.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVAN KAFKA
|
|
|
