It seemed like a decent enough job to fill a college kid’s wallet.
Nonetheless, counting traffic bored the hell out of Kurtis McBride. About 15 minutes into his first day-long shift, he just knew there had to be a better way.
A scant few years later, that better way is called Miovision Technologies Inc., a Kitchener-based company with a satellite office in Germany, customers in 25 countries, 75 employees and McBride at the helm as CEO.
Miovision, the first client at Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre when it opened in 2006, makes systems that automate collection of detailed traffic data, enabling transportation administrators to optimize timing of signals and improve traffic planning to keep people moving.
As the world’s cities grow and roads become ever more congested, so does demand for Miovision’s award-winning technology, and in turn, Miovision’s demand for top-notch engineers to meet that growth.
The challenge of finding talent, a perennial one for companies in Waterloo Region’s white-hot technology sector, was highlighted starkly this spring when McBride issued a bold public offer: $3,000 to anyone who refers a software engineer for employment at Miovision (provided they actually get hired and pass probation, naturally).
I sat down for a chat with McBride at Miovision’s Manitou Drive headquarters recently, where he talked about the birth, growth and values of a company whose roots, like so many others, can be traced back to the University of Waterloo’s engineering program.
Q – Tell me how and why you started Miovision.
A – I guess the ‘how’ was, I graduated from the University of Waterloo, had done a bunch of co-op terms and wasn’t quite ready to take the leap into the workforce.
So, I decided to go back and do more school to do a master’s. Half way through the master’s, some of the stuff I was working on, I thought, had some practical applications.
To get through the master’s, I needed what I call a ‘practical light at the end of the tunnel’. Other than the book that goes on the shelf and maybe gets read by five people if you’re lucky, there needed to be something at the end of it that I could be striving for.
So, we started the company about half way through the master’s.
I was part-time and one of my other partners was part-time, and we won a contract – we were bootstrapping – and it was a web-development contract. It was in the traffic space; not really what we do right now, but it was a related type of project.
So, my third partner was working full-time with an army of co-op students to get this project done, but always with the idea that once I was done school, we were going to take some of the research we were doing and try to productize it.
Initially, the idea was to bootstrap to fund the product side of it, and we ran the business that way for a year and a half or almost two years.
It became obvious that we could grow this software consulting side of the business, but the more you grew that, the more all of your resources and your good, highly skilled and highly motivated people needed to be focused on that side, because we had customers and deliverables.
So, we did very little product development because we were so focused on fulfilling this contract, and given that we wanted to be a product company, we made a decision to basically cleave that side of the business. We worked out the contracts and then just stopped getting more of them, and in parallel, we raised a small amount of financing.
We were in the Accelerator Centre at this point, when the Accelerator Centre was a startup company. We were there when they actually used keys instead of key fobs.
We continued to leverage co-op; we actually stole some of the guys that we had during that time, and they’re now full-time guys who are now running big teams of developers.
That was the ‘how’. The other question was ‘why’.
We had done this project in a related field, but the technology we were looking at, we could have applied to a lot of different things, like security, retail – counting people in stores and figuring out where the highest-traffic areas of stores are – and traffic, counting vehicles.
We probably took about five months, when we first did our pivot to become a product company, and were looking at a whole bunch of different opportunities. At one point, we actually went and pitched to Home Depot, as an example.
There was a book that we read early on that I would say probably informed our decision. It was Crossing the Chasm, and one of the main points the book makes is, when you’re small, attack small things; if you’re small, don’t attack big things because someone who’s big will already be there and will stop you.
We looked at security, retail and traffic, and security was a massive market; there was a company called ObjectVideo that had raised $60 million or something. In retail, there was a company called Brickstream, and I don’t remember the number; $15 million or something. And the markets were measured in billions, not millions.
And in traffic, especially the niche within traffic that we’re in, it’s small, and not a lot of innovation goes on in it. So having read this book, it was like the textbook was saying, ‘Go after traffic; it’s small and you’re small; you can attack it.’
The idea is, you build your beachhead there and it’s easily defendable, because no one’s going to come and attack you, and you grow your infrastructure and your technology and your team within that beachhead, and then there are opportunities to multiply.
That was why we picked traffic as opposed to any other option.
Q – So was it just coincidence that you had worked as a traffic counter while you were in school?
A – It was the reason that market was even on the list in the first place. The big markets, retail and security, you would think about; I’m sure there’s dozens of other little ones like traffic; we just didn’t have any visibility into them, but I had done this eight hours at the side of the road counting, so I had some insight.
The reason I did the masters in that area is because I had done that job and had some insights into the pain, if you will, and into the opportunity.
They say necessity is the mother of invention.
Q – Or boredom is.
A – Or boredom; yeah, when you’re 15 minutes into one of those counting sessions, you definitely start to think about how else this can be done.
I would say the genesis of that idea came from having done the job and having seen how important the things they do with the data are, and yet how risky the way they collect it is.
Q – Where is Miovision sitting currently, as far as employees, locations and revenue are concerned?
A – We’re currently working in 25 countries, on all continents except Antarctica. We’ve got tons of work in Australia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, and more-limited footprints in Japan, Taiwan, Brazil.
I believe we have 75 employees right now.
We have an office in Cologne, Germany that we opened about a year ago; it’s at seven or eight people right now, and it’s a startup company within what we’re doing.
On revenue, I won’t give you an exact number, but this will be the fourth year in a row that we’ve grown at greater than 65 per cent, year over year, and we plan to keep doing that as long as we can.
Q – Do you expect your employee numbers to grow substantially along with that?
A – If I go back to 12 months ago, the headcount has grown about 50 per cent. I wish I had a crystal ball; I don’t want to say exactly, but to say that we’ll be over 100 a year from now would be not unrealistic.
I think we’ve got 15 positions open right now.
Q – What kind of funding and mentorship support did you receive in the beginning, and how crucial was it to getting started?
A – I haven’t started a company in any other community, so I can’t say this with absolute certainty, but I would say this community is extremely unique in its desire to pay it forward.
I can count at least a dozen, and probably closer to two dozen, people who have agreed to multiple meetings of at least an hour or more; Dave Caputo (Sandvine’s CEO) would be an example; there was Ron Neumann; there were all kinds of Communitech EIRs, some of them even before they were EIRs.
I think one of the strengths of this community is that each generation of entrepreneur got some help from a prior generation, and this sort of collective understanding – that you can’t ever pay those people back; the only thing you can do is help the next generation – was one of the pillars on which we built this business.
Straight out of school, we had no networks; we had three engineers who didn’t have a lot of business, marketing or sales experience, but we knew that through Communitech or the Accelerator Centre, you could reach into a network and get connected with someone who could solve your problem.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve e-mailed Iain Klugman and said, ‘This is my problem,’ and within half an hour there are two or three introductions to people who can help solve my problem.
We’ve leveraged the mentorship side of this community to the most we can.
On the capital side, we’ve been doing this for about seven years, or really five years since we decided to be a product company, so it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of how capital is organized in the community.
When we first started it was very much disjointed, so there was lots of opportunity for people who were looking to make investments in technology companies, but you had to have access to the networks that could introduce you to those people. You couldn’t just go to an interface and pitch.
At first, the Accelerator Centre didn’t really organize the capital, but it at least provided an address where the capital could come and see what was going on, and you were there to sync up.
And then, it’s been interesting to watch groups like GTAN (Golden Triangle Angel Network), and what they’ve been able to do in helping companies so they can go and pitch one time and access 80 or 100 people, and then have six of them put up their hands, and syndicate a round in three months as opposed to the year that it might have taken five years ago.
As we’ve grown, we’ve leveraged the community infrastructure to raise capital in each of its forms, including GTAN.
Q – Anyone else? Any big VCs?
A – We didn’t have any institutional money at first, but we brought in two institutions about a year ago; it’s just sort of the natural lifecycle of a company.
Q – The basis of your technology sounds pretty simple – counting traffic. What made your technology superior to what was out there already?
A – Let me tell you a story.
When we first started the company, we were a software company, and we positioned ourselves as a software company. So, we’d go out in the market and say, ‘Before, you had to organize these big teams of people to do counts; now you can collect video, run the video through software and the software will give you data.’
The first question that we got was, ‘That sounds great; how do I collect video?’
So, I think part of it is that we didn’t take a horizontal approach, where we have this software and we just try to plug it in and people will want to use it. We picked a vertical, and we went deep in the vertical, and we tried to understand, ‘How do we make it dead easy for these guys to collect video?’
I want to be able to take a piece of equipment out of a truck, and within five minutes, I want to be back on the road.
So, we designed hardware that was very application-specific. If you walk around here, we’re still very much a software company, but in terms of our market positioning, we’re a hardware company, because that’s the thing that they interface with every day.
That was one part of it.
The other part of it was that, these days, the business model is pretty much software-as-a-service, and anyone who is doing software these days is doing that.
Five years ago when we started, it was just kind of getting going. So, one of our innovations was, instead of just putting the software on the hardware and just selling it – and we would have had to sell it for lots to make the economics work for us – we decided to sell it on sort of a metered basis; a pay-per-use kind of model, which allowed us to sell into the guys who are doing four counts a year just as easily as the guys who are doing 1,000 counts a year.
So, we could ride the whole market spectrum, as opposed to only being able to sell the top end, which made the technology accessible to lots more people.
Q – So the more you use it, the more you pay?
A – Yes. So, vertical focus and market accessibility were probably the two differences we had.
Q – What kind of an impact do you now see your technology making on the management of traffic in the markets you serve?
A – The one big thing we provide is a consistent way to do the data collection.
So, whether it’s sunny or snowing, or whether the guy that’s doing it is a professional who takes his job seriously or a college kid who might not, you’re going to get a consistent output, consistent accuracy, consistent turnaround time. So, consistency is a big one.
Ultimately, what this data gets used for is to make decisions about how to time lights, for example.
If you’ve ever come to a red light and you’re looking around and you’re waiting 30 seconds for this advanced-left flash to go on, it’s because the municipality either didn’t have accurate data, so they made a bad decision, or it’s so difficult to collect the data that they didn’t collect it at the time of day that you’re sitting there.
So, they made some assumptions, that if at five o’clock there are lots of people turning left, at eight o’clock at night there must still be lots of people waiting to turn left, and that may not be true.
Because it used to be expensive, and because you can’t expect someone to sit there for 14 hours collecting data, it was just not feasible. What we’ve seen is that, whereas before they might have counted two hours in the busy part of the morning and two hours in the busy part of the afternoon, now they’re just doing from 5 in the morning until 9 p.m. at night.
Or some of them, like in Montana, actually do it from Tuesday at 5 in the morning until Thursday at 9 o’clock at night, so they just count the entire middle part of the week, throughout all the ups and downs.
So, the fidelity and quality of the data in many cases is better, but more important, the fidelity and the amount of data people are able to collect is much greater, and the modelling tools people are using are starting to catch up to that, and are starting to almost demand more data.
There are other companies out there, like Synchro as an example, where as we make it easier to get more data, their modelling software can get more sophisticated, and so there’s this perfect storm.
That’s one of the biggest impacts that we’re having. I like to think that because we’re making it more accessible to get data, we’re getting better roads as a result.
I may not have any quantifiable evidence that that’s the case, but qualitatively, people are collecting a lot more data. Like, Edmonton is doing almost twice as much data collection as they were before they started using us.
Q – Have you had any surprise feedback from people on how they’re actually using the data?
A – We recently launched a completely new way to use the product, with a slightly different camera and different software, and we’re basically capturing licence plates.
So, if you want to understand not how many cars go by but where they go, you cordon off an area and ask, if they leave from this part of town, do they go to this part of town or do they go to this part of town?
So we’re getting involved in that.
I wouldn’t say there are a lot of surprises in terms of what the particular application is doing, but the more we’re in the market, the more we realize that the type of data collection we sell is actually one type of a dozen or two dozen types of the data that they collect, and I can see us over time trying to adapt the ability to provide services to more and more of those types of data.
Q – Your company has been growing faster than Friday afternoon traffic on a long weekend. How do you maintain the kind of work culture you want in the company, while also trying to handle the challenge of growth?
A – We invest in our culture, we talk about it, we write it down, we have our Mioway Award, which was one of Dave Caputo’s ideas.
When we first started up, and let’s say we grew to 12 or 15 people, culture was just the sum of the personalities that were in the room. You didn’t have to talk about it, because for all the people who were there, it was just innate; they knew why they were there.
As we started to grow, we’ve had to be incrementally more conscious of, and more deliberate about, our culture.
So, we write down the culture. When people come in on their first week and they go through an orientation, one of the things they get a presentation on is culture; ‘This is the Mioway, this is what Miovision’s all about.’
Even in the recruiting process, you’re exposed to our cultural mantra.
The idea is that right from the time you’re walking around on campus, you see Miovision’s brand. We’re maybe not talking directly about our culture, but certainly in everything you see from us, you’re going to see what our culture is.
Then you go through recruiting, and now you’re going to get introduced to maybe a little more of a directed way; there are interview questions that are testing whether you agree with and will fit into our idea of how we work together and things like that.
It continues all the way through to when you start working here, to your intake, the company meetings we do once a month, the way that we reward both from a compensation perspective in terms of our performance review cycles, but also in terms of how we reward people, the pat on the back. It’s all reinforcing this culture idea.
Now, at 75 employees, we’ll soon be launching Mio U – Mio University, basically – where some of the courses will be tactical; ‘I’m a new manager, so how do I manage people better.’ But some of it will be cultural things like, ‘Why is being humble in our communications style important?’
The big thing is that we’re almost fanatical about our culture. Culture is why we win, is what I always say. If you don’t have culture, you don’t have cohesion, and you just can’t work together.
If your culture starts to fracture and you start to get these different cliques – even though everyone might be working to the best of their abilities and with the best of intentions – teams don’t work together.
Teams clash because if the way they work, the way they communicate, the way they interact with each other and the types of expectations they have on each other are not aligned, then there’s this friction that starts to get created, which will break a company.
I think we’ve got a long way to go to continue to figure out how to do that at 100 and 200, but it’s something that we’re….well, you can see it by the (business) books that are on my desk.
Q – Is culture something you instinctively knew would be important, or is it something your mentors really stressed with you?
A – I would say both. Plus, the books you read make it very clear that it’s super-important.
Put it this way – it’s something I always instinctually knew; maybe not consciously.
I play a lot of hardball, and in baseball we don’t have a captain, but there’s always somebody on the bench who’s the team leader; the guy who, when you’re down two runs in the seventh inning and you’ve got to rally to get ahead, he’s the guy who can wake the team up.
So I’ve always kind of instinctually understood that was an important part of leadership and team dynamics; maybe not to the degree that I now do. I mean, I think about it five hours a day, so now there’s a little more science to the art, if you will.
But certainly, mentors will talk about culture.
The thing with getting mentors to give you advice about culture is that culture ultimately is a reflection of personalities. Every CEO I’ve ever talked to has always said culture is important, but there’s not necessarily a common theme in the culture that they all preach, because really what they’re saying is, it’s a sum of the personalities of the people who you want to direct the vision and the attitudes of the company.
So, Sandvine would have a different culture from Miovision. Both of them are strong and allow the companies to do the things they need to do to grow and remain cohesive, but they’re not necessarily the same.
I’m not convinced that a mentor can always tell you what culture to build, but they can certainly emphasize the importance of building a culture.
Q – What is a typical week like for you, as far as work hours and travel are concerned?
A – One of the things I love about this job is that I don’t have a typical week.
We still put in a lot of hours; probably 55, 60 hours, but that’s down from 75 to 90 hours in the first two years we were doing this.
Sometimes I tell people I work 55 or 60 hours a week and they’re shocked, but for me it feels like a lot less work than it used to.
In terms of travelling, I was in Germany for a month a couple of months ago; I’m going to a trade show in Amsterdam in a week; I was in Denver recently. So, there’s still some travelling, but it’s less.
I used to be chief cook and bottle-washer and sales rep, so before, I would go to an area, meet with eight guys, try to sell two of them and that was successful. Now, my travelling is more about going to a location to meet with one strategic relationship to try and move it forward, or to go to Germany to make sure that the culture we’re trying to engender is getting translated across the pond, or go to a trade show because there’s a density of meetings that I can be involved in.
There’s still travelling, but it’s different than it used to be.
Q – There are a lot of young people today jumping straight from school into life as an entrepreneur, as you did. What kind of advice can you offer about making that jump?
A – I think it’s the right time to do it; not to say there’s ever a wrong time to be an entrepreneur, but I think you have the least to lose when you are straight out of school. You’re used to eating Kraft Dinner and living on 10 grand a year, so if that’s what you need to be an entrepreneur, it’s not a big lifestyle switch, right?
From that perspective, I think it’s a good thing.
In terms of advice, the quicker you can realize that you don’t know anything, the faster you will develop as an entrepreneur.
You might know a lot about software design, but building good software is 10 or 15 per cent of what it takes to build a business. So, you need to be coachable, you need to leave your ego at the door and you need to reach out and talk to as many people as you can; read as many business books as you can.
It’s not to say that every single person you talk to will know what they’re talking about, either, or that they’ll be right, but the more you can talk to people, the more you’ll inform your world view.
Whatever kind of background you came from with school, you need to surround yourself with people who have different world views.
There’s a Top 10 list somewhere out there from when I left the Accelerator Centre; my Top 10 things I learned.
I think the most important thing is just to be humble and coachable. If you can combine those two things, it’ll accelerate your career significantly, at least in my experience.
Q – What’s the biggest traffic nightmare you’ve ever encountered?
A – Paris. I could answer this question on so many levels, but from just a pure, rush-hour-traffic driving experience, my experience in Paris was probably the most eye-opening.
Downtown Paris is basically just a parking lot. It actually works reasonably well; it’s somewhat choreographed, but it’s organized chaos.
I’ll answer the question at a somewhat different level of abstraction, and I’m not sure you meant it this way, but I’ve had a lot of insight into different geographies and different jurisdictions, in terms of how they approach traffic planning.
I’ll come back to culture. The culture of the organization responsible for traffic, timing signals and building roads, and ultimately responsible for the drivers’ experience, is directly correlated to how the roads function.
I hate to name names, but there are certain geographies, like Florida, who are extremely proactive and progressive with their approach, and if I drive any major corridor in Florida, I hit green lights for miles; you can drive for half an hour and hit green lights, green lights, green lights, green lights.
Other geographies, and unfortunately the one that we live in – and it’s not a generalization of every geography in Ontario; there are lots that are progressive and that are trying to solve these problems – but we are very conservative as Ontarians, and we’re sometimes afraid to do things that might fix our problems because we want to wait for other people to try it first.
We don’t want to spend money on our roads; we don’t want to make them a focus of our politics; in some cases we don’t attract inspirational people, who are going to come and lead us into the future, to our traffic planning departments, and as a result, we suffer as drivers.
The U.K. is amazing that way, and there are lots of people on the other end of the spectrum all over the U.S. and all over the world, but the correlation between the culture of those organizations and the driver’s experience is eye-opening.
Q – Anything else you’d like to say?
A – It’s easy to focus on the CEO. As human beings we like simplicity, so we can look at an organization and we can say, ‘Well, Kurtis must be doing a great job’, but the reality is, I hardly even know what’s going on any more.
I’ve been fortunate to have an amazing team that’s dedicated, that’s humble, that’s committed to what we’re trying to do.
So often, whether it’s interviews like this, or awards we get, I always feel a need to make sure that the story is told in a way that doesn’t ignore the fact that I’m one guy out of 75, and my contribution is one seventy-fifth of what it took to get us here, and what it’ll take to get us to the future.
