LightSurf - News (original) (raw)

Borland Founder Kahn Focuses On Sending Photos
Over Cell Phones
By Michael Krey, Investor's Business Daily
July 3, 2002

Philippe Kahn is one Silicon Valley executive who can be described as colorful.

The flamboyant Frenchman is best known for starting software maker Borland International Inc. and guiding it to be, for a time, the second-largest software company behind Microsoft Corp.

Kahn, a creator of the Pascal programming language, took on Microsoft in word processing, spreadsheets and databases while building one of Northern California's best-looking campuses.

Borland went downhill, however, choking on such big acquisitions as Ashton-Tate, and Kahn was ousted from the CEO post in January 1995. (Borland Software Corp. continues as a maker of programming language software products.) He later founded Starfish Software Inc., selling it to Motorola Inc. In 1998, he started privately held LightSurf Technologies Inc., the company he continues to lead along with his wife, Sonia Lee.

It makes technology that puts photos and digital images on wireless devices such as cell phones. Sprint PCS this year is expected to release a color cell phone in the U.S. with LightSurf technology.

Kahn spoke recently with IBD about his career and LightSurf.

IBD: Did you expect such a sharp about-face in technology over the last two years?
Kahn: From 1998 on we were busy building the core instant imaging LightSurf platform, and I was looking at the dot-com bubble in disbelief. For a while I have to admit I thought the world had gone upside-down. But we focused on building real technology for real paying customers with real deployments. Being a limited partner in several venture funds, without even trying we saw huge financial rewards. But we always saw this as a fluke. When the bubble burst, I was lucky to have gone almost 100% liquid.

IBD: By the same token, did you ever expect such a run-up as the Internet bubble?
Kahn: I didn't. I think there were lots of people who got lured intothe crazy formula: "a great dot-com look and feel, an office south of Market (in San Francisco)." I remember looking at office space in San Francisco and wondering why people would pay so much money. Now we know there was no good reason. Every time I saw a company paying over $6 a square foot, I'd calculate how much we were saving at LightSurf, renting space at 99 cents a foot.

IBD: Borland was that rare company to take on Microsoft directly. Would you do anything differently today?
Kahn: Borland was and still is the leader for open professional development tools worldwide. Microsoft was competing in that space, but it had an operating system. We played the cards that we were dealt pretty well, given the circumstances. If you think about it, out of all Microsoft competitors - WordPerfect, Lotus and others - Borland is still the one that is standing up on its own merit. From a shareholder's perspective, the mistake that we made was that when the stock was 85ashareandIBMoffered85 a share and IBM offered 85ashareandIBMoffered125 a share, we turned them down. So in 1998, when Motorola made us an attractive offer for Starfish, we accepted. Lesson well learned. Now at LightSurf we work with Microsoft. We support their PocketPC initiative. At LightSurf, they're a partner, not a competitor. So you move on.

IBD: Does the wireless field offer the best chance to spark technology out of the doldrums?
Kahn: Wireless is just one way. Wireless adds a new dimension and is putting live information in the palm of everyone's hands. Maybe the biggest perceptible change in our lives in the next three years is that our cell phones are all getting a color screen, sometimes with a camera embedded in them. That will put instant pictures in our hands anytime,anywhere. I believe that picture messaging like (J-Phone's) Picture Mail in Japan will be a killer application. Such killer applications don't happen much more often than every 20 years.

IBD: Wireless hasn't taken off as fast as many people expected. Why?
Kahn: The problem came when companies hyped applications that weren't useful or practical. That changed in Japan, with J-Phone's Picture Mail in particular.

IBD: What are your plans for LightSurf?
Kahn: To continue to grow rapidly, with an emphasis on building real revenue with real customers and real technology. We both license our technology (as with Sprint PCS) and act as a managed services provider (as with Eastman Kodak.) We saw our LightSurf business pretty much double every year. We have a little more than 100 employees. People love photos. It's an exciting business.

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