At the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show, the SlingCommunity Team had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Jason Krikorian, one of the founders of Sling Media, and one of the original visionaries for the Slingbox. In this conversation, they discussed everything from how Sling got started to the newly announced Windows Mobile SlingPlayer. Here are some highlights from the conversation:


Let's talk a little about the beginnings of the Company. You started this company with your brother. Tell us about that, about starting a company with your brother [Blake]. Basically, he's CEO, and you're..."

VP of Business Development. I was CFO as well, but we're growing to a point now that we have one job a piece. We brought on a full time CFO, which is great, Judy David. Blake and I worked together previously, since 2000, when we had a consulting company together, and it was a great experience. A comment that I hear often [from others] is, "I could never work with my brother or sister," and that may be true for others. It works for us for lots of reasons, but I think primarily because we have similar tastes or perspectives, but we [approach] and solve problems different ways. If I were to totally generalize, I'm a little more logical of my approach to issues and problems, while Blake has a tremendous gut feel for things. It can be a very powerful combination... Underlying that is deep respect, and trust, which is especially nice as the company grows.


So you have been friends since birth, growing up?

Well, we shared a room growing up 'til I was 15, and he went away to college. I don't know how it worked out, but my younger brother got his own room, and we had to share.


Blake's older than you?

Blake's four years older than me, and we've got a younger brother Adam, who's three years younger, and he's in a totally different line of business as head coach of water polo at UCLA.


When did you know, or was there a defining moment you just knew you had something big?

It's been written about before, but inspiration really came from wanting to watch the Giant's games when we were on the road. We were following that [vision], and putting the pieces together. I do remember one show in Taiwan, called Computex, in fall of 2003, and we were watching the 49ers game live from our hotel in Taipei, and we were like "That's pretty cool. There's not a lot of ways to do this, and it's incredibly valuable to us." It took a while for us to figure out how to go at this... and decided that this, unlike some of the ideas we had in the past, was a good product to start a company around...


Who actually built the original prototype?

Blake primarily. He's a mechanical engineer by training, but he's kind of "self-taught" in computer science. We grew up in the bay area, Mountain View, and it's hard not to have some of that seeped into you. Blake definitely, since a kid, has been incredibly active on the PC and Mac, and put together the tools, however limited in the time he had, to put together some product concept. So the stuff we were first demonstrating to Walt Mossberg in early 2004 was all built by Blake.


Was there any moment starting out where something just didn't go right, and you pulled through last minute? You know, a good war story?

Well, it's not a really good war story, but we did have an isolated quality problem early on. We realized there was a bad part that got into a certain range of products. A lot of the product we were able to pull back, but some of them had already gone to customers. Fortunately, the problem wasn't big, and we fixed it going forward, but we had some customers with bad product. You know, what do we do? This was critical... and we were sweating because we wanted to create a good experience for these customers. So, we made a decision. Instead of dealing with it in the background, [we decided] to be really overt, put it right on the main screen and said, "If you have this product, call us and we'll set you up". I think that, combined with the fact we have this support staff that's always there, we handled it well. I think sometimes when you have a relationship with a company, and you have a problem and they fix it really fast, you create a better relationship.

Interview continued on page 2

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