Gravity Ranch

 Michael Downing

 Currently based in San Francisco, California – by way of Texas where I grew up.

I have been working in the online media and technology sector for the last 16 years, here is some quick info on my background

   Currently Founder & CEO of Tout, the first real-time media network of its kind.

Tout, launched in April 2011 -  powers real-time video status-updates… updated to your Facebook Friends and Twitter followers instantly. Tout enables consumers to capture the moments that matter to them in life and instantly share those moments through real-time updates.

Prior to Tout, I was most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) – working on some stealth technology that has been developed over the last 2 years internally by the SRI team – and which subsequently went into Tout.

I was also a co-founder and  advisory board member of Decision Maker Media, the first online vertical media platform of its kind focused exclusively on the B2B media sector. [UPDATE: Decision Maker Media Acquired by Martini Media, April 2010]

In 2008, I became a  founder and general partner at Transmedia Capital, an early-stage venture fund focused on making investments in capital efficient technology companies in the online media space, more specifically we invest in those companies who have developed technology and media platforms that are disruptive to the traditional media industries.

Our thesis…see more here…, is that the best exits/liquidity events for start-ups will arise over the next 3-5 years from traditional media companies acquiring small innovative start-ups in an effort to “outsource their R&D effort” and fundamentally transform the DNA of their organizations as times change faster than they can internally.

From 2003 to July 2008, I was the founder & CEO of a company called GoFish [GOFH], . GoFish became the second largest media network online for the Youth Entertainment category behind Viacom-Nickelodeon.

GoFish was originally focused on multimedia search way back in 2003, in late 2004 we began to focus exclusively on online video. GoFish quickly grew to become one of the the largest Video destinations on the web in Chapter 1.0 of online video.

We took the company public on Halloween 2006, and began to focus on what was always our largest audience, the youth category.

  Prior to GoFish, I was the co-founder and CEO of Musicbank. Musicbank was the first legal subscription service for music-on-demand on the Internet      formed in partnership with the traditional music industry including Universal, EMI, Sony, BMG and Warner Music.

See our old presentation here: http://www.zada.com/projects/musicbank/

Musicbank was the first company to successfully structure a licensing approach that was agreed to by all the major labels and publishers in the music industry, who  were undergoing significant disruption at the time. In 2001 when everything online was crumbling and illegal P2P file sharing was effectively euthanizing the music industry as we knew it, we wound down the company.

  [UPDATE] April 08, 2011 – Amazon.com launched Cloud -Music Application – replicating the model we proposed and launched in 1999 (the pain of being too early)

Prior to Musicbank, I was the COO of a company called Sonique. Sonique was one of the first consumer applications available that allowed people to listen to MP3 files/Digital Audio files on their computer, build playlists, develop skins for the application and generally do things that have now become the norm in the online audio experience. Sonique was widely known for its unique design aesthetic and largely credited for helping spark the online music revolution.

Sonique was an innovative product that identified the changing consumer behavioral trends around music before most people even knew what digital music was.

In July 1999, we sold Sonique to Lycos, a company that was at that time one of the leading search engines online, owned by Telephonica. The acquisition was a tremendous success, being that we only raised $150K in seed investment and sold the company in less than 2 years for $70MM, netting our investors a roughly 90X return.

In 1995, just after graduating from the University of California, I co-founded an interactive agency called Addwater. Having developed some early CD-Rom and very early web based products for businesses in various industries, Addwater’s goal was to combine team members from more traditional marketing and brand strategy backgrounds (guys who were older than I was from companies like CKS, Fitch, Landor & Associates) with experienced digital media technologists who could begin to deliver an “integrated” offering for major brands whose customers were changing their behavior based on the emergence of the web and other new technologies. Addwater took $40,000 in seed investment and was profitable in a matter of months, we successfully developed and delivered innovative marketing tools and properties for companies such as Wells Fargo, Adidas, Sony and Joe Boxer.

Now going way back……

In 1992, while I was a student at The University of California at Davis, I started a company called Kensington & Fairchild, this was my first interaction with developing software products and the amazing business process efficiencies that could be garnered by leveraging the right technologies in smart ways. Myself and David Conlan created a software based platform that allowed us to more effectively help graduating students find targeted job opportunities in their areas of interest. I promise I will look for an old K&F logo but that may be a stretch.