Provo Labs
Our Story
It Started With Search
In 1990, Infobases, Inc. was created by two young entrepreneurs, Paul Allen and Dan Taggart. The company's mission was to "identify and digitize the most important books in every field of human knowledge and make them available" to as many people as possible. The duo licensed the powerful Folio VIEWS(tm) search engine and began publishing CD ROMs filled with electronic content.
The company's religious and educational products were especially well received, and in spite of the founders' lack of business experience and many mistakes, the company's products were recognized and the company grew. By 1996, Infobases was listed as one of the nation's fastest-growing privately held companies by Inc. Magazine.
Internet Genealogy
In 1997, Paul and Dan struck again, this time founding Ancestry.com , whose mission was to "digitize the genealogical records of all nations" and make them accessible on the world wide web.
Connecting Families
In 1998, they launched MyFamily.com, a service primarily marketing to the active genealogists on Ancestry.com, 78% of whom said they wanted a private web site where they could share information (such as their family tree) with other family members. Within a few months MyFamily.com had more than 1 million registered users and was considered one of the fastest-growing community web sites of all time. It was designated the Viral Marketing Company of the Year in 2000 by Technology Marketing Magazine. The company's valuation increased quickly during the Internet bubble and had all the makings of a high-flying Internet stock. But when the bubble burst in early 2000, MyFamily.com faced serious challenges and even questions about whether it would survive.
MyFamily.com Succeeds
Thanks to a solid subscription-based business model, a new syndicate of investors in 2001 and a strong management team, MyFamily.com became profitable by the end of 2001. The company has experienced dramatic growth in revenues ever since. Today, MyFamily.com owns a network of web sites including Ancestry.com, Rootsweb.com, Genealogy.com and is considered an IPO candidate by Fortune magazine and other industry observers.
While the founders of MyFamily.com (like most entrepreneurs) have not made a fortune from this successful start-up, they have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience from this venture. They watched a small company with less than $1 million in revenue turn into a profitable, industry-leading operation with more than 1,000 employees–in about eight years.
10x Marketing
In February 2002 Paul decided it was time to move on. MyFamily.com was profitable but very focused on genealogy. The company abandoned its vision to provide free web sites to every family in the world and it was no longer interested in innovation and new ideas.
Paul decided to take his 7 years of online marketing experience and form a company that would help other businesses succeed online. He documented 196 internet marketing tactics that he and MyFamily.com had used to generate traffic and turn visitors into subscribers. Paul developed a methodoloy for analyzing internet companies -- the 10x Marketing Scorecard -- and then determining which internet marketing tactics to deploy first.
Within 6 months 10x Marketing had 26 employees and $90,000 per month in revenue. But Paul learned an important lesson--he didn't love marketing other people's widgets, er, products. And he had grown the company so quickly that the newly formed team had difficulty keeping up with all the customer's needs. Most of all, Paul realized that he only loved marketing when he also loved and believed in the products he was promoting -- mainly products that he had a hand in designing or developing.
When a new CEO was hired to take over 10x Marketing, the company decided to focus on search engine marketing. The company has helped dozens of clients and it has become one of the best providers of SEO and PPC services in Utah. In June 2005, 10x Marketing was acquired by Vista.com (now Innuity.)
A Parallel Entrepreneur
By 2003 Paul realized he wanted to be a "parallel entrepreneur" which involves forming new companies whenever it is necessary to execute on a new (hopefully great) idea.
In early 2004, Paul helped form LDSAudio.com and within a few months the company had raised $1 million in startup capital and had signed a major partnership with Deseret Book, the leading religious publisher in the LDS market. The company also launched LDSLibrary.com and will soon launch LDSMedia.com, a search engine for all LDS content, including text, images, audio, and video.
In January 2005, Paul teamed up with former Novell general counsel David Bradford and web site developer Trent Miskin to form FundingUtah.com. This "matching service" for angel investors and entrepreneurs proved so successful in Utah that the company rolled out 50 more web sites to cover every state in the United States and changed its name to FundingUniverse.com. Now led by CEO Brock Blake, FundingUniverse.com seeks to be the starting point for all entrepreneurs worldwide who are in search of startup capital.
Provo Labs Formed
In December 2005, Paul's vision of forming a well-funded internet business incubator was realized when a private investor chose to provide him with the necessary capital.
Provo Labs has quickly built a strong core team of dedicated employees who are building web sites that can turn into successful businesses. The Provo Labs culture is unique in Utah. We are highly focused on constant networking and learning and we freely share that learning among ourselves and with others in the community.
All of our companies have official blogs and all of our employees blog. We are all into RSS feeds, Google alerts, podcasting and video blogging. We buy Blackberries for every employee and invite everyone to attend technology and business conferences regularly, so we can all stay on the cutting edge. We use LinkedIn to find contractors, employees and partners.
Our technologists, led by Phil Burns, are totally into Web 2.0. They study new web services weekly and share their code libraries with each other. While we develop and use modular technology to do web mashups we also believe that we can reuse our marketing tactics and business models to do "business mashups."
We think we will succeed as an internet business incubator because we will focus all of our companies on the things we are best at: 1) content acquisition 2) search engines 3) building community and user-generated content 4) internet marketing and 5) subscription business models.
One of our doctrines that describes our Provo Labs culture states: "Most value creation happens outside of the office. Get out of the office!"
What that means is that we know that our relationships with other people, including customers, investors, business owners, and key employees at hundreds of other companies, will be the most important factor in our success.
We wholeheartedly subscribe to the concepts in "The Only Sustainable Edge" by Harvard Business School professor John Hagel. We focus on what we are great at and then we spend most of our time networking at the edge with our customers and business partners, to make sure we are interfacing with all the right companies that are increasing their capacity faster than anyone else. It's really the business ecosystems that we will play in that will lead to our greatest successes.
Our Mission
Alexander Graham Bell, one of the greatestest inventors of all time, defined an inventor as "a man who looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees; he wants to benefit the world."
The short term goal of Provo Labs is start 12-20 internet businesses in the next three years and to nurture them so that they can spin out into successful companies.
Long term, we hope to help infuse Utah with the knowledge sharing and networking culture of Silicon Valley, and to train hundreds of creative inventors and entrepreneurs who will benefit the world by creating sustainable enterprises around great new ideas.