In the summer of 2010, a Vans Warped Tour fan could text a keyword to a short code and receive video reports from the road. The tour visited 43 cities. Its updates carried interviews, performances and glimpses of life around the stages into a much smaller venue: a phone screen. Bruce Goldstein was running Thwapr, the company helping those clips make the journey.
There was a pleasing economy to the arrangement. A touring event already had things to show. Its audience already had phones. Thwapr supplied a way to connect them. A subscriber received a text, followed a link and watched. The business proposition fitted inside an everyday action.
That example offers a useful entrance to Goldstein’s career. He is the founder and CEO of Universal Management in New York, where his work concerns strategic partnerships and the commercial development of technology. His earlier roles stretch across online shopping, licensing and mobile media. There is also a food-products business in the picture. The career changes settings often, but repeatedly arrives at the same practical problem: getting something worth selling into the hands of somebody who wants it.
The shopping years
Goldstein held executive business-development roles at Internet Shopping Network and Styleclick, both within the USA Networks orbit. At ISN, his responsibilities included marketing and partnerships. These were businesses working out how established retail and media relationships might function on the internet. Their names now have a period charm. FirstAuction.com and FirstJewelry.com sound like shops that put up their signs before the street had finished being built.
The street was nevertheless attracting substantial investment. In 2000, USA Networks agreed to combine its Internet Shopping Network assets with Styleclick.com. The package included cash, advertising support and financing arrangements. The resulting company brought together online auction and jewelry operations with Styleclick’s commerce properties. The transaction closed on July 27.
The advertising component is a telling detail. A commerce business needed products and a functioning site, but it also needed people to arrive. Media exposure had a place in the deal alongside cash. Distribution was being negotiated as part of the company’s structure, before a shopper clicked anything.
Goldstein’s job at Styleclick covered business development and strategic planning. Those titles can make the work sound conveniently abstract. Retail gives it a harder edge. A partnership must deliver something that the participating businesses can actually use: access to an audience, inventory, a channel, a commercial reason to keep working together. An introduction is pleasant. A working arrangement has expenses.
In 2003, Goldstein was brought into Home Shopping Network as a special executive working on media convergence and new revenue opportunities. In 2005, he was part of the launch team at Conductor, then known as Link Experts. The settings differed, but each placed him near the point where media, technology and commercial demand had to be fitted together.
Forty-three cities, one small screen
Thwapr gave that problem a different shape. Goldstein became its acting president in March 2007 and CEO in November 2008. A company built around sharing video had to confront the inconvenient variety of mobile devices. A clip that played smoothly on one phone could present a much less agreeable experience on another.
The platform’s approach was to adapt delivery to the receiving device. Its plans described several methods, including streaming, downloads and previews for less capable phones. That variety helps explain why the text-message link mattered. The recipient could get to the content through an action that required little explanation.
A phone owner was being invited to watch something, without first accepting a homework assignment about software. For a brand or event, that made mobile video a distribution proposition. The company wanted to help organizations use content they already had, or were producing, to keep an audience engaged.
- 01SubscribeA fan texts a tour keyword.
- 02ReceiveA text brings a video link.
- 03WatchThe clip plays on the phone.
The Warped Tour campaign made the idea concrete. A festival passes through a city and leaves. Daily video updates gave subscribers another point of contact with it. The content included fan and musician interviews, sponsor booths and performance highlights. The same service also worked with the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival and Brooklyn band the Lordz.
“The mobile platform is ideal for live events and for music.”
Bruce Goldstein, discussing Thwapr in 2010
It is a compact explanation of the market he was pursuing. Live events create material quickly. Fans have a reason to care about what happens around them. A portable screen gives that material somewhere to go. The commercial task is to arrange the route and make the experience sufficiently straightforward that people bother taking it.
A platform with bills to pay
Goldstein’s Thwapr years also involved the machinery of running a company. In March 2010, Thwapr completed a share-exchange transaction with Seaospa and became part of a public company. Goldstein continued as president and CEO. The management group included finance, technology, operations and user-experience roles. A video service needed considerably more than a person able to explain why video was useful.
The proposed business covered branded content as well as consumer sharing. Sports offered another setting for mobile updates. Thwapr described a Miami Dolphins campaign that let fans subscribe to videos including player interviews and material around the team. Its 2011 plans distinguished trial activity from revenue-generating contracts. That distinction belongs near the center of any account of commercial technology.
A demonstration can establish that an experience works. A trial can show that an organization is willing to try it. A signed, paying relationship answers a further question. These stages may look similar in a presentation, particularly when each gets a handsome logo. In the company accounts, they have different consequences.
Thwapr was also developing an application alongside its browser-based approach. In January 2011, Goldstein signed an announcement that Apple had approved a mobile-video sharing app for a planned February launch. The company was pursuing more than one way for users to reach the service.
A working product, a customer trial and a paying contract are three different milestones.
The financing story became difficult. In February 2012, Thwapr’s leadership changed during a credit arrangement, and Goldstein left the CEO role and board. The company subsequently described a restructuring effort involving debts, payables and additional working capital. The episode places a limit on any easy tale of a promising product moving smoothly toward a market.
It also gives the career its texture. The mobile-video chapter contains distribution experiments and technical work, followed by a change of management under financial pressure. Those events can coexist. A useful idea still needs an organization capable of paying for its development, delivery and next month of operations.
Thai Chef, and a different kind of distribution
There is a more tangible product line in Goldstein’s history. He formed WorldWide Thai with Marvin Traub, the former chairman of Bloomingdale’s, to produce and distribute Thai Chef products. He was CEO of the food and housewares business. He also owned restaurants in SoHo and the Caribbean.
Those ventures widen the portrait. Alongside executive titles and mobile technology sits an interest in food that found commercial expression. A restaurant and a digital platform are very different operating propositions. Their customers, costs and daily demands resist being squeezed into a single neat theory.
Still, the retail element makes a recognizable connection. Producing something and distributing it are separate responsibilities. The Thai Chef venture named both. Traub brought a history in department-store retail to the collaboration. Goldstein’s business interests had room for products whose route to the customer ran through a physical world.
His education was a BS in Business Administration from Suffolk University. He also served on New York City’s Community Board 2. The food businesses and community-board service provide a local counterpoint to the international partnerships in his professional biography. His career includes neighborhoods as well as networks.
The next partner
After Thwapr, Goldstein remained involved in mobile media. In July 2012, VuMee announced his appointment as chief strategy officer, with a remit focused on growth and sales. The announcement also identified him as the founder of March1Digital and a co-inventor of mobile-media sharing patents.
At Universal Management, the commercial questions now appear in the language of spinouts, funding, strategic partners, acquisitions and exits. A spinout has to establish a business around technology that may have begun inside another organization. A partner can provide capabilities that a new company cannot simply conjure for itself.
The firm’s description emphasizes planning and partner development. That is a quieter vocabulary than the language usually wrapped around invention. It has the advantage of naming work that must happen: identifying the organizations involved, arranging their interests and deciding what a technology company needs at its next stage.
Goldstein’s career is readable through those concrete arrangements. A shopping business receives a route to an audience. A touring event sends video to a subscriber. A food brand organizes production and distribution. Each involves a product, another organization and a customer who has every right to be occupied with something else. Getting their attention is only part of the job. Giving them a workable way to act on it is where the business begins.