by Nicole Braddock
Jonathan Cobb was just an average, run-of-the-mill college student with aspirations of something greater. From his humble beginnings as a radio disc jockey at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, he went on to publish an online platform for his radio station 90.3 FM, allowing it to reach audiences he never thought
possible. Right at the beginning of the dot com boom, Cobb knew he had
what it took to become somebody in this ever-advancing age of
technology.
By late 2004, Kiptronics was born. Kiptronics
gives online publishers the ability to put audio and video online in a
format they can sell. Anybody can put a video or an MP3 up on the web,
but Kiptronics has given publishers and regular companies alike the
ability to utilize a common platform for their media. “I started
Kiptronics with the goal of providing an efficient and effective way of
helping publishers make money off audio and video they’re distributing
online,” says Cobb regarding the original vision of his online
publishing business, Kiptronics.
Kiptronics allows publishers to do
effective targeting, reporting, analytics, ad placement, tracking, and
management across advertisements that are running on media they’re
distributing out to all of these different devices. With such large
names as CondeNet, CBS and even FOX in their repertoire, Cobb’s company
has gone from small potatoes to the big cheese in just a matter of
years.
There are some essential components to any successful
enterprise. Once Cobb settled on the company vision, the future of his
enterprise was left up to everybody else. A business needs a dedicated
CEO, which Kiptronics had in Cobb, but it also requires a clientele
base, mentorship, and willing investors in order to really get off the
ground.
Luckily, Cobb had what it took to get those essentials as well.
“If
you’re an interesting person and you’re doing interesting things you’re
going to meet other interesting people who do other interesting
things,” says Cobb regarding business networking for his Kiptronics
endeavor. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for all of the
VPs of engineering and super software developers and other crazy
entrepreneurs that I’d run into over the years that I could then lean
on and say, ‘How can I do this?’”
These days, Kiptronics is
doing big things. Stationed in San Francisco and employing 14 full-time
employees, the enterprise is taking advantage of the needs of online
publishers. The market continues to stretch their needs and desires for
multi-media utilization methods. Kiptronics plans to stretch right
along with them. Cobb has one piece of advice for aspiring
“collegepreneurs” like himself: “Be humble and receptive to input and
seek it out. I think you’ll find that when people hear about something
exciting, that they are more than happy to help.”
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