By Rob Sheeley
CEO, Vaddio

Well friends, I just want to say a few words about my upcoming departure and a few thoughts about what it has been like to have been a part of this amazing adventure we call Vaddio. Starting simply as a call to my friend Tom back in November of 2002, we turned that one casual conversation into one of the most amazing companies I have ever been involved with.

When Tom and I started Vaddio, it was about two friends trying to find a way to have some fun while trying to make a living. There was no deep strategy or brilliant product ideas that we started with. In fact, we kind of thought that maybe we would go overseas and find some amplifiers and speakers to private label and sell to our AV friends. The real reason we started Vaddio was to be able to create a company that we could have fun at while we made a living. In the process we ended up empowering a lot of others to have fun too. The power of a team having fun is the most powerful and irresistible group of people you will ever find.

Sometimes when I try and connect the dots from where we started to where we are today it sure seems like “What A Long Strange Trip It Has Been,” to quote The Grateful Dead. From a few true believers such as Bill Fischer and Erik Soderlund who both believed enough to work for free, to getting lucky enough in finding Stacy Kringlen as our first employee who turned out to be the only responsible one out of all us. She managed to keep order in the sandbox as we all scrambled to find that one thing that we could bring to InfoComm 2003, to show we could be cool. Below is a brief news article that appeared in Wainhouse Research right before our first InfoComm Show in 2003.

“Vaddio has come out of the closet and introduced multiple peripheral products for the conferencing industry. Central are ControlVIEW and MicVIEW product lines, systems designed to provide automatic camera preset management and automated camera switching. In March 2003, Vaddio acquired the CamCommand and MicCommand product lines from ClearOne Communications. Under Vaddio, these products have been redesigned and given a new feature set. Other products are all-in-one integration packages designed to simplify camera control and cable distribution for remote camera systems in AV and videoconferencing applications.“

I kind of liked the bit about our coming out of the closet and in a lot of ways it still applies to us today when other AV Manufactures look at us from a distance. As most of you know I firmly believe that there is profit in confusion and folks, we have been baffling the rest of the AV industry for years.

The one question I get the most these days from a lot of people about our early days has to do with, “How did you know what products would be successful?” The answer is quite simply, “We didn’t.” The only people who truly know what products will be successful are our customers who are our dealers and integrators. I have always felt that it was our job to make our technology easy enough so they could actually make some money by selling and installing our products. And the only way we can ensure Vaddio’s future success is to know exactly what that integrator needs to do at that project site now and in the future.

The AV industry is going through some massive changes and disruptions that has, and will continue to change our industry forever. IP networks are here to stay and just as they have totally disrupted the consumer electronics industry, they will do the same in AV as well. There is a reason why the AV Bridge family is the fastest growing product line that we have ever launched. Computer applications drive our industry, not physical media anymore. Video/Audio Switching, Control, Signal Distribution all become data streams in this brave new world of AV. In fact the “Internet Of Things,” is rapidly becoming a standard in most new AV product designs. Does anybody really want to buy a non-networked product these days?

This does not mean that we don’t have a future in this new world of AV, the same rules of AV room design will still need to be followed. Acoustics, sightlines, user interfaces and system integration will still need to be addressed in the system design. Transducers such as microphones, speakers, cameras and displays will still need to be designed according to the space requirements. IT guys still don’t understand what it takes to design a room system however they do know how to install an appliance.

Our future success will require us to take a good long hard look at how we can play in a world of networked transducers that connect to software applications. If you don’t believe me go into any home living room and see what content the typical home display is showing and where it is coming from. That is if they even watch content in the living room anymore and are not just using a mobile device to watch whatever content they want to wherever they want to. Software applications are going to replace our black boxes and I can see a whole lot more software engineers being added to the Vaddio engineering team as software replaces black boxes.

So over the years that followed since we founded Vaddio, we have focused our corporate culture on having fun and the power of creativity, and believing that by building a team of very creative individuals and by empowering them to be creative we could really be something special. And you know what, we are. We have done things that nobody ever would have believed that Vaddio could have done. At InfoComm last week we were the talk of the show. We had lots of AV folks, dealers, integrators, consultants, end users; industry types all tell us that our new products are some of the most innovative products at the show this year. Doing a quick Google search we had over 6,514 mentions about Vaddio at InfoComm 2014.

The best part about InfoComm this year was the opportunity to announce Ed Ellett as our new president and CEO and to spend some time with him at the show. Ed happens to be an Austin, Tex. native, and as such, is a Midwesterner at heart. He fits in at Vaddio perfectly as he is both a guitar player and a fisherman in addition to being one of the kindest gentlemen I have ever met. (However, in full disclosure I have yet to meet anyone from Austin that I have not liked). Both Tom and I could not believe how fortunate we were in finding someone of Ed’s caliber to lead Vaddio in the future.

Ed’s experience at Dell and Compaq will be critical as we navigate from being an AV black box company and into an AV software application company in the future. By the way, he was the man who navigated Polycom from being just a video conferencing set-top company with ViewStation and into the world of enterprise class video conferencing systems. But from my perspective the real gain with Ed is he is very much like me in that he is a product manager at heart and has passion for the products and our industry. It takes real passion to lead a creative team of people and to be a leader in our industry. As we all know we already have way too many bankers leading AV companies nowhere.

And for those of you that think that I am just going to disappear, you guessed wrong. Just as one does not abandon their children as they grow up but you give them enough room to grow and reach their potential. That is what we are doing with Vaddio. We believe that this team is poised to be successful for years to come and with Ed we have a leader who will be able to bring Vaddio to the next level of success. As Tom and I are the two largest individual shareholders of Vaddio we will be very active board members and will be providing guidance to the team for years to come.

So, as a serial entrepreneur who has always lived life by following my heart and my dreams I would like to announce my latest business, Mill City Sound. A true brick and mortar retail record and hi-fi store located in beautiful downtown Hopkins, Minnesota. Yes, this is from the guy that said that physical media is disappearing from the home and the world is on a collision course to digital media. However the romance of vinyl and true analog audio has proven too strong to stay away. Besides on a scale of 1 – 10 on the fun-meter I’m thinking that most days will be a 10+. If you get a chance to visit my blog at www.45Spins.com you can read all about it.

So hey, I started Vaddio with the chance of having some fun – who knows what the next adventure will bring. See you later my friends, I got a new business to start.

Rob Sheeley
CEO/President, Vaddio
rsheeley@vaddio.com