It seemed counterintuitive to start his own Internet venture when the dotcom business he’d been working for collapsed in the crash of 2000, but Mark Kennedy has always followed his passions.
The St. John’s entrepreneur had already co-founded a legal practice, worked as a high school chemistry teacher and laboured in the oil field service industry when he decided his future lay with the Internet.
For Kennedy, now CEO of Celtx, a maker of pre-production software for the film industry, life is to be embraced, wherever it leads.
“In 1998, I was a lawyer working on an entrepreneur’s exit deal and the entrepreneur asked me to become his strategy person in a new Internet-based business,” Kennedy explained. “I’d had a long-standing interest in computers and it was a great opportunity to learn about the Internet.”
That startup hit the wall, but Kennedy felt sure the Internet was about to upend software distribution models and people’s interactions with software, so he decided to start his own software development company.
With co-founder and software developer Chad House, he established Celtx in 2001. To pay the bills, he and House did some coding projects for clients before settling on the film industry as their area of focus.
“I joke that my first company was a law practice that had money and clients, my second business had money but no clients and the third had no money and no clients.”
Kennedy said the Celtx software allows filmmakers to do all their preparations for filming on their personal computer or device. Early on, the company offered free software and paid-for premium products.
In the past two years, it has focused more on cloud-based and device-based products. Globally, Celtx now has four million desktop users, 600,000 users in the cloud and 150,000 users on devices.
“We started to focus on revenue late in 2012,” Kennedy said. “We basically doubled our revenue in three months.”
Celtx has also been taken up by larger businesses, which are interested in its enterprise products, designed for studios and major companies. Kennedy has had discussions with NBC Universal in the U.S. and European conglomerates.
He is considering increasing the size of the Celtx development team, there are currently 13 employees, of whom 10 are developers, and possibly opening an office in New York or Los Angeles.
A couple of big launches are on the agenda, but running a company means there are always “rough edges” to smooth.
“There’s lots of pain and stress,” Kennedy said. “If you solve the cash flow problem, you have 99 problems.”
He accepts the stress as inevitable and says it is good as long as you still want to get out of bed in the morning.
“You have to stay scrappy, innovate and take risks. The second you put your feet on the desk, you’re dead. You have to grow a bit further than the cash flow.”
Since founding Celtx, Kennedy has seen the St. John’s startup community grow. Companies, like Verafin Inc., maker of verification software, and smaller companies such as Celsius Game Studios and Red Meat Games are thriving.
“We’ve seen more activity in the startup community in the last 18 months than in the last 10 years. Now, we need some new big exits. There were a few about a decade ago. We need our own Radian6’s and Go Instant’s,” he said, referring to two well-known Maritime companies that have recently been sold.
“That will make a huge difference and attract attention. We need to see that. It encourages people to throw their hat in the ring.”
With the aim of boosting local confidence and inter-connectivity, Kennedy is one of those involved in establishing Common Ground, a co-working space for the startup community.
“The co-working startup space will help create the right atmosphere. We will offer advice and maybe new companies will be able to avoid some pitfalls. We seemed to fall into every one.”