Interview MobUI Founder John Burry

Interview with Founder MobUI John

Now, this is an amazing story. I had a great chat with John Burry from MobUI on the phone last week. I was really interested to know how the ex- Chief Technology Officer at Action Engine suddenly turned around and bought the company he once worked for in the space of about six months with his own start-up.

Yes! It sounds unbelievable but its true and the trigger in all of this is that small device called the iPhone.

What happened?

John Burry left Action Engine at the end of June 2008. He had spoken to the Action Engine team and was making noise that an iPhone application was necessary, NOW. But Action Engine preferred to do what it was good at and didn’t want to pursue the iPhone application market.

So John Burry left to Co-found MobUI.

MobUI – wasn’t a competitor for Action Engine but complimentary and in the first instance it started up a partnership with Action Engine.

MobUI’s first customer was a huge Music Brand and from there the business just kept on growing as many ex-clients from Action Engine wanted iPhone applications.

To cut an extremely exciting story short – during this deployment the tables turned and it was Action Engine that needed or started to depend on parts of MobUI.

So, MobUI took over all assets and 8 staff (out of about 40 staff) from Action Engine. The 8 people were all in the development team and it now boasts a leaner mobile business.

CEO of Action Engine Scott Silk is not part of the package –but John Burry had some great things to say about Action Engine and the future of MobUI.

He said, our ethic is not to “get sold” we want to make a scalable profitable business. I am an ex-Microsoft guy and I have the early Microsoft ethic of look after your employees and pay them well – in my bones. Our aim is to grow and provide quality strong services. We want to grow our reputation and not our body count (I loved that!).
I mentioned in our interview that it’s a nice change to hear that because more often than not start-ups just want to be sold.

So that is it – what a great story and I am sure we will hear a lot more from the company.  On top of that iPhone applications seem to be the bee’s knees at the moment. I have never been a fan of on device portals because of the difficulty in downloading and the likes of SurfKitchen need to watch-out.

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