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JULY 13, 2005
VeriSign's New Target: Consumers [Page 2 of 2] Q: That's pretty radical to say you're going to forget about the stock market and investors. A: You know, I've spent a lot of time with a lot of CEOs, and I sit on some boards, and the general refrain is, "We have three constituencies: employees, customers, and shareholders." But I think if you believe you're doing the right thing for customers, and if you believe you have a great set of employees who are all motivated, then the third constituency gets rewarded, right? And I can tell you -- I spent 25% of my time in the 2000 to 2002 period with investors, and finally realized that that 25% would have been better spent with customers and employees. Q: So you've gone from making online transactions more secure to selling ringtones. That's confusing to a lot of people. How do all your businesses fit together? A: Oh yeah, from the outside we look like we're in supply chain with RFID, we look like we're in domain names with dot-com and dot-net, and we look like we're in telecom with Jamster and our traditional voice stuff. But think about those things at another level. Those are just [ways of] enabling an interaction or protecting an interaction. It's all built on the same technology base. It all connects into the same networks. It's all run by the data centers that we've owned for many, many years. RFID, at a technology level, you can't distinguish it from what we do in domain names. It's exactly the same addressing scheme, right? So for us, we could build that in literally four months. Q: What new areas of the business have been really exciting to you personally? A: In the communication space, Jamba and wireless content. It's so funny. People talk about it as ringtones, and they kind of crinkle their noses and say, "Who would want that?" It's not [just] ringtones. It's about mobile entertainment. It just happens to be, because of the speed of the networks and the functionality of the phones, that the first thing we can do is ringtones and graphics. But there will be full download songs, there will be video-on-demand, there will be TV, and there will be multiplayer gaming. So we're at the tip of the iceberg on mobile entertainment. I think that's incredibly exciting, because I'm watching it through my children's eyes. It's that generation that we're seeing use this new technology, because they're the first generation that's growing up with the network always on. Q: What's the ringtone on your phone right now? A: Right now, it's a funny one that we have that says, "Hey, pick up the phone." But it changes frequently. My kids are the funny ones. Man, I hear a new song on their phones weekly. Q: Do you put them on a budget, or do you let them spend whatever they want since you're making money off it? A: They understand that this stuff costs, so they come and ask. And they're pretty good about it. Q: Like a lot of software executives, you've been the CEO from the beginning. Ever wonder if you're still the guy to be running this company? A: Sure, I wonder it every day. I didn't know how to run a startup, I didn't know how to run $100 million business when we got there, I didn't know how to run a billion-dollar one when we got there, and I certainly don't know how to run a $2 billion one. It energizes me and scares me every day. That still excites me about coming to work. So yeah, I worry about whether we are quote-unquote a scalable management team, but you know what? Go pick me a successful company, I mean, literally a multidecade successful company, where they changed the CEO just because the revenue got bigger. What metric is that? Q: Are there things you miss about running a smaller company? A: You know, it's tougher when you're in this many locations and you've got this many people. There are people who will come up to me at a company event and call me Mr. Sclavos. That still shocks me 10 years later. So I miss that part of running a small company. On the other side, you can't be bored with what we're doing. As I said, I have no place else to go, and the things we're working on are more exciting than what I see most other companies working on. So I plan to be here as long as they'll have me.
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