Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with Bob Marshall, President and CEO, AWS Convergent Technologies, Inc.
May 22, 2006

Bob Marshall has created a successful business from other people’s obsession with the weather. His Germantown company, AWS Convergence Technologies Inc., sells the WeatherBug product, a real-time weather tracking service used by consumers and federal agencies. He launched the 200-employee company nearly 15 years ago after working for a federal contractor that was networking sonar sensors for the Navy. Today, WeatherBug’s Web site gives CNN and MSNBC a run for their money in terms of daily hits, and the product competes head to head with Weather.com in providing weather information. Marshall, 40, grew up in Rockville, but moved north to work for BBN Technologies, the Cambridge, Mass., company credited with helping develop the Internet. He came back to the Washington area in the early 1990s to launch AWS.

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: We’re intrigued to see that the Department of Homeland Security uses WeatherBug. How?
We’ve had a partnership in place with NOAA’s National Weather Service and DHS for a number of years now. They have a critical need for very local weather information in the event of a terrorist attack on one of our major cities. If a terrorist were to release a chemical or biological agent in one of our major cities, you need to know the local wind conditions to be able to provide guidance to the first responders, where to evacuate people. Without our data, the National Weather Service has 1,000 weather stations around the country at the airports. We have 8,000 of our systems that are very densely populated in the major metropolitan areas where people live and work. That’s where a lot of the threats are. If there was an attack on Bethesda, without our data, they’d be using weather data from National Airport. That just would not be adequate. They’d be sending people in the wrong direction. It’s also unique that it’s live content, as opposed to hourly information, which is generally what’s put out from the airport.

When did you form the relationship with DHS?
We started talking to them not too long after 9/11. When the president asked businesses to step up after 9/11 and see what we could do to contribute to the homeland security effort, we pretty quickly saw that our network should be able to play a key role in supporting the homeland.

Did your company play any role during Hurricane Katrina?
We play a role in almost all hurricanes. Our focus is on the real-time local conditions, so we have many relationships with local municipalities and first responders whereby they will be monitoring our weather network in real-time as the storm approaches shore. NOAA and the National Weather Service also use our information to help forecast where these storms go and issue alerts to the public. Like the National Weather Service, we actually had substantial damage done to our network after Hurricane Katrina. We installed several hundred thousand dollars worth of new systems to support the relief efforts within weeks after Katrina, including one atop the city hall in New Orleans. It was a horrendous situation with a lot of toxic chemicals in the area. But they had a critical need to know where the winds were blowing so they could manage the relief effort and keep everybody safe.

What gave you the inspiration to launch WeatherBug?
We were networking sonar sensors for the Navy and doing some really exciting things with sensors under the ocean and came up with the idea to network weather sensors instead. My wife was a middle school math teacher at the time, and she said this would be a phenomenal tool to have in the classroom.

Did you think nearly 15 years later you’d still be in business?
I can’t take credit for seeing the full vision that it would become and what it is today. It was never really about selling weather stations to schools; it was all about creating a network of weather stations that could be utilized by the schools. We did know back then that if one day we created a substantial network, there should be good business opportunities that would result from the data. We always believed that content is king, and if we had hyper localized information, it would be of great value not only to consumers but ultimately businesses.

Was the original product intended for consumers?
We did see very early on that consumers would have an interest in this information. That’s why we went almost right out of the gate to local TV stations. If you watch WJLA here in Washington, they highlight the local community weather information from the schools. It’s really an important part of what they do every day. We definitely didn’t have a vision for being a direct to consumer outlet that we have become. But that was a pretty natural progression for us once the Internet became mainstream.

Who are your competitors?
On the consumer side, we look at the Weather Channel and Weather.com as competitors. If you look at it on a daily basis, we go back and forth with the Weather Channel. We’re both in the top 10 on the Internet on a monthly basis. On a daily basis, it’s between us and the Weather Channel, we’re generally No. 1 and No. 2 when it comes to news and information sites everyday. We have more users than CNN.com and MSNBC.com, Yahoo News and AOL News. We have a tremendous number of eyeballs that visit WeatherBug.com everyday. We have a professional side of the business where we license the data to governments, energy companies, transportation companies and education. There’s a small number of weather companies out there that provide services out there that we consider competitors. We’re probably one of the largest ones.

How much venture capital have you received?
A series A round for $15 million in June 2000 and a series B round in Spring 2004 for $23 million.

Your company had been in existence for eight years before you raised venture capital. What made you take the plunge?
We bootstrapped the company for eight years on our own cash flow and the investment from the founders. One of the other founders was ready to retire. We really had a couple of options at that point. One was to sell the company and the other was to raise money and buy his shares. We chose the latter. We raised the money to buy his shares and provide some growth capital to allow us to focus on the consumer side of the business.

You have four daughters. Have you talked to them about going into engineering?
Not anything directly but certainly I have a couple inclined that way. My oldest is a scientist through and through. She loves marine biology, chemistry and the study of the human genome. They’re all good at math.

What’s the future of the company?
We see tremendous opportunities both on the consumer and professional side of our businesses. We’ve done a tremendous job of building into our technology the capability to alert people when severe weather is approaching. So between planning your day and making sure we deliver real time severe weather alerts, we see that as a great opportunity both on the desktop and the mobile side of the business. On the professional side, we continue to see the opportunity to build out networks of proprietary weather information that can be harnessed and used to provide critical decision technology for both businesses and government. A lot of that is around safety and alerting. Governments and businesses need the capability to monitor in real time severe weather and provide alerts to their employees, to their constituents. Any ideas to branch out?

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]