The Danger Seeker

Hank Nothhaft: 35-year industry veteran. Headed Concentric Network before its merger with NextLink. Now CEO of Danger Inc., creator of Hiptop, last year's vaunted wireless data device. Out to prove the company is about more than just a cool toy.

I would categorize the reason I came to Danger into different areas: the market, the team, and the technology. All of them have to do with timing: Despite the outward appearance, this is a good time to be in the market. Many times in my career, telecom grew more rapidly in recession periods.

One of the things that attracted me to Danger is that wireless data is going to be one of the few markets with real growth. One has to be one of the early entrants if not the first. Second, there's an excellent technology team that was put together to take advantage of this opportunity. A lot of them came from WebTV, which masked the complexity of the Internet from the users. The founding group took those learning experiences and applied them to wireless data. Danger is taking the approach of making effective utilization of the thin bandwidth available.

We're a software company, so our desire is to get as many manufacturers on board as possible. Our goal is to give the manufacturing community a reference design for free. The only caveat we have is that they must use our operating system.

I've been involved with the broader telecom market for my whole career. Having been with the carrier side gives me an advantage. If you understand how carriers operate and what they find beneficial, it helps you plan your business more effectively. What the Sidekick launch by T-Mobile demonstrates is that we can deliver exactly the type of device for the market that the carriers want to go after: the 18- to 34-year-old market.

A lot of the approaches to wireless data that have been taken in the past have not been standards-based. Sidekick is a network-based PC. Because we're using the back end to do the heavy lifting, the device itself is fairly simple and we provide a very good user experience.

As our carriers evolve they will want to put [the device] in different packaging. The company was fortunate — through shrewd planning and pure luck — on when we entered the market. We're not going to be anchored forever in the 18- to 34-year-old market. Ultimately we will evolve into relationships with carriers that will take us into the enterprise.

—As told to Vince Vittore