A somewhat interesting transcript of Mark Dankberg's statement before the House Small Business Committee in October 1999:
house.gov
<STATEMENT OF MARK DANKBERG, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, ViaSat, INC.
Mr. DANKBERG. Good morning. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you very much for the opportunity to tell ViaSat's story. It is really an honor for us to be here at all.
I have submitted a written statement for the record and would like to summarize some key points here.
We think we are a prototype of the American success story. Steve Hart, Mark Miller and I started the company in 1986 working out of a spare room in my house. We have grown in sales every year and we have been profitable every year after the very first year.
ViaSat's now headquartered in Carlsbad, California, near San Diego, and employs about 400 people with sales over $70 million dollars for the fiscal year that ended March 31st of this year. We are a high tech company specializing in advanced digital communications products and systems.
Generally we compete with and work with companies like Motorola. Most of our products involve satellite communications networks, and ViaSat serves customers around the world including the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa.
And we even have satellite communications equipment on Air Force One. Most of our business is in defense, but our fastest growing segment is commercial satellite networking. We started as a self funded start up with about $25,000 from the three of us.
We later raised about $300,000 in venture seed funding, and then, a few years later, got a commercial bank line of credit. We ended up doing about a $20 million dollar public offering in December of '96 and are listed on NASDAQ.
We believe the American entrepreneurial environment is the best in the world. We think we are a good example that our system works; that public and private resources available to entrepreneurs, combined with hard work, dedication and at least a little bit of luck, offers real opportunities to live the American dream, starting a company and taking it public.
The Government Small Business Innovation Research Program, known as SBIR, was a big enabler for growing our company to the point it could go public. We think we have been one of the most successful companies at converting SBIR seed R&D funds into commercially viable phase three business.
We think the SBIR program is probably the single most effective Government program for fostering both the growth of small business and for innovation. Our first direct Government program was actually a $50,000 SBIR phase one contract for a communications environment simulator for the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland back in 1987.
That $50,000 phase one earned us an additional $500,000 phase two contract. But since then, we have received over $40 million dollars in phase three contracts from the Navy, Air Force and prime contractors like Lockheed Martin for products we developed directly from that initial award and we still do work for the same customers.
Plus, we estimate that the DOD saved about $40 million dollars because of the technology that we developed under that SBIR program. And we have been able to repeat that success in a couple other business areas generating over $100 million dollars in contracts with similar savings to taxpayers.
Building on that foundation, ViaSat reached about $20 million dollars per year in sales and close to about $2 million dollars in pretax profits in our fiscal '96, the year we went public. We had also earned a small foothold in commercial satellite networks.
We found the process of going public to be straightforward, but very time consuming. Probably the single biggest factors though in dealing with that are the volatility of the stock markets and the global high tech product markets, which greatly influenced the timing and reception for an IPO.
We found the SEC, in particular, to be positive and constructive to work with in assembling our offering documents, with the big issue really being to present a fair and balanced view of both the opportunities and risks of investing in our company.
We have been public for about three years. We felt like we had a good understanding of the changes that would be involved in being a public company. But I would say that the reality has probably been a little "more" -- with "more" of almost everything in terms of time consuming than we anticipated.
Not that that is due to anything necessarily bad or bureaucratic. It is just something that every company ought to be aware of.
Overall, I would say that the company and its investors have had a positive experience. Well, the company has, and I hope our investors have. And I believe access to the public markets is a big advantage to American entrepreneurs.
Thank you once again for providing an opportunity to tell our story here.> |
