After all, the startup is centered on storytelling and Kevin Costner is maybe the archetype of a storyteller. Woody and his partner Bill Werlin conceived of Autio as they independently roadtripped around the country with their families. Woody loves traveling with his wife and three kids, but he wanted a way to peel his kids’ eyes off of their screens for a minute and engage with the world around them. That is ironic, because Woody had a lot of responsibility for putting those screens in their hands.

Woody’s previous startup was iStoryTime. Back in early 2009, kids were just being introduced to screens. Woody wanted his kids’ time with screens not to be mind-numbing and passive. iStoryTime was more based on the time tested format of picture books and gave kids an opportunity to develop early reading skills. His wife helped write the first story, and Woody struck deals with Dreamworks, Apple, Warner Bros, Nickelodeon, Sony and more for premium content licenses. iStoryTime was a hit, and content companies were approaching him for partnerships. 

They had bootstrapped the whole thing, which was great to a point, but when a VC approached them with an opportunity for funding that would help them expand rapidly, they recognized the upside. But, within a few years, that VC’s involvement led to complications that, for all intents and purposes, forced an acquisition. Cupcake Digital seemed to be a great parent company, and Woody had a place in the new organization, which seemed promising. However, Cupcake had different priorities and its own ideas about strategy, and iStoryTime didn’t flourish the way Woody wanted. Seven years invested, with more lessons learned than paydays. The biggest lesson was to get to know your investors and make sure that the fit is perfect before tying the knot financially. 

So, when Bill Werlin shared his road trips with his grandfather, learning about the geology of Colorado and stopping at historical markers, Woody could relate. His family stopped at historical markers, too. They always found themselves searching Google about that mountain in the distance or how this town came to be. They realized that stories about places could be downloaded to iPhones and triggered by GPS coordinates, and people traveling could learn about the places they’re traveling through. 

They prototyped it and then tested it with 120 people and refined the proposition. People wanted well-crafted, curated content. They eventually launched in 2020 with 1,500 stories connected to the west coast. Within a year they had expanded to every state in the nation and over 8,000 stories. At the time of this writing, they have 9,600 stories that have been downloaded over 500,000 times. Woody’s managing 7 full time employees and 20+ contractors working on content, which is a manageable load for a seasoned entrepreneur, and frankly, comparable in difficulty to a thousand-mile road trip with a carload of pre-teens. 

It turns out that Kevin Costner has homes in Santa Barbara and Colorado. If you know Kevin’s work, you know that he’s in love with the western United States, US history and native peoples’ history. You may not know that he and his family love to take road trips and stop at historical markers. He described to Woody how he encounters so many stories worth sharing, but many of them will never become feature-length films. However, they need a platform, and Autio is the perfect fit. By the end of the 30-minute meeting, which lasted half a day, Kevin Costner was an investor, co-founder and storyteller. 

In the last thirteen years, Woody’s started two companies. Both were inspired by situations that he was experiencing as he spent time with his family. Both were about wanting to make his kid’s experiences better. Both shared the thread of storytelling through technology. 

And, the thing Woody likes most about Autio is how it can bring people together and enrich their experience. Listening to a 20 minute story about the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in central California can lead to a 30 minute conversation about what that Manzanar experience must have been like. It’s one thing to read about it in a textbook, but it’s a whole different thing to look outside your car and imagine this inhospitable landscape 75 years ago, when it would have been much more foreboding, and picture what it must have been like to be released from Manzanar without even so much as a bus pass. History comes to life when you see it and share it with other people, and that’s what Woody loves about his latest venture.

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Mike Krebs Delivers!

Twice a week Mike Krebs brings meals to seniors in the Long Beach area. He’s there to help create a spark of joy in a homebound senior who is depending on that delivery for their next two meals. He has been delivering Meals on Wheels for six years now, and he really enjoys those bi-weekly routes. Besides the fun of the driving in the cool, blue Long Beach mornings, there’s also the relationships developed with the meal recipients.  At one point Mike had a 100-year-old client named Walter, who lived alone on his boat at the Marina!  Needless to say, Walter was always glad to have someone stop by and chat.

Mike was born in Long Beach, but it took him a couple decades of living elsewhere before he made his way back to the area. At age 2, he moved to Illinois and then a couple years later to Kabul, Afghanistan. His father was working with Columbia University to help establish a primary education system in Afghanistan (1965). Mike attended kindergarten and first grade at the American International School of Kabul. His mother, who was trained as a psychologist, was the guidance counselor for the high school students.  In the early 1960s it was a challenging job counseling students applying to colleges they had never seen via postal mail from central Asia. No TV or radio, Mike remembers everyone gathering in the school gym each Saturday night to watch a black and white movie.