New DriveCam CEO Is Focused on the Road Ahead

It’s been a little over six months since Brandon Nixon moved into the driver’s seat as CEO at San Diego-based DriveCam, a venture-backed company that uses a combination of technologies to help reduce risky driving behaviors. That seems like enough time for a new boss to get up to speed, so I stopped in recently to ask Nixon why he agreed to take over a startup that’s already got some mileage on the odometer.

Nixon has his reasons, three to be specific, all related to the potential growth he sees for the company and its technology. And his reasoning carries some weight. As a general partner at Housatonic Partners, Nixon oversaw the private equity firm’s investments in a number of telecommunications-related companies. In 2002, he stepped into the CEO’s job at a Housatonic portfolio company, Enerdyne Technologies of El Cajon, CA, and led Enerdyne’s sale four years later to ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) of Carlsbad, CA, for $17 million.

So in essence, by naming Nixon as CEO, DriveCam was redefining itself as less of a video technology company and more of a data communications technology business.

Yet DriveCam’s business strategy has only come into focus since 2005, when the company got about $50 million in venture funding from San Diego’s JMI Equity, Silicon Valley’s Menlo Ventures, New York-based Insight Venture Partners, and Integral Capital Partners, the Menlo Park, CA, firm that also put money into Google, Akamai, and Qualcomm.

Until then, DriveCam was mostly bootstrapped, although spokesman Eric Cohen says “there’s not a lot of historical information” available now about the first seven years. The company was founded in San Diego in 1998, after Australian inventor Gary Rayner experienced one of Southern California’s infamous road rage incidents. His idea for mounting a small video camera on the dashboard was novel enough to win a most-innovative product award in 2000 from Connect, the San Diego non-profit group that promotes technology and entrepreneurship. The device combined hardware and software to store unbiased video clips that served as an unbiased eyewitness to traffic accidents and other highway incidents.

Fast-forward 11 years, and it now seems as though hardly a cable TV channel goes by without seeing reality TV video footage of some terrifying high-speed police pursuit that was recorded by the dashboard-mounted camera in a patrol car. “There are a lot of crash recorders on the market,” Nixon conceded. But the company learned a long time ago there wasn’t much demand for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.