Chris Jaeb

Early life

Jaeb grew up in Dallas, Texas, the second oldest of Tom and Sharon Jaeb’s six children. He attended Jesuit College Prep and was first in the state in tennis and golf the year he graduated. He attended the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin and lastly the University of Texas at Dallas, where he received a degree in Business Administration.

Family

Jaeb married wife, Brenda in 2001. They have a daughter and a son.

Early career

Jaeb excelled at both tennis and golf, which led to his first job at Northwood Country Club in Dallas. In 1981, Jaeb and a partner founded Video Dating, a short-lived, pre-Internet venture. In April 1984, Jaeb and a friend launched Galt Imports, named after the character, John Galt from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The business, which imported luxury gray market cars and parts, served as a business learning platform for Jaeb.

Cameron Communications

In 1989, Jaeb founded Cameron Communications to sell a promotional radio product to professional sports teams. The company was based on the premise that fans wanted to hear the play-by-play of the games they were attending. Aware that AM signals didn’t get into stadiums, he put together a plan to redistribute the AM rights holder’s broadcasts inside stadiums and arenas using a low power FM transmission system.

By 1992, he was working for Affiliated Computer Services, a mainframe computer outsourcing company where he reviewed contracts that sold satellite bandwidth. Still moonlighting to pursue his original concept, he was able to calculate the cost of digitally broadcasting college and pro games to the arenas and stadiums. In time, realizing the market was metropolitan areas, not stadiums, he put together a plan for the NBA, MLB and NFL to distribute their games via satellite to metropolitan areas and use the cellular phone network to re-transmit the programming to consumers. As the Internet started to come alive (1993–94), it became apparent that rebroadcasting over the Internet eliminated the need for the satellite distribution infrastructure and without that cost - the focus became broadcast rights acquisition.

Jaeb put a contract together to acquire the right to rebroadcast live sporting events in real time via the Internet and share revenue from ad sales and with around $17,000 a year in funding from his father, quit his day job and started making calls and securing the rights to redistribute live broadcasts of college and professional sporting events in 1993-94.

AudioNet

Convinced that he had a winning idea, Jaeb initially sought investors from amongst his friends and acquaintances. In 1994, he was introduced to Dallas attorney, Todd Wagner, by the leader of a seminar Wagner was attending called “Running from the Law”. Anxious to leave the legal profession for something more entrepreneurial, Wagner was intrigued by Jaeb’s concept and set up a meeting for Jaeb to meet his friend, Mark Cuban, who had just sold MicroSolutions and was looking for new investments.

In November 1994, during a meeting with Wagner and Cuban at California Pizza Kitchen in Dallas, Jaeb outlined his fundraising pitch. Within ten minutes, Cuban said, “I’m in." Wagner then left for a long-planned trip to Australia and Jaeb continued in his quest to find additional investors. With other investors expressing interest, in December, he approached Cuban asking for a show of good faith and received in return, a check for $10,000, with the note, “2% of the company” written on the memo line.

By December 1994, a major contract Jaeb had made with Teamline fell through. Teamline had acquired the right to retransmit college and professional games through a 900 number telephone service. When Cuban heard about the loss, he announced he “was out." AudioNet later sued Teamline for breach of contract.

When Wagner returned from Australia, he and Jaeb set out to rewrite the business plan, seek out new investors, build the company and quantify Cuban’s ownership. Cuban’s insistence that he owned a 2% non-dilutable interest, made it difficult for Wagner and Jaeb to secure additional funding.

During the next three months of negotiation with Cuban, RealAudio debuted their RealAudio player, which eliminated the need to develop the software to retransmit the games over the Internet. By spring of 1995, Cuban said he was not only, “back in," but announced he was going to develop the company with or without Wagner and Jaeb. Rather than be cut out of a concept that was originally his, Jaeb allowed Wagner to put a deal together whereby Jaeb would train others to acquire broadcast rights and not report to Cuban. The company, which was originally called Cameron Broadcasting Systems was reorganized as AudioNet with Jaeb receiving a monthly draw and 10% of the company and Wagner and Cuban splitting the other 90%.

The initial broadcast on AudioNet was the first game of the SMU Mustang football season in the fall of 1995. Jaeb was at Cuban’s house in Dallas, overseeing the computer that encoded the play-by-play into a digital format. For the next few years, Jaeb worked 2 days a week at AudioNet’s offices in Deep Ellum, on the edge of downtown Dallas, teaching employees the art of acquiring broadcast rights. At the same time, he was developing a new venture called eAds, the first fee-per-click advertising company on the Internet – believing this was going to be the best way to generate revenue for the programming on AudioNet.

Broadcast.com

By spring of 1998, mere months before its IPO, the company name was changed to Broadcast.com. On July 20, 1998 it went public with what was at the time the best IPO in history, with at 240+% first day gain. When it went public it included Motorola, Intel, Yahoo and Premier Radio amongst its shareholders. Nine months after going public, it sold to Yahoo for $5.4 billion. During the summer of 1999 with what seemed to be a sky-high valuation of Yahoo stock, Jaeb sold his remaining interest in what was then Yahoo and was totally out of the stock market.

In the post-IPO years, Jaeb made a move from Texas to Santa Barbara, California.

Common Ground Kauai & Malama Kauai

In 2003 Jaeb moved his family to Kauai, Hawaii, and began working as an environmental activist. Malama Kauai, co-founded with Keone Kealoha and Common Ground Kauai were developed in this same time frame to “merge traditional Hawaiian principles of aloha and malama aina with contemporary principles guided by the four pillars of sustainability – the environment, culture, economy and society."

Jaeb purchased approximately 46 acres of what had originally been the 600-acre Guava Kai Plantation, a guava farm and processing plant on the north shore of Kauai. His purchase of the hub of the plantation, including the visitor center, a gift shop, snack bar, administration and processing center, 6 acres of guava trees, and 15 acres of open space have been re-imagined into organic gardens, a farm to table food service at The Garden Cafe in Common Ground Kauai and a permaculture touring environment.

Common Ground Kauai's mission is to create a sustainable resource center, a demonstration environment that offers access to food products and educational information that support the local economy, environment and community. Ongoing and in-development programs driven by Jaeb’s vision and community feedback and involvement include the development of educational programs, a sustainable agricultural system and a full complement of holistic approaches to water, waste, energy and food system design.