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Startup Agility 127

team. Switching their full focus to the new iPhone would mean
stalling, and ultimately abandoning, their hard-won progress on the
click-wheel frontier. But staying with the click-wheel iPod would
leave them as undisputed masters of a once-great but forgotten tech-
nology. Mark decided to give up his “bird in the hand” in hopes of
seizing what new opportunities might lay in the bush.

The next few months were a whirlwind of innovation, salesman-
ship, and surprise for him: Trips to Cupertino, California, to share his
iPhone-based prototype with Apple; word from Apple that Steve Jobs
loved the prototype; and then an invitation to join Jobs on stage at
Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June. The
June 2008 WWDC functioned as a coming-out party for the AppStore
distribution channel and for the new generation iPhone. When called
upon, Mark took the stage and made the most of his twenty minutes,
walking the audience through a demo of the Modality Netter’s Anatomy
application that featured high-definition, colorful, zoomable screen
shots of human heart, brain, nerve, and bone anatomy. Apple’s online
AppStore, the channel that would forever change the face of mobile
computing, would soon make its debut, featuring Modality’s first
iPhone-based Netter’s Anatomy digital flash cards priced at $39.99.

Mark had bet big on the iPhone and the AppStore, and he needed
a significant revenue payoff to make it worthwhile. “If we don’t get a
good bump from this,” he said at the time, “we might need to talk
about how to close this thing down.” Fortunately, by mid-August, sales
had gone through the roof: five Netter’s Anatomy titles alone had grossed
more than $600,000 for the month of July. For the time being, Modal-
ity had survived a dangerous blow, and had positioned itself as a force
to be reckoned with in the emerging mobile learning space.

Mark Williams’s story illustrates a common experience for entre-
preneurs, who must often let go of cherished strategies or hard-earned
assets in order to seize new opportunities and deal with emerging
threats. With the benefit of hindsight, Mark’s decision to aggressively
redirect his resources into iPhone development seems like an obvious
move, a no-brainer. But at the time, it meant trading away a newly sta-
ble platform for a disrupting dose of uncertainty. It required a psy-
chological openness to change and a high degree of operational agility,

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