Danny Beckley had already left the startup world behind.
After studying music education and trombone performance at university, he became involved in technology during the dot-com boom, building software businesses that helped fund his education. He eventually moved into the music world and is now president and CEO of the Kansas City Symphony.
Then an injury changed how he spent his spare time.
Beckley injured his wrist and found himself unable to do many of the activities he normally enjoyed outside work, including woodworking and gardening. Even flying was affected. With fewer ways to occupy his evenings and weekends, he returned to something he had enjoyed years earlier: building software.
Over about six months, Beckley developed two iPhone apps through his company, Creative Sonar LLC. Both grew out of his and his wife Nicole’s enthusiasm for books and their habit of visiting used bookshops around Kansas City.
The couple have around 1000 books at home, and that collection presented a problem that will be all too familiar with bibliophiles out there. The Beckleys owned plenty of books that might be useful or interesting, but finding the right one meant remembering what they had, where it was and whether a particular title was actually on the shelf.
Danny’s first app, Home Library Companion, is designed to make that easier. Users can photograph their bookshelves, allowing the app to identify and catalogue the books rather than requiring every title to be entered manually. The resulting library can then be searched and shared.
His second app, Bookstore Companion, addresses a different part of the same problem.
Used bookshops can contain thousands of titles, and browsing is part of their appeal. But it can also be difficult to know which books are worth picking up, particularly when there are shelves of unfamiliar authors and subjects. The app uses a phone’s camera to identify books and provides information intended to help shoppers decide what deserves a closer look.
Neither product is being pitched as a conventional venture-backed technology startup. Beckley has released the apps through Apple’s App Store and hopes that the modest fees they generate will eventually cover their running costs.
The project is valuable to him for another reason. Building software gives Beckley a creative outlet that is completely different from his day job running a major orchestra. He describes the development work as something he can turn to outside working hours, rather than another obligation competing with his responsibilities at the symphony.
There is also something familiar about returning to technology after such a long break. Beckley had previously built software businesses when the internet was going through its first major commercial boom. Decades later, he is once again writing software, but this time the motivation is much closer to home.
The apps began with problems he and his wife actually had: keeping track of the books they owned and making sense of the books they encountered in shops.
That makes Beckley’s second act in technology an unusually personal one. There is no huge funding round or ambitious promise to transform an industry. Instead, a senior arts executive found himself with some unexpected free time, rediscovered an old skill and started making tools that solved small problems in a hobby he already loved.
For Beckley, entrepreneurship has become less about building the next big company and more about having something creative to work on when the orchestra’s doors close for the evening.
