View from the Office. 

Dorrian Porter was visiting Paris in 2012 and found himself mesmerized by the enormous arrivals and departures board at the Gare du Nord, the city’s iconic train station.

He loved the motion of the flipping tiles and the sound they made when hundreds of them rotated to change times and destinations. 

There was something both modern and old fashioned about the board. It was sort of digital but also analog. It commanded everyone’s attention. 

He thought: how cool would it be to build a smaller version to hang on the wall at home for his kids. Whenever he was traveling he could leave them a message.

It took longer than expected to get started, but twelve years later the company he founded, Vestaboard, has sold 15,000 units and generates $11 million in annual revenue. 

I met Dorrian last week at a conference in San Diego put on by Howard Lindzon, a general partner at the venture capital firm Social Leverage. 

Dorrian had lugged a board to set up in the back of the conference room. I can vouch for the fact that every time the 8,000 or so tiles on the board whirled, heads turned. 

I used to work in an office at Bloomberg that had a complex and expensive system of monitors they used to update employees on sales numbers and changes in policy.  

It’s telling that Bloomberg’s management found the system – which was called Arcade – a necessary and more impactful way to commuunicate than email. 

Vestabord would have been a lower cost, more dynamic solution. It can be programmed or changed on the fly from anywhere via an app.

It includes free software and an optional paid subscription for feeds of content about everything from news to stock prices to sports scores from 400 sources that update automatically

Vestabords cost about $3,295.

It’s not cheap, but it’s less than business class to Paris to see the original at the Gare du Nord.