In 1992, VisualMagic™ cofounder, Gary Warhaftig, started Point of View Telescopes (POV). Since that time all telescope leases are with non-profit organizations or parks. Gary has always appreciated the dedication of park’s staff who provide the best possible visitor experience.

Gary solved the many challenges of the telescope business, allowing him to rapidly scale the business profitably. He found ways to get park foundations and the senior leaders above the park managers to recommend his telescopes to the park managers, greatly accelerating the installation of telescopes. He developed tools for analyzing where to put telescopes and how many would be appropriate at each site. He built a cadre of local telescope repairmen to keep the scopes maintained and collect the coins without having to travel to far away parks. He found ways to get long term leases that precluded competition. He designed and built telescopes so strong that breaking them for the coins within the base was almost impossible. The result has been a profitable business that has supported Gary and his family for thirty-three years.

Prior to POV, Gary’s career has been in the non-profit world. He was the Director of Development for the San Francisco Ballet; the Executive Director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences; and a director for a San Francisco Community Foundation. Gary spent many years as a docent naturalist at Ano Nuevo State Reserve leading tours of the Elephant Seals, as well as Pescadero Marsh Nature Preserve, home to over 200 species of birds including a rookeries of nesting egrets, herons and cormorants. 

In his role as a real estate broker, Gary brokered the sale of 2000 acres of Redwood Forest to the Sempervirens Fund who then transferred it to the California State Parks. During the heyday of Japanese investment in US real estate, Gary put together many multi-million dollar deals between Japanese investors and US property owners. Despite radically different cultures and the frequent reluctance of US property owners to sell what the Japanese investors wanted, in the end, with Gary’s help, they all found ways to get their needs met and the deals closed. Indeed, the buyers and sellers became friends, lubricating yet more deals. Brokering these deals require great business acumen and great character to maintain trust with the participants. These skills and the character that lies behind them will be powerful assets as the Zoomie™ business scales.

In the years he worked to protect the Montara, CA water supply, Gary demonstrated outstanding relational and collaborative and political skills that are needed to protect precious national resources. When others saw the loss of Montara’s water rights as a lost cause, Gary made friends with powerful political players who held any raiders at bay.

Founding VisualMagic™ was a natural progression for Gary—a business that is also a social venture that supports parks in engaging and educating their visitors and better achieving their missions. It is Gary’s privilege to help support the public lands and venues with VisualMagic’s services, as the importance of this purpose continues to grow.  

Gary brings decades of full-time focus on a similar business, bringing telescopes to parks.  He understands the internal perspectives of parks from many years dealing with them while installing telescopes. He knows who to talk to and what parts of the organization will appreciate the educational or amenity value of a Zoomie.

Those of us who work with Gary find him a kind, visionary, enthusiastic and inspiring leader who is dedicated to supporting parks and other public lands and venues—and has a wealth of experience working with them. We are always astounded by his countless warm connections, some spanning decades, with those who serve parks and public lands. Gary’s quick grasp of business realities, quick recognition of opportunity, and trustworthy character will guide VisualMagic through the startup, scaling, and eventual sale of the business. Also, whenever we need to build a relationship with a person important to VisualMagic’s success, whether as customer or staff member, Gary’s network of old friends and the high regard people hold him in, gives us access and a good start to a trusting relationship. 

Gifford Pinchot has started five companies and sold four of them. In his younger years, he began his activism in social and environmental issues as a civil rights organizer, first for the Congress of Racial Equality and then for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. While working part time as a biodynamic dairy farmer with his brother, he cofounded, led, and sold a metal fabrication company with his wife. He designed the products and built efficient tooling and ways of making them. 

Gifford brings experience in managing technical ventures from his role as the CEO who turned around a struggling internet security company, Consensus Development. He also learned from engaging in eight startups as an angel investor and eight hundred new products as a business consultant.

Consensus Development built SSL Ref 3.0 for Netscape and then built its own commercial implementation toolkit, TLS Plus, which it sold to companies like Lotus, Oracle Sybase, and Wells Fargo. Consensus Development led the working group at IETF that made TLS the international standard. It is still used for trillions of dollars of commerce today. Giff sold Consensus Development with a 100:1 return for initial shareholder, garnering two and a half times more than the investment banker he approached said was the very best he could hope for. 

Gifford was a cofounder and for thirteen years the President of BGI, the first graduate school with an MBA in sustainable business. In addition to providing a transformational education for BGI’s students, the goal was to act as a model to help other business schools incorporate sustainability and social responsibility into their curricula. That goal has been achieved. In 2016 BGI and its sister school, Presidio Graduate School, which Giff and Libba also helped start, merged. The program continues within the University of Redlands.

In 1978, Giff coined the word “intrapreneur” with his wife to amplify the work of people who function like entrepreneurs inside a larger company. After co-writing the New York Times bestselling book that started the intrapreneurship movement, he, with his wife Libba, went on to consult on innovation management to half of the Fortune 100, numerous government agencies, and environmental NGOs, and many foreign corporations. Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur was published in fifteen languages. 

One long-lasting example of the Pinchots’ intrapreneurship work began under Gore’s reinvention program—leading to an eighteen-year program in the Forest Service to make government work. When audited, the program’s Enterprise Teams (internal service enterprises), led by self-selected and intrapreneurs that he trained, were found to be 1.8 times as productive as the average Forest Service employee. An intrapreneuring model will allow VisualMagic™ to scale rapidly. 

Gifford was named a top twenty leadership thinker by Executive Excellence; received an Olympus Lifetime Education Award and the 2015 Eye for Pharma award for the “Most Impactful Global Initiative” in the pharmaceutical industry. He has an honorary Juris Doctorate from the University of Puget Sound and an honors degree in economics from Harvard.

Much of Giff’s life has been devoted to the dual goals of supporting the welfare of the nation’s people and the environment they depend on—in the words of his grandfather over a hundred years ago, the goals of both “caring for the land and serving people,” the motto of the Forest Service the first Gifford Pinchot founded. Today, Giff sees VisualMagic’s work as a critical lever for supporting the 700 million plus acres of parks and other public lands so they will continue to serve the people and the ecosystems of this great nation.

Gifford’s ability to look at spreadsheets and see what variables are most important to manage, his history as an entrepreneur, and long history as an innovation consultant, will help him to apply funds efficiently as VisualMagic scales. His experience in many functions as well as finance will help him to steer the growth of VisualMagic as it explores new opportunities. 

Since 1984 Nancy has worked with corporations and educational groups worldwide, facilitating visioning strategic planning sessions and clarifying concepts using her unique form of graphic representation, Nancy developed the Mindscaping graphic facilitation process in the early 1980’s. She named it “Mindscaping” because the images she draws and phrases she uses are like a landscape, providing a cohesive image of ideas and plans and a unique way of discovering their connections. 

During conferences and other events, from strategic planning meetings to interfaith dialogue, Margulies literally draws ideas using pictures, symbols and words on flip chart sheets, capturing the content, showing relationships among ideas and creating a memorable record of the event. Her work is often reproduced and shared with those who attended the event. 

Nancy is skilled at bringing diverse groups together, inviting them to discover their collective wisdom via examining questions that matter deeply. (www.theworldcafe.com) She often uses the World Café to enable groups to discover their shared ideals, resolve challenges, and practice deep listening as well.

As a facilitator and graphic recorder Margulies enjoyed the opportunity to work with The Clinton White House, and corporate and community leaders in the US, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, India, Thailand, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand. She has written several books, such as Mapping Inner Space and Visual Thinking, as well as a number of educational comics and videos. She looks forward to lending her creative input to the VisualMagic team, while helping the public learn more about the crucial role nature plays on our planet Earth. 

Nancy’s creativity and ability to help others be creative will keep the business discovering new possible sources of revenue and better ways of doing things.

For over half a century, Gordon Wiltsie's photography has celebrated the wonder and majesty of some of the wildest places and cultures on Earth. His work has made people care about our planet and helped inspire the modern boom in adventure sports and travel. He has often traveled with leading explorers of our time, and his images of mountaineering, rock climbing, extreme skiing, dog sledding, mountain biking, and many other activities have brought awe to millions of viewers

Combining a unique mix of organizational, leadership, and technical skills, Gordon has led and/or photographed over 100 treks and expeditions to remote places that few, if any, had been before. These include numerous journeys to the Himalayas, the Andes, the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica, and both geographic poles. He is an accomplished mountain guide and has led many treks and adventure tours for leading companies like Mountain Travel/Sobek, Geographic Expeditions, and National Geographic Expeditions.

The Explorer's Club has called Gordon one of the great expedition photographers of his generation. His work has been widely published in international magazines, including numerous features for National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Outside, Geo, Life and many more. He is the author of "To the Ends of the Earth – Adventure of an Expedition Photographer," and his images have appeared regularly in calendars, posters, and advertising for leading outdoor companies like Patagonia, The North Face, and Nike. Visit his website at https://www.gordonwiltsie.com to see his work.

Both at work and at home, Gordon is a skilled do-it-yourselfer with expertise in electricity, plumbing, construction, and mechanics. In one instance, he and his family used only hand tools to build a cabin and boathouse on an off-the-grid Canadian wilderness island, an hour by boat from the nearest road. Over the years, they improved the property, and today, they rent it as an Airbnb, complete with hot water, internet, and most home amenities.

At Visual Magic, Gordon will help choose locations for Zoomies, oversee and maintain camera installations, fine-tune the composition, zoom and settings, and teach other installers to do the same. The beauty of his work will ensure that the visitors will love and share their video selfies widely.