Okay, so today we are talking to my friend,
partner, CSO, which is Chief Strategy Officer,
and co-founder of Ultra Mobile, this is Rizwan Kassim.
Rizwan, how's it going?
- Pretty good.
- Great, so let's talk about this a little bit.
You're one of the co-founders of the company,
there's five of you, right?
- Yes - Okay, so what was
the impetus of starting this company,
and kind of where are you guys today?
- So this same group of five people had a
calling card company that we started about 10 years ago,
and all of us were at earlier point in our careers.
We built that, and it became a fantastic business
kind of more of a lifestyle business at a certain point.
- What does that mean?
- It would distribute some cash,
we all got paid our salaries, we didn't all
necessarily have to work 40 hours a week,
and it was five people with one person helping
with customer service, and that was it.
So there was a lot less of the stress
that you have with a larger company,
we kind of got comfortable with that.
One of our partners kept saying,
"Look, we're selling calling cards to Indians online.
"There's a size for this market.
"We should do something bigger."
- So you guys started with India first?
- Yeah. - Okay.
- And that was calling cards only.
Typically, there's some cultures that are very
price-sensitive to getting the best deal possible,
in fact, will share it with everyone else.
I actually did an analysis of our Indian customers.
I found there was a lot right by USC.
There was a lot right by Bentonville, Arkansas.
I couldn't figure it out until we realized
there was Walmart headquarters.
So one person there who is coming in, probably on a Visa,
found our website through her SEO,
and then 300 people heard from that person,
and those were all organic ads, saying
"Oh, if you wanna call home, here's the way to do it."
So there was a lot of virality there.
And, when we looked at the virality between certain
cultural groups, certain ethnic groups,
especially, first generation,
and we looked at the fact that we were getting five,
six, seven dollars from these subscribers
but they were still paying for cell phone service.
We thought, why don't we have the cell phone service,
why don't we bundle the two together?
Took about two years to get a deal.
Just putting that together, finding everyone,
the business model's called an MVNO,
Mobile Virtual Network Operator
So we don't have cell towers,
what happens is that we purchase air time from one
of America's cell providers. - Got it, so you're
partnering up, you're not building
that all out because that would take forever.
- Yeah. - And, it would cost
a lot of money. - And billions of dollars
in the spectrum.
And, it's a pretty common model overseas.
Let's take one of our competitors.
So AT&T has their AT&T brand, they charge $60
for ad a minute and $90 for good, and they have their tiers.
But they've got spare network capacity,
and they want extra customers, so they have a prepaid brand,
you have to pay in advance, there's no credit check.
You and I both have cell phone service,
that our social security numbers in there,
if we miss a payment, they'll just send us a letter,
it's not like a huge deal, these guys are prepaid.
They've still got excess capacity.
And they say well what if we use it for people
who can reach into markets that we can't.
An excellent example is the Vietnamese
in southern California.
There's a lot of word of mouth in the community.
There's also not a lot of cell phone stores
in that community that's catering to their needs
either by language, or by apps, or just what they want
so sub-MVNOs under AT&T are kind of a
they fill in the cracks, right?
The big swath of the business is taken up
by the big four and their prepaid brand.
It's their 330 million people in the U.S.
By having a million of them in there,
you can have incredibly healthy business.
If you are in Canada, niche marketing
to a subgroup of subscribers in wireless,
turns out to be pretty difficult,
'cause they've got I would say 12 million,
they have 20 or 30 million people.
It's not a massive market if you find
a percentage point of that.
A percentage point of the U.S. market is 3.3 million people.
That is a massive number of people
that can be interested in your service.
There are over 40 million people in the U.S.
that are foreign born and have immigrated here.
That is massive possible customer base.
So we have this idea, and we start talking to the networks.
And, the MVNO business sounds a lot cooler than it is.
It's a great way to get high revenues,
but the pricing and the competition can be very difficult.
So we talked to them, we get in line,
we attempt to partner with a network.
We decided early we that we needed a GSM network.
There's two technologies. - What's GSM?
- There's CDMA, which is Verizon and Sprint,
which is a pretty much a U.S. only
technology with a couple of exceptions,
and there's GSM, where you have SIM cards.
Now, it's all LTE, so they've kind of combined,
but if you're coming overseas, you've got a phone
that can take a SIM card, so we needed a service
that allowed you not to have to come and buy a phone,
but to be able to put your own SIM into your existing phone.
- Got it, so here's another key takeaway.
This is something that I latched onto
which is when you start a business,
Rizwan talked about targeting Indians
specifically in the beginning, right?
You think about Apple.
Apple has the iPod, they have the iPad,
they have Apple TV, all their stuff right now,
but they started out with the Apple computer first, right?
And then they started to break out from there.
And now you aren't just targeting Indians anymore,
you're targeting a much bigger segment of people, right?
- Yeah, and you know you can think
it sounds very much like an MVP,
and in a way, it is, right?
What was the minimum product we had to launch
to see if people were interested all?
The very first customer segment for us
that took on were Bangladeshis.
We launched with eight people, there's 140 back here now.
We had this small group, we kind of said
look let's launch this, we don't know if this is gonna
take off or not, so the rest of the year, couple years,
was playing catch up on hiring
and development and resources,
but we bootstrapped very much,
also financially bootstrapped the entire business.
- Interesting, so I want to talk about that.
I mean, just backing up a second,
looking at the five co-founders that you have.
How did you all meet, first off,
and then how do you all work together like that?
Because five people sound like a lot to deal with.
- There's a gentleman named David Glickman
who has started a number of telecom companies,
multiple, massively-growing companies, and he had an idea.
He reached out to some friends and got two of my partners,
Chris Furlong and Dave Schofield, from another business,
saying "Hey, these guys would be great for this."
I was on a science fiction list at UCLA,
and a friend of mine, who's also involved with David,
sent an email saying we need someone
to rack some servers and put it in.
And, I had another job at the time and said,
you know what, money's good, and I want an opportunity,
I wanted to see where this was going,
so I signed up to do something
that I didn't fully understand how to do.
I'm an engineer, but I'd never done cable, wiring for that.
Went and learned, went and installed it,
and found myself continually to be more and more useful.
And then there's Jesse Anderson,
who has a telecom background and knows
how to find the best rates for all of us
and has been trained significantly in that.
So suddenly, we've got this team.
It is a team of very strong personalities.
- Yes.
- We're friends.
You know that I have a particular style.
I'll be honest about myself,
there are times I'm super intense,
and I can get a ton of work done,
there's other times where I've kind of
fallen out of orbit a little bit,
and I'm taking care of other things in my life,
or trying to regather energy.
- Yep, so how do you deal with all that?
'Cause what I'm trying to get at is these personalities
are so powerful, you're gonna clash no matter what, right?
Just like were in this entrepreneurs' group,
and there are strong personalities in there too, right?
So how do you deal with that?
You're gonna fight sometimes,
and then you have to come back to work,
and you have to see the same person the next day,
and this is for years and years.
How long have you been doing this?
- 10 year. - 10 years.
Okay with the same group of five people.
- Yeah.
- I mean what kind of stories can you share?
How do your deal with this?
- I think it happens in multiple phases,
so I'm gonna talk about the first five years first
when we had this business that was a lot of work
but ended up becoming a lifestyle business.
First, we were all remote, we literally all were
at least two hours from each other, some were in New York,
some were in Minnesota, weekly conference call.
So we had our separate sections,
so as long as I was trusted to do my part well enough,
we didn't have to conflict that much, but it happened,
and it happened much more than you'd imagine.
There'd be frustration on the phone,
and I learned the amazing power of a retreat.
Every quarter, we would pick up
and we would go to someplace nice.
Whether it was someone's condo in L.A.,
we'd go out to someone's house in Maine,
we'd go to Hawaii for a trade show,
and we'd have a good time.
- [Host] Then there was no agenda, it's just
let's just go and have a good time and meet up.
- There was a light agenda, we needed to do work,
but there was a day's worth of agenda
and three days time together.
- Got it.
- I actually remember being frustrated by this,
'cause I had another job at the time too,
and I'm like I'm taking time off from that other job
to come out and were not doing work--
- I don't have time for this. - And we have all this
to talk about, yeah.
Single best lesson I've learned,
because by going out, so if the trip cost five grand,
we would easily come back with five grand
of business value from an idea.
- Totally. - Easily.
But the other part is by going out
and having drinks together,
by going out and having nice food together,
there was a connection that was built,
and it helped fixed the previous three months of animosity,
'cause we know this now from internet chat
and everything else, by sitting face-to-face like this,
oh, that's right, you're a human being.
This is what you're like.
It's easy, you get to deconstruct the model of like
fuck, this guy's just messing with me.
And now you're like, oh, this is a person.
They want this, I want this.
You have a couple of long talks late at night over drinks.
- Yeah, you just get over it so quickly.
- So we'd sit and do napkin math,
or throw up Excel on the screen and say,
oh, we can afford to to this.
Here's some code changes.
And we'd roll out releases right then
and make strategic choices.
- So it sounds like it's the agenda is light.
Here's the issues, high-level,
and let's just talk through them.
- Yeah. - Okay.
What about the second half, next five years?
- Teams that know each other incredibly well,
can move at a speed that is not 2x, but 10x that of a team
that's just been introduced to each other.
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