#teleku

As you have probably already seen on TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, eweek, and DZone, I have sold my open source PaaS startup Nodester to AppFog, a leading polyglot PaaS service provider!

If you remember back two years ago, I also sold my cloud communications startup Teleku to Voxeo.  Ten years prior to the Teleku acquisition, I built and sold another company called Digital Voice Technologies which build and managed IVR (Interactive Voice Response) services for companies like Disney, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft.

All of three of these companies were bootstrapped subsidiaries owned and operated by GetVocal, inc, my AZ-based technology company, which made the exits easier.  Reflecting back on these deals has generated a few questions and thoughts:

Does this make me a serial entrepreneur? 

Does this make GetVocal an incubator?

What's next?

I enjoy the excitement around a new idea and opportunity.  I love the branding side of the business so much that I have hundreds of web domains and can't write a single line of code until the project has a name. I love solving new problems that have not been tackled by other companies or projects.  I love the notion that my idea has the potential of changing the world.  I love the excitement surrounding launch day. I love meeting new people throughout the life of the project. I love coding but equally move the marketing and sales side of the business. Finally, I love negotiating the exit deal and watching my project take on a new life under someone else's vision. 

This process just seems to continue repeating itself.  

If you visit GetVocal's website, you'll notice that I have another project already underway.  In fact, it's be underway for several years now.  This project is called Surf-By-Tel and it's more of a humanitarian / labor of love project enabling visually impaired people to surf the web with their voice.  I love seeing a visually impaired person's face light up when they first learn that they can surf the web with their telephone of VoIP application.  Check out this video testimonial from a user of my Surf-By-Tel voice browser platform:

Last year, I hacked my telecom startup, Teleku, to run OpenVBX, the cloud based and open source PBX maintained by Twilio.  Here's the story and video.

As the CTO of a large rebates and sweepstakes company, I was looking for an IVR solution to automate our customers' status inquiries. When AT&T provided a bid for $5M, I accepted the challenge to build the solution in house using Visual Voice and Dialogic boards.  $65k and six months later, my first IVR was up and running answering 4 T1s of voice traffic!  IN YOUR FACE, AT&T!

I had so much fun hacking that IVR project (plus the lure of 7 figure deals) that I started my first communications company, Digital Voice Technologies, inc.  We were quickly recognized in the industry for developing on of the first VoiceXML 2.0 browsers and developer SDKs on the market.   We deployed racks of our Dialogic-powered VoiceXML browsers in Worldcom's co-location facilities and offered voice hosting services for $.25 per minute to companies like Disney, Coca-cola, Microsoft, and Cisco.  Digital Voice Technologies, inc. was sold in 2002 (five years later) to Ideas and Associates. 

Next I joined BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona as a Director-level executive to startup their eBusiness Technologies division which provided strategic vision and development services for the healthcare carrier's Web, Voice, and Mobile technologies.  My team developed their first secured web portals and e-commerce technologies and later partnered with Genesys and Nuance to build and deploy a new VoiceXML-powered voice portal and callcenter CTI platform.  Three years and eight figures later, our new HA "state-of-the-art" voice platform was deployed and taking calls on-time and on-budget.

Deals like this always get me thinking...  Why did it take so long and cost so much to design, build, and deploy an IVR/CTI system?  Why did we need to send our best Web developers to VoiceXML programming school and Genesys University to be trained to manage their system configurations.  Why do companies still deploy on-premise IVR systems and plan for their worse case call volume situation and leave half of their ports idle in the mean time?  What about SMS, IM, Twitter, and Facebook integration? 

Like DejaVu, I left BCBS AZ in 2010 to start another communications company, Teleku. This time I addressed the lessons learned from my previous experience and leveraged a modern RESTful Web API approach, Amazon EC2 cloud communications, Ruby on Rails and traditional VoiceXML to build a next-generation Phone and SMS service for Web developers.  Tropo and Twilio were already in the market doing something very similar but Teleku had a major design difference.  It deployed a REST API for developers but it connected with existing carrier networks using traditional VoiceXML.  This means that Teleku could be white-labeled by any carrier offering VoiceXML hosting services or deployed on-premise within any enterprise wishing to extend their existing VoiceXML platforms.  Teleku also leveraged SIP (VoIP) technologies and Asterisk in its Amazon EC2-deployed Ninja platform to offer a free platform for Web developers to build next-generation Voice and SMS services.  Teleku also offered a paid cloud communications hosting service with DIDs based on Voxeo's 100% uptime SLA Evolution platform.

Teleku was definitely on the fast track to an inevitable acquisition! Here's our history of events:

Month 2 - I had already built the core API and VoiceXML Teleku platform using Ruby on Rails. Next, I created a contest where I was giving away a free iPad to the first person to build me an opensource Asterisk-based stack on EC2 consisting of Linux, Asterisk, VoiceGlue, and Flite TTS. (Zhao Lu was the winner of the Teleku iPad contest.)  

Month 3 - I managed to launch the Teleku service publicly at the Emerging Communications 2010 conference in front of the who's who in telecom.  

Month 4 - TechCrunch ran a story on Teleku which led to a bunch of investor phone calls offering us cash.  We turned them all down because we were bootstrapped and doing fine.  

Month 5 - Teleku entered into early acquisition discussions with Voxeo and Twilio (and a couple of other communication companies).

Month 6 - Teleku was acquired by Voxeo in June 2010.  

With the Teleku acquisition, I became the Director of Business Development of Voxeo Labs which incubates all of the next-generation technology for Voxeo including: Tropo, SMSified, and Phono (and amazing new tech that we are not allowed to mention yet :).