Let’s start from the beginning: who are you and what inspired you to launch your startup?
My name is Dragos Vingarzan and I worked most of my life in telecommunications, being part of the software transformation. For me, it was always fascinating to find new and disruptive ways to re-engineer big core networks with modern technologies. Early on, I was lucky enough to find a scholarship type of job at a Fraunhofer institute, which basically allowed me to aim big and start prototyping differently. The current startup is still partially inspired by the work that we’ve done there, a long time ago, but now with a realistic and updated market view.
Mobile telephony and messaging are far from being innovative services today. That pushes the IMS market into a sort of stagnation, after the huge hype we had during the 3G years. Back then IMS was seen as THE platform which will fuel the disruptive new Internet. Yet web 2.0, social networks and all the new always-connected mobile lifestyle of today happened in parallel, without any overlaps. Even the mobile operators rebranded it as VoLTE first, then VoNR, yet largely we still used fallbacks to Circuit Switched during the 4G years. And now in 5G, as 2/3G have been or are being turned off, IMS becomes a bit of an elephant in the room: there is no big need for it, but you also can’t fully do without and hand-over all voice/video/messaging traffic to Over-The-Top apps.
So we believe that it’s just a case of unfit products for the current market environment which slows down the adoption. The complexity is still there, so the increasing number of operators (including the growing number of small Mobile Private Networks) find it just as difficult to acquire vendor provided or adopt Open Source solutions. Our startup aims to provide IMS as a Service, in the true sense of offloading the complexity out of our customer’s busy hands and hitting economies of scale through a flexible, multi-tenant, cloud-based solution. The IMS interconnects are also central in our strategy, recognizing that the lack of seamless roaming for voice services was/is a major roadblock. Making it feasible to onboard even very small (private) operators with just tens of SIM cards, while also catering for hybrid cloud/local-deployments and out-of-the box interconnects, is part of our progression strategy.
Technology-wise we also took the approach of re-basing everything in modern programming languages, AI-assisted development and state-of-the art automation of software testing and deployment. This should give us a good and focused approach to keep costs in check.
We want to be that lean Over-The-Top-like service for operators, which actually connects and uses the native phone capabilities, for an app-less end-customer experience.
What was the hardest moment in your journey, the one where you thought, “This might not work”? How did you push through?
Telco is tough… The entire industry serves maybe as an example of how not to waste money and chase ideas in the hope that customers will eventually use them.
Talking then to investors or VCs is pretty hard. They expect huge multipliers for their investment, in the 10x range. They immediately push back on the abysmal profit margins of the big telco players. Hence building something for telco and competing for talent is very difficult. We had to always self-fund our development from early-licensing of prototypes. Which develops into a wrong-incentives situation: our customers pay for cutting edge first-time features for testing, while we want to build stable, hardened and cost efficient software to be put into production.
At Core Network Dynamics, also having the reputable brand of Fraunhofer in the background, we were very successful, licensing to over 100 paying customers. But bridging the gap between chasing 35+ functional elements to make existing customers happy, yet also hardening (all of) those elements and getting to recurring production revenue was getting more difficult as time passed.
Our lucky break was with Twilio. When we met them they had already done an MVP for an IoT product and were looking to form that v2.0 engineering team. Our hard, but very necessary decision was to cut down all the parts which were outside of Twilio’s scope and instead focus on what was critical to control and customize. “Wearing the customer’s shoes” through a direct-to-customer approach was the key to success that Twilio inspired into us. And switching to a single customer – basically us, running it into production – was a blessing for our engineering team, in order to prove that our decade-long investment in the platform was worth it.
Building a startup is never just about technology: it’s about people. Who were the key people in your journey, and how did they shape the company’s success?
Indeed, it was quite obvious that our customers were buying not just some code, but they were investing in us and our can-do attitude.
Alberto Diez was the original idea guy. He had this drive of always going for the best product that we could ever do. His insight into what the then-new 4G/Evolved Packet Core potential was, became instrumental in funding the whole operation through licensing for R&D. Then Valentin Vlad and Jakub Kocur, starting first as students but then pouring all their efforts into bootstrapping an awesome modular platform, were the key pillars to our development team. Then Lukas Wöllner, Kartikeswar Koppula, Kamaljeet Kaur, Murugadoss Venu, Ramon Butter and others’ attention to detail and progress-driven approach gave shape to our implementation, awesomely delivered to our customers by Alex Russu, our devops specialist, and Glenn Lea, our tech-writer. And our cloud-team, of Giuseppe Carella and Lorenzo Tomasini made our solution ready for a big-AWS deployment. There were many others who joined us at Twilio, too many to mention here, who really made it into a success in real life. And last but not least, we had great support from Prof. Thomas Magedanz and Marius Corici from Fraunhofer FOKUS for initial funding through research projects and grants. Having a professional CEO, Carsten Brinkschulte, meant we always made the best of all our opportunities along the way.
Selling a company is a dream for many founders. But how does it really feel when that moment arrives? Was it as you expected?
It’s a bag of mixed feelings, to be honest. On one side there are the financial benefits and you finally can breathe, offloading that pressure of having to pay salaries in the always-changing markets environments. In a startup you feel deeply connected to all the employees, such that failure is not really an option you want to ever consider.
On the other hand the control is taken off your hands. You become a wheel in a machine. Sometimes that’s helpful, but sometimes you really hate hard decisions which others take, sometimes driven by cold numbers. A big corporation can afford to fire and hire without big impacts on their business short term and that’s hard to swallow. Begrudgingly, you learn to agree-to-disagree, as a big company needs an army of disciplined workers, not the type of autonomy which you tried to infuse in all your start-up colleagues before.
The scale and the opportunities that a big company opens up for you and your team are tremendous. Getting your software to run reliably into production, serving a very large number of customers with around-the-world coverage is certainly fulfilling. So it is a huge prize to have the dream happen, but you learn that it is also a transaction, an exchange of sorts; while things are also moving very fast, all the time.
Looking back, what would you do differently? Any mistakes you learned the hard way?
I would look earlier for what end customers really want and how they use them. Many industries are chains of businesses and you are influenced mostly by the next downstream customer, while in turn influencing the upstream suppliers. Yet it happens so often that the chain fully misses the market. Or that the customers are not buying the products to which you contributed for the reason that you thought they were. Talking directly to them, to find their actual problems might blow your mind with regard to what you are actually doing today.
And something that I hit later: don’t get too comfortable with a day-to-day job. The moment that something bothers you, fix it, address it, start doing something about it.
Now you are back hitting the ground with your new endeavour: Neat Path Networks. Why this decision?
A fellow founder in our team at Twilio once said something along the lines of “in a small company you can do anything, but you have also to do everything; in a big company you don’t have to do everything, but you can’t do anything”. Of course, this was half joke, half constructive criticism to get back to our roots as entrepreneurs.
I felt like I was getting into a sort of routine of integrating and re-integrating, or refining a working product. But the world outside of the current bubble is always moving and won’t wait for everyone to complete their side-quests. I wanted to be disruptive again, to be in direct control of my decisions. I wanted to start a new software platform, unencumbered by decade-old decisions. And when I met Alberto again and we resumed our conversations, that was pure fuel for my decision to start new.
There is something magical about a start-up: the piece of “paper” is empty and that means it’s also perfect. This thing you don’t really know or appreciate the first time around.
How do you see the market today? Is there anything that should change?
I’d start by saying that there is always potential to disrupt.
My impression is that the market is in an “expectation” moment. Something must happen which will push us forward. But you have to also move yourself and create leadership in the market. The worst thing is a bit of resignation that I see with many developers, a fear of tinkering with something new, since everything was probably already tried and the VC-funded startup game is a bit too fake and hacked to hell (I mean there are even sit-coms about it).
To take the example of Mobile Core networks, in which we’re acting:
- On one side you have this 5G Depression I would call it. Getting the radio deployed was great for consumers, but the 4G Evolved Packet Core was and is good enough for it. So the 5G-Core is struggling to find true traction (see 5G SA deployment), maybe a solution to a problem that might’ve not needed solving?
- On the other hand there are Open Source projects implementing these technologies, both as stand-alone protocols and functional components; so the entry barriers have never been lower. This, unfortunately, also makes it harder to sell more advanced solutions, as it is hard to fund larger engineering teams, either when you are in an Open Source one, or when you are competing with what is perceived as “free”.
But I think this is also an opportunity, especially for those who are not going to resign and just wait for 6G to come around, with more or different demands. At Fraunhofer FOKUS, on the floor where our team was based, we had this quote by Henry Ford: “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said: Faster Horses”.
This is why at Neat Path Networks we are trying to aim way beyond the hype of the day. We aim to realistically solve first the problems of the end customers of telecom networks, not necessarily those affecting now some big operators or big vendors.
Of course, better support and results-driven investments by the local governments would be greatly appreciated. Communication networks are critical infrastructure, especially during precarious years, as we are experiencing now. We need a shift from popular decision making to strategic thinking and long term investments in locally sourced technological solutions.
What’s next for you? How do you plan the development for the next 2 years?
We are past our first milestone of showing that we can develop this new technology and that it works with off-the-shelf phones. Next we would need to scale up our development and that is the tricky part of funding and growing our team. For us, technical folks, this is maybe not as exciting as solving a coding problem, but it is nevertheless very important to align funding with revenue, customer demand with our product development and team growth with establishing valuable core principles.
We are optimistic that we will be successful in attracting funding and growing, since we believe in our technology and our approach towards finding and solving the correct problems for our customers.
