One of the really cool things that I got to do at VoiceCon Orlando 2009 last week was to meet and interview Terry Matthews, the founder of Mitel and currently an entrepreneur incubating several high-tech startups. He's a legend in this business, and he couldn't have been more gracious or generous with his time and insights.We spent most of our time talking about the way that he builds these new startups. Basically, he goes to a university and interviews 12 to 15 candidates, of which he selects 4 or 5 to form the core of the new company. He said he doesn't necessarily look for the students with the highest marks--you can't build an effective team for a startup by "putting four Tigers Woods' together," he explained. Talents he looks for include, "a little humble perhaps, good communicators, perhaps." He pays them $25,000, offering them ownership in the company if it takes off. That's why he looks for new graduates--they've got to be willing to work long hours for little money.
Then he turns them loose on a vertical market, talking with customers and identifying a discrete problem that needs to be solved--for example, retail "shrinkage" or loss of inventory via theft or other loss. Of course, having Mitel as a partner is what gets this otherwise-obscure startup in front of the customer in the first place.
Matthews clearly subscribes to the belief that the best R&D comes from startups; the way he put it is that when a new idea is brought to a big, established company, "the immune system kicks in" within that big company, and the people who are either working on a similar solution or realize they should be will absorb the project, often without producing the desired result.
The overriding concern that these ultra-small, agile startups are meant to address, according to Matthews, is time to market. This was a lesson he said he learned in the early days of Mitel, when long distance equal-access regulations came into effect, and it was clear that having a first-mover advantage with programmable equal-access dialers for corporate phone systems would be a huge selling point. "Timing in life is almost everything," Matthews said. "When the client wants the thing, you'd better have it."
Matthews highlighted two examples from his current portfolio. Benbria (named after the first home Alexander Graham Bell built), builds a mass notification and IP paging system that's especially suited to the higher education vertical. The obvious application is in school shootings or other emergencies; universities have been searching diligently for better ways to notify students and keep them updated over multiple media (email, IM, SMS and even social networks) in these situations. But it's just as useful in everyday situations, such as when a library is closing for the night. Schools typically rely on overhead paging to make an announcement, but nowadays, students tend to be listening to iPods and don't always hear the announcement. So the Benbria system can notify the student or even lock down the network, forcing students out.
Another company, one-year-old Teldio, already has as a customer a Canadian province. Teldio's system uses GPS location based routing and also can connect to an IP-PBX switch, allowing public safety walkie-talkie traffic to be converted and exchanged with other voice devices on the network, helping to solve the interoperability problems that first responders have.
It's not new that startups are providing some of the cutting-edge R&D in this or any technology market. But it was refreshing to talk with Terry Matthews and see that, despite the current economic troubles, it's still going on.
