From Idea To Reality: Paving The Path To Achieve Your Goals With Anthony Minessale II
It's not enough to have a great idea. You also have to be proactive in achieving your goals to serve not only yourself but others as well. In this episode, host Chad Burmeister is joined by Anthony Minessale II, CEO of SignalWire, to discuss how Anthony built his company from the ground up. He shares how he dropped out of high school to pursue his dreams and other circumstances that led him to where he is now. Anthony believes that it's all about having dedication and faith in your vision. Be inspired by his story and learn more about how he actualizes his ideas and what's next in telecom.
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From Idea To Reality: Paving The Path To Achieve Your Goals With Anthony Minessale II
I've got Anthony with me who is the Founder and CEO of SignalWire. He started around the same time that my company did, which is December of 2017. Time flies when you're having fun and they hit a major milestone which is their Series B. Congratulations on the round and welcome to the show, Anthony.
It’s great to be here. Thank you.
I'm excited to dig in. A lot of times, people look from the outside in at us as entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs and say, “They've got it so easy.” Little do they know, the level of pressure sometimes that we face in raising money or bootstrapping both bring their own unique pressures. We're going to dig into a little bit of that. I'd like to start by letting our audience get to know who you are. Anthony, tell us a little bit about the company before we dig into the history of where you came from and all those things.
SignalWire is a company devoted to transforming all communication to the internet and that includes telephony, using landlines, live audio and video. We want to convert that to the internet and the way we do that is by making infrastructure that is software-defined that can run on virtual computer clouds that are out there. Also, transform telecom into APIs so when you want to build something that integrates your communication tools with your business logic, you can use software to bind them together and create your clients, behaviors. It creates hooks and things that happen when your communication elements and certain events happen like somebody is calling or hanging up, or when they talk and don't talk, or asking for data over the communication. Let's say you want to make a robot that asks you a bunch of questions and reacts to what you say and that kind of stuff.
I remember caddying for the former CEO of US West back in the ‘90s in Colorado. I interviewed him for my MBA program in 2000. They did this test in these little houses in our neighborhood where they had these dozens of people come out. They talked about the set-top box and how they were going to deliver voice video and data to your home, but the piping wasn't big enough at the time. They were ten years before their time. Fast forward, I worked for RingCentral for a time, Zoom video and SignalWire, being able to bring all of that over the internet is such leaps and bounds above what it was capable of twenty years ago.
The timing problems still existed even five years ago. That's why I waited for the timing when we SignalWire. We had a lot of the technology developed in the academic sense, but I needed the internet to be right first.
Helping our audience get to know you. You're in the Wisconsin area. Is that where you've always been?
Yes. For most of my life, I was on the East side of Milwaukee. I got a little older and moved into the suburbs but still close to downtown Milwaukee.
I was born in Madison but we moved to Colorado when I was about 5 or 6. What I like to share with folks is what you were passionate about then. You're a CEO, Founder now and you've done a lot in your life. Tell us about what you're passionate about when you were younger like 6, 7, 8 years old or some of your first memories? What do you love to do when you're that age?
I was at the right age when Star Wars was brand new so I was obsessed with it. I had all the action figures and stuff. I also started learning guitar at that point. The two things that I did were guitar and Star Wars.
What was your favorite figure?
Boba Fett because it was the one you had to save up the packaging to buy it.
Those are good memories. I remember having a magnifying glass and we would burn the toes of Luke Skywalker. Now you have them and it’s not what it used to be probably with burns.
One kid in my neighborhood would glue his to a stand to make them worth something later, but now we know that if you go on eBay, they're still only worth $5 or $10 each. It might have been a bit more fun playing with them and burning their toes.
I thought someday it would be one of those things where it was, “I fetched $1 million for the original Luke Skywalker,” and that's not the case. You can buy the whole set for $89.
I tried to share it with my kids and I lost most of mine by then so I went on eBay and bought a bag full of them and it was all the same ones. I was like, “Here you go. Play with this. This is what I had when I was a kid.”
It's certainly still a big deal. My nephew is all into it and he can name all of the different aircraft, spaceships and everything. It's moved on to the next generation with TV shows, Disney+ and all of that. I played the guitar too. I have two sitting in the back wall behind me so it sounds like we have a lot in common and we're both from Wisconsin. If you think of what you love to do then to what you're doing now, is there any relation between being curious about Star Wars to the work that you do?
Achieving Goals: You should always have every plot point of your path figured out so you can think quickly when the time comes.
Maybe in some weird way that I haven't figured out but this was in the late ‘70s. If you give me a couple more years then I discovered video games because it's the era of the arcade like Donkey Kong, PAC-MAN, and all that stuff. As a software engineer and a self-appointed tech founder. Some of my family likes to theory that to me being obsessed with Donkey Kong. Somehow, I doubt it but I was drawn to technology. The arcade machine was different from what we're used to going outside and making stuff with sticks. You can shove a quarter in this weird thing so you can play video games.
I was obsessed with that when it came out. I still do emulate all of those things. Maybe that was my draw to technology because I got to see that. I was too young to capitalize off of it. Many people are rich from a single machine. Space Invaders made so much money that they had to empty it three times a day. It would stop working because it would clog with quarters. I was too young to have that opportunity but I definitely was a consumer of it.
Did you ever do the Choose Your Own Adventure programming where you put in the lines of code in DOS? You say, “You go into the woods. You choose the left path or the right path?”
That's the InfoComm Engine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was my favorite. In fact, as a demo later in SignalWire, I connected that to the phone so you could call on the phone, talk and say the commands, and it would read back the text. It’s a gateway to text to voice so you can play that game basically just by talking.
That’s where the future is headed. You talk to the computer and the computer can talk back to you.
There are still a lot of challenges behind that. You're saying you're involved in AI. That's probably a good topic to focus on because we still haven't completely nailed understanding speech because it's hard. Our brains are the best thing ever at doing this and maybe AI will figure it out. It's still messed up but it's getting better constantly. There are two pieces to it. Capturing the voice, sorting it into pieces, and interpreting it because you almost need 2 or 3 steps of processing. It's almost impossible as a generic computer to understand the context, especially English has so many words that sound the same depending on what you're saying. You almost need to get all the words, separate them and do another test where you take logic and try and make sure that's not garbage. It could be nonsensical stuff but if you read it, “This is what I said.” It's just hearing different words.
There’s a company called Balto software out of St. Louis. They can take a phone conversation between a salesperson and a prospect or a customer, listen to it in real-time, and serve up what the salesperson should say back to the customer based on the AI's understanding of the conversation. To your point, it's probably catching something like a competitor word. It's not fully understanding all of the sentences put together. It's getting better and better to the point when call centers are selling insurance or large transaction volumes that are highly repetitive, it can do a good job at keeping the salesperson on the track that they're supposed to be on by listening and providing feedback to the calls.
There are a lot of opportunities to improve the context area of conversations with robots because we all accept Siri, Alexa and Cortana. No matter what ecosystem you prefer for your computers, there’s some form of AI voice stuff. They all lack context still, which is a great opportunity to expand on them. You can't just say, “Robot. I'm hungry,” and relentlessly tries to help you until you tell it to stop. You have to say it all in that one sentence and it forgets. You have to move on to the next command that’s completely irrelevant. It still could be worrying about the fact that you're hungry.
It's like, “I know a few restaurants. Also, the grocery stores are still open." It doesn't do that. It doesn't have all the context. You have to get it all into one command before it'll stop. There's been a few things that are starting to work on that, but they don't do it enough. My GPS should know why I'm getting off the highway. It immediately starts telling me to get back on the highway but I'm going right towards a gas station. It's like, "I see we're running out of gas. Good idea. Let's get some." It doesn't have context with what's going on, which is a whole different problem on top of voice recognition, which there are lots of ways that we can do that too.
That's complex. My son is going to the Colorado School of Mines for Computer Software Engineering. I suspect that generation will set out to solve these kinds of problems and probably get there in the next twenty years.
We're making them the tools.
Let's talk a little bit about you went from childhood to computer playing arcade games to now. I have to imagine every one of us has faced challenges on the way. Is there one that sticks out to you that you're comfortable sharing on the show to help our audience understand that we all face stuff in life? What would you share?
The most relevant one was as I was trying to figure out what I was doing for the next many years. I was in a world where work from home wasn't a thing like it is now. It was the late ‘90s but I wanted to live that lifestyle. We're talking about barely 28 modems and computers with giant monitors that weigh 400 pounds and are only 800x600 resolution, and dial-up internet which is tech space and Unix. I had this vision of remote work, communications and trying to solve all these problems. It’s like being teleported back to the Wild West and trying to make the iPhone or something.
I had this struggle of wanting to make something cool by learning and all while it was unfolding. A browser was a new thing so people didn't even know they needed websites yet. I had to claw my way from a world that was super new and figure out how to create my vision. It was like going to school. There are still no classes on how to be an internet entrepreneur in advanced technology that changes things. There's no class for that. It just teaches you generic computer science. It's gotten a little better since then but there wasn't anything that was happening.
I had to drop out of school because I was so obsessed with what was unfolding in front of me. I was forced to self-teach things that were happening in the world right around me like the advent of the internet, CGI programming, web-based apps, and watching it all explode around me. I was trying to hang on to something and grow with it. That’s probably the hardest thing because that’s not what I ended up doing. My career is not something you can go to college for. There still isn't a way. It's unfortunate.
We still expect programmers to be naturally smart. The best programming schools, you have to already know how to program to even get into. There's not a lot of nurturing in Computer Science. You have to find your way through the Wild West. You meet a whole bunch of other people like you eventually that you can go online and they all have similar stories about where they came from. That’s probably the hardest thing. It made things a little more challenging than picking something like a lawyer. That's very obvious. There's an exact path I could follow to get to that job.
That's neat to think about. I've heard the term, “The bigger the why the bigger the try.” If you were to articulate the why behind what you're doing, you talked about remote work. Have you put a finger on why you are so enthused to deliver this technology to the people you're delivering to it now?
Part of it is as I progressed, the lifestyle that it opens up is very good. There’s finding balanced work and life. I go sit in the office, throw pencils at the ceiling, and have a meeting. I take off and try to go camping or something. I keep trying to divide it but I find that with remote work, you can leave it instead so you can go do whatever you want. You have your phone, you can look at it, you can communicate with people and stuff, and put it away again. It lives from wherever you are. You can go places.
Achieving Goals: If you just turned it off and walked away and sat under a tree for an hour, you’d probably have better results than if you’re sitting there trying to stay up all night fixing it.
You can go work like, “I can go on that trip for a month. I’ll just bring my laptop.” I don't have an exact office so I can do more stuff a lot easier. Also, when it comes to communication, we can leverage it because it's not one landline with the mobile phone ringing anymore. You can pump 1,000 phone calls over one phone number now. With digital communications, you can set up a call center almost with a roomful of laptops and stuff. You don't need as much complex stuff. Even for your home phone number, consumers eventually can start enjoying the fact that you can get five calls to your house at the same time. When five people are home, they all pick up a different phone at your house. Just because one person answered the phone, the rest of them shouldn't be useless. Those are all kinds of cool things that I've started working on, being involved in, and want to bring to the mass of general people.
I love when I land on your website. What you said is right there front and center on the site, “Be there anywhere.” I'm traveling to Atlanta at 6:00 AM, then I’ll go to Charlotte to see my aunt and uncle, and then I'll go to Kentucky to see Noah's Ark that I've heard a lot about. I wasn't planning on working. My wife was going to be coming with me and now she's got a cough. She's like, “I'm going to stay home.” That's fine. It's okay. I'll work in the hotel room a little more than I had planned. To your point, I'd love to go skiing. I've been to Canada. I'm in Colorado. I'd love to ski in Europe someday. Why not? What's holding me back? That’s the beauty of the technology that’s available. Be there anywhere. It's awesome. This is fun. What would change everything for you whether it's with work or personal life? You woke up one day and you said, “Holy cow. That's awesome.” What would that one thing be for you?
That's a tricky one because that happens every week for me because there's a lot. We're bleeding ideas with stuff that we work on. When you're running a new company, there's this notion that you're either in wartime or peacetime. Wartime is struggling, fighting, clawing your way up, being scrappy, trying to figure out how to poke everyone, run between the legs and get out there, and grow. It's being in war and arrows are coming at you in every direction. There's also peacetime and it usually transitions between them. It never lasts forever. You go back and forth between these. Startups are always born in wartime no matter what. You don't magically show up and you're winning and everything. That’s probably the best one to hit that peacetime. Give me a little rest from the strategy. Peacetime is easier to do than wartime.
It's interesting because my son faced some oil burns. He's healed now. He said, “Dad, on a scale of 1 to 10, what's the most pain you've ever faced?” I'm like, “Maybe a 6 or a 7. I broke an arm or something but your adrenaline kicks in and cuts it down to 7.” He was like, “Maybe I'm a 3.” This is hands and face burn. He's like, “I'm a 3.” I go, “You don't get meds at a 3.” He's like, “Then it's a 7. I need to get my meds.” I started paralleling that to stress. There's only a scale of 1 to 10. There's no such thing as 15 stress. It seems like we make up the number that we associate with the stress that we go through. In your role as founder and CEO, if you were to put a stress factor on a typical month, does it ever get to a 6 or 7 or a 9 or 10? Have you come to a level where you keep the stress under a 3 or something like that? How do you manage that? What number would you put to it?
In a similar vein to what you're saying, you could set whatever the normal is and that normal suddenly will go down to the middle of the scale because whatever you live at will keep going down the normal. I remember being new to this. Before, when I was working for other people building the tech side of things or maintaining systems for people. If I'd make mistakes, I'd have to clean up after them or I'd be in a hurry to do so. I found myself up at 3:00 AM panicking about, “I accidentally killed the server. I have to remake the whole thing again,” or whatever. That was an immense amount of stress. In comparison to now, if it's trying to close a $30 million round, it feels almost the same but it's a lot bigger stakes.
It could be fast forward even further and I'm doing $10 million deals every other day. It's probably stressful. If you figure out how to baseline it, it's hard to gauge. I always live at 5 because I used to be a 10. It's important to try and not always be stressed because it blocks your ability to see. It's foggy because you're always trying to get out of the one thing that's crushing you and it makes you feel you have no control over it. It's one of those wisdom things that you learn after the fact. If you turned it off and walked away and sat under a tree for an hour, you probably have better results than if you're sitting there trying to stay up all night fixing it.
I love that. Dan Martell, I go on his ski trips to Canada and he has 48 CEOs attend it. He talked about this. You either have $1 problems, $10 problems, $100 problems, $1,000 problems, $1 million problems and it's just the scale that changes. Our company did $1.4 million in 2020 so now we're targeting $2 million. If you have a bad month or a bad quarter, you could be down $100,000 or $200,000. In the past, I would be like, “That's terrible. That's what I make in a year.” Now it's like, “You need to solve for that. It's a bigger stack of chips on a roulette table. It’s baselining it. That's cool. I’m thinking about a few years from now, you've progressed the B-round and done some things. If you could wave the wand and say, “Chad, I'm back on your show. I've had the best three years ever,” what would that look like three years from now for you, your family, your employees or whomever?
It's most likely getting as much of my vision implemented as I can and hopefully, there'll be another big milestone happening somewhere in that timeline because we hit series B right now. There are lots of other outcomes you can do. You can keep going up and getting more funding. You can get an exit or you can go public. I'm sure it will be one of those and I have to work my way backward from that. I'm imagining that will be cashing into $10 million problems. Trading my problems being in the same boat, but having a lot of growth and larger company and more time to think because we have other people we’re helping. We started out with three people and we're up to 70 now. In a few more years, I'm sure we’ll be at a couple of hundreds.
If you could go back and talk to your twenty-year-old self and say, “If you do this one thing,” what would that be?
That would be to implement my ideas faster. In certain cases, it's a waiting game for some of my ideas and other times, it's not. If you start seeing a pattern where you're like, “They should make this and do this,” and you keep seeing it, maybe you're good at coming up with some of those things. You should try and do them instead of declaring that you wished they existed and wait for someone else to do it.
We were launching an app that was like that and it came to us through COVID. We said, "Someone has got to do it," so we did it and it wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it would be. The last question for you, Anthony, is about faith. What role does faith play in your life or your journey and where you're headed?
It's a critical component because it's like when you drive a boat. You steer the boat and you have to wait to see. It's more about deciding how long to wait for stuff than it is what to do. One plan, you should always have to have every plot point of your path figured out so you can think quickly when the time comes. We also have to know how long to wait and when to switch to one of the other plans and stuff like that. I started out unhappy with anything that existed as a tool for me to build. If I had an idea, I could go off the shelf, find some stuff and make the product that I thought was cool. It turned out that it didn't.
There wasn't enough there so I had to go one level deeper and build my own software platform, which was like an open-source project. I built this code. I started out by myself. I wrote a whole bunch and started bringing more people involved. I had a small team and I had a community that had to grow manually around me. Taking on giant and ridiculously ambitious things like that. When we were starting, everyone said, “This is vaporware. That's not possible. You can’t do any of this stuff.”
It’s working through all that. Running the company is not much different. It's an even bigger scale. You need dedication and faith, especially your own goals because it takes a while sometimes. Our software project is over fifteen years old now. When I started, it’s a low-level open-source C-program that has millions of lines of code and has people around the world. Major enterprise companies are built on the backbone of my first early work, including now SingleWire. That took a long time. With no faith in that process, we would give up easily. A lot of times, you had to be relentless.
This has been a great conversation. A lot of people might read this and think, “Anthony's figured it out.” My friend, Arjun Sen, a big-time marketer, a brand whisper, the Yoda for marketing, and he even works with Tiger Woods on marketing. He said that we all need to find what we're one of one at and go for that. It feels to me you're in that lane of knowing where you're one of one. How did you get to that point to understand, “This is what I'm built to do. This is what God made me for and this is what I'm going to deliver on?” How did you come into that zone?
The Unix Operating System was the first thing that I ever used besides an Apple. I didn't have a computer. I only went to a data center or the school's computer lab. A lot of people were starting to get the Windows or Mac thing. It was the early version of Windows and Macs were new. I only had seen an Apple when I was in grade school because they used to bring them out to show little kids what computers were because they were hardly anything back then. The number one influence I had was discovering Unix first.
The first computer operating system that I ever used on a daily basis and memorized how to work was the Unix. Back then, it was a DEC Alpha, probably the size of a refrigerator. I never saw it. It was to go sit down at a green screen terminal and type stuff. I have these above-average literary skills, not per se that I should write books or anything. I had a rapid development in that at least as a kid. My reading level was higher when I was younger than most people. I’m probably caught up now. As I was going through that, Unix is this special thing where you have to have computers or one part of the brain in literary skills or another. The Unix is a crossover between the two. Starting from Unix and following the trajectory of that, all the software I've built is on top of that.
Coming into communications might have been lucky because I went to build a call center that telemarketers or inbound call centers could use. The idea was over the internet because they had this over a wide area network. You would set that up, shove it in the corner, put a bunch of people in the same room, and there are computers somewhere close by on a local area network. There was no wide area network solution so I wanted to make it to where I want it to be. This all ties into work from home. I wanted my call center to be a bunch of people at their own laptops wherever they were. That’s what the company I was at and the product we're trying to build. It was a combination of that.
My early upbringing and derivative stuff from using Unix and learning about what was there for communications and leveraging it specifically for that stuff. I also had a background in web hosting because web hosting was one of the first companies I worked at that was technical and it was back when everyone was still making their own websites. It used to cost $100 a month to even have a website and the company where we were brought that down to $20. There is a lot of scaling of web servers to try and make up for that to make it versatile. The computers were weak back then compared to now. Everybody's laptop is nicer than the servers we used to put 10,000 websites on in the ‘90s. It was a combination of all that and it tends to be that way with everyone.
Achieving Goals: With our goal in mind, you worry about the app itself like the client. The behaviors are already built; you arrange and pick the ones you want. Your time to market is shaved down to a fraction of what it has to be.
If you go back and look at stories, Malcolm Gladwell has a cool book where he goes and looks at a bunch of people that have the right stuff hit them and whether or not it's luck or what. Because of the combination of what you're exposed to, Bill Gate’s mom had a free pass to the computer lab where you use the punch card computer and no one could touch it unless you had timeshare on it. She had unlimited, so he got to spend every night playing with the thing. When you get the right combination of stuff then it produces different people with different skill sets. Whatever my track comes from those things and being there at the right time.
That's a neat thing. If you're reading, pay attention. Think about what Anthony said, “Looking back at Unix.” Your eyes lit up when you talked about it because that's the thing that helped lead me into the path that you're supposed to be on. It feels to me that sometimes, people go down a path and they don't find their Unix. They go down on something because someone else thought it was good for them to be a lawyer, a doctor or something. It's important to pay attention to those things that cause you to light up and amazing things can happen when that happens. What a cool conversation. Anthony, it’s a pleasure having you on the show.
Anthony Minessale is the Founder and CEO of SignalWire. If you haven't checked out the site, it’s cool. Be there anywhere. I'm going to have to check out this video collaboration because when I was with WebEx in 2005, I remember the video first came out. I would have the CIO on sales calls and big enterprise calls. I remember them telling a story that a picture is worth 1,000 words and the video tells the whole story. They showed a picture of someone in the middle of the street where this guy that looked like a thief was holding on to a bag, it looked like he was going to steal this purse from this woman in the middle of the street and that was the picture. They unfold the picture, It was a movie and he pulled her out of the way of oncoming traffic. I was like, “Video is here to stay. You can see and understand a lot more about a person by having not just voice communications but video and all of it.” It’s really cool.
Our goal is to break that down into tools so you can combine all those things your own way so when you want to build something, you have the hard part and the infrastructure. You can build the client against it, provisioning resources, generate apps, have the video arranged any way you want, and use it for whatever vertical you think is interesting.
We’re launching a foundation called Living a Better Story. We're going to have recorded 20 to 30-minute sessions, where you present it in a group of twenty people, and then there's a facilitator. However, we'd like to be able to have that remote facilitator come in and have live conversations with the room. I would expect there's probably an app to be built waiting for us with SignalWire on that one.
Think about building that app, it changes the paradigm because right now, if you didn't have SignalWire, you're going to go find a bunch of low-level software and twice as many engineers, you need a place to put the servers on the internet, and you have to go and hook it up to build it, then you need someone to the front end. With our goal in mind, you just worry about the app itself like the client. The behaviors are already built, you just arrange and pick the ones you want. Your time to market is shaved down to a fraction of what it has to be. You might not even try it.
It's similar to what has happened in things like Stripe and payment processing or email. It's hard right now to go make your own unit server or if you can build a payment gateway yourself to take credit cards and stuff. Some of those things are prohibitive by the time it takes so you could do it if you have lots of money and an army of people, but then you're repeating something that already exists. We're not doing it well so we're trying to make it liquid as possible and worry about the part that makes it interesting and not the heavy lifting that's needed.
Thanks for sharing your story with us from Star Wars, video games, Unix, to right here right now Series B. Congrats on your success and best of luck going from 70 to 210 and hitting all the objectives along the way. Thank you for sharing, Anthony.
Thanks.
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About Anthony Minessale
25+ years of experience in software engineering, telecommunications, and open source.
Founded FreeSWITCH and ClueCon in 2005. Founded SignalWire in 2017.
